An Empirical Study On The Voluntary Disclosure Of Listed Company

With the development of China's capital market and the reform of the governance structure, company's transparency has received more attention from the stakeholders. Voluntary disclosure has been one of the most important avenues for listed companies to show their competitive advantage, reduce the information asymmetry with investors, and promote the companies' long-term development. In recent years, China's listed company has realized the importance of voluntary disclosure, however, the level of voluntary disclosure is still far less than needed. This thesis seeks to analyze the quality and the influencing factors of voluntary disclosure supplied by China's listed companies in theoretical and experimental methods.In the theoretical research part, this thesis mainly introduces the practice and the incentive of voluntary disclosure to analyze "what", "how", and "why" listed companies choose to disclose the information voluntarily. Voluntary disclosure is a strategic tool, which can greatly enhance one company's value especially with the perfect of China's capital market, corporate governance structure, and the quality of investors. However, it is still necessary for listed companies to consider the capital market benefit, and the absorbing ability of investors when disclosure, so that they could make the best decision.In the experimental research part, this thesis provides a checklist of voluntary disclosure items by combining the approaches used by Botosan (1997) and Chau-Gray (2002), and analyzes the quality and the influencing factors of the voluntary disclosure supplied by China's listed companies. The results show that the whole voluntary disclosure level of China's listed company is not high, and the disclosure extent between different companies is very large. The regression results indicate that industry type, region, foreign listing status, company size, leverage, and the type of audit committee are significantly related to the extent of voluntary disclosure. In contrast, profitability, the proportion of independent directors, and the ownership structure do not have a significant influence on the voluntary disclosure.