A Research On The Influencing Factors Of Voluntary Information Disclosure In Chinese Listed Companies

Information disclosure of listed companies has become the focus of attention in the world recently.Looking back on the western countries' disclosure history,the mature capital market has normally gone through three stages:voluntary disclosure, compulsory disclosure,and the combination of these two kinds of disclosure.At present,the voluntary information disclosure is becoming more and more important.The research on the voluntary information disclosure started early in the western countries.Their study focused mainly on two sides:one is the effectiveness of voluntary information disclosure,and the other is the influencing factors of voluntary information disclosure.For example,Healy,Hutton&palepu(1998)proposed that the voluntary information disclosure can reduce the company's capital cost.Penno(1997) found that the liabilities ratio is relation with the voluntary disclosure extent.With the rapid development of the Chinese security market and the enhanced analytical knowledge of the investors,voluntary information disclosure begins its gradual momentum in China.At the same time,as the steady improvement in the financial disclosure system and the ever increasing demand for company's information from institutional and individual investors,voluntary information disclosure becomes one of the key research topics in our country.Nowadays,most of the researches just concentrate on the theoretical area,and the empirical study is rare.On the background of such situation,firstly,this paper studies the theoretical foundation of voluntary information disclosure.Secondly,the paper describes the situation of Chinese listed corporations,it is found out that the items of voluntary disclosure of the annual reports are very few,and most of the corporations are unwilling to disclose predict information.The third part and the fourth part are the focus of the paper.In the two parts,the paper studies the determinations of voluntary information disclosure in China.The regression result shows that the voluntary information disclosure is effected obviously by five factors.They are the size of listed companies,liabilities ratio,profitability,the effect of the CEO duality and the scale of accounting firms.In the end of this paper,the implications of the findings for policy and research are delineated.Firstly,the listed companies should improve their corporate management structure,at the same time,the SFC should also take measures to help the companies initiate the voluntary information disclosure.The research methods the paper adopted is the duality of empirical study and standard research.In this paper, we proposed mainly three innovations,at the same time,there are some problems to be studied in the future.