Research On Corporate Disclosure By Family Firms

Along with the development of information economics and signal theory, more and more investors are aware that the information disclosure behaviors of companies are important. At the same time, huge accounting fraud scandals that appear both at home and abroad in recent years cause widespread concern in the community. The term "information disclosure" has been no longer strange for us. Since the reform and open-up, family firms have been developing fast under the support of the government. Some of them choose to finance by issuing stock. According to the research of foreign scholar, family firms have their own characteristics in the process of information disclosure. It is necessary to have in-depth study on this topic.This article analyzes the different characters between family firms and non-family firms from the perspective of agent theory. Then the paper gives the deep studies of family firms. After analyzing its cause and consequence, the article lists the aspects that should be pay attention to in the process of information disclosure of family firms, and propose useful advices.Compared to non-family firms, family firms face less severe agency problems due to the separation of ownership and management, but more severe agency problems that arise between controlling and non-controlling shareholders. These characteristics of family firms affect their corporate disclosure practices. In this paper, I show that family firms report better quality earnings, are more likely to warn for a given magnitude of bad news, but make fewer disclosures about their corporate governance practices.Then the paper deeply researches the performance of the corporate disclosure by family firms. After dividing the sample companies based on controlling power of shareholder and the concentration of equity, paper study the information disclosure performance of each category separately.At last, through the horizontal and vertical comparative analysis on family firms, I get the conclusion on the character of the performance in the family firms' information disclosure, and proposed advice on the supervision of the information disclosure behavior in family firms.