A Study On The Voluntary Disclosure Of Chinese Listed Company

On the base of mandatory disclosures, voluntary disclosures make corporate disclosures more complete and specific, and improve the quality of corporate disclosure, which is helpful in getting rid of information dissymmetry and incompleteness, in realizing fairness and efficiency of capital market. For a long time, voluntary disclosures have been one of most important topics in research. 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. 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. Because of the affection of unique economy environment, economy development and traditional culture, listed Chinese companies' corporate governance has some unique feature, so many foreign research results on voluntary disclosures are not fit for listed Chinese companies effectively. Then, on the process of voluntary disclosures research, empirically examines the linkage between corporate governance and the extent of voluntary disclosure in annual reporting provided by listed Chinese companies.In this study, corporate governance is characterized by nine attributes which are the proportion of outside ownership, the proportion of government agencies ownership, the proportion of corporation ownership, ownership concentration, the proportion of managerial ownership, the scale of board, the proportion of independent directors to total number of directors on the board, the scale of supervisors, the proportion of supervisors whose background is about accounting or law. This study is based on a sample of 100 listed Chinese companies that only have A-shares on Shanghai Stock Exchange. Then, the entropy method is used to compare the values and the attributes. The association between the corporate governance and the extent of voluntary disclosures is tested through this comparison. The results indicate that the proportion of government agencies ownership is significantly and negatively related to the extent of voluntary disclosure, ownership concentration and the scale of board are negatively but insignificantly related to the extent of voluntary disclosure, the proportion of corporation ownership, the scale of supervisors and the proportion of supervisors whose background is about accounting or law are significantly and positively related to the extent of voluntary disclosure, while the other attributes have insignificantly relation between them. Based on the empirical evidences, on the angles of internal and external, the paper provides some advices on improving listed Chinese companies' voluntary disclosures.