Empirical Study On Voluntary Information Disclosure In The Annual Reports Of Listed Companies

According to the disclosure motivation classification, information disclose of listed companies can be divided into mandatory and voluntary information disclosure. The impetus of mandatory disclosure mainly comes from the government regulation, while the impetus of voluntary disclosure mainly comes from stock market pricing mechanism. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange issued"The Guidelines for Listed Company Investor Relations Management"in late 2003, introducing the concept of listed company voluntary information disclose for the first time. With the development of the security market and the change of corporate operation environment, the continuous increase of the number of persons involved in funds and securities analysis service, and the continuous improvement in capital market efficiency, the mandatory information disclosure of listed companies according to related provisions can no longer meet the information demand of information seekers. The market appeals to more information relevant to enterprise value. Therefore, the impetus of voluntary information disclosure is enhanced continuously. Moreover, the improved identifying capability of investors for information disclosure and their enhanced negotiating power promote the development of voluntary information disclosure.This paper firstly expounds upon the four theories of voluntary information disclosure: theory of asymmetric information, signaling theory, efficient market theory and agency theory. Secondly, it summarizes the content and quality requirements of voluntary information disclosure, and discusses how to improve the quality of voluntary information disclosure under the cost-effective principles. Thirdly, through designing the voluntary disclosure index to appraise the voluntary disclosure degree in the annual report, and taking the information technology industry as example, it then studies the impact of voluntary information disclosure in the annual report on the stock market. The result shows that voluntary information disclosure can produce stock over-earnings, further evidence shows that intangible assets, social responsibility, predictability, and business information are positively correlated with over-earning, and the relevance of strategic information to over-earning is not obvious; and the liquidity of the company with high voluntary disclosure degree increase significantly, while the liquidity of the company with low voluntary information disclosure may be relatively high before the disclosure because the company with low degree of voluntary disclosure has motive to disclose information ahead of the annual report disclosure day in order to cushion the large fluctuations of stocks on the disclosure day. Finally, from the three perspectives of investors, listed companies, securities market, this paper gives the improving suggestions for voluntary information disclosure.