The Empirical Study On The Relation Of Audit Committee's Characteristics And The Quality Of Information Disclosure

Accounting information is the main basis of investment decisions. Its quality plays an important role in market supervision and investment. But in our country, the frequent accounting frauds of listed companies destroy our country economy gravely and bring investors great loss. Authorities have taken many kinds of actions to control the situation, one of which is the introduction of the Audit Committee System. So the China Securities Regulatory Commission and China Economic and Trade Commission promulgated"The Govern Standards of Listed companies"on Jan 7th, 2002, which includes non-mandatory requirement for listed companies to establish an audit committee. According to the practice of some countries such as US and UK in mature markets, this system's establishment is beneficial to reinforce the company interior surveillance system, perfect the company management structure, alleviate the information asymmetry and enhance the accounting information quality.But, it is still a problem whether the audit committee of listed companies in our country takes up the supervisory role. This paper offers the empirical study on the relation of audit committee's characteristics and the quality of information disclosure, in order to play a good role in researching on the improvement of audit committee in future.This paper falls into four parts: First of all, there is a summarization on the corporate governance theory. And it analyzes the relationship between the Audit Committee and the corporate governance, in order to get an in-depth understanding of the Audit Committee System. The second part is about the development of Audit Committee. First it introduces the overseas development of the Audit Committee, and then does the system in our country; The third part is a kind of empirical analysis. Based on many research achievements all of the world, this paper uses the date of 441 listed companies that are in Shenzhen Stock Exchange with the Audit Committee in 2004-2007 as the samples and establishes the regression model for finding the relation of audit committee's characteristics and the quality of information disclosure; And the last part comes to a conclusion. This paper provides some advices that could effectively perfect the system of audit committee of Chinese listed companies.