Research About Corporate Governance Characteristic Based On Voluntary Disclosure

The relationship between voluntary disclosure and corporate governance is a attractive and important topic for both theoreticians and positivists. On the base of mandatory disclosure, voluntary disclosure can make corporate disclosure more completely and specifically, and it can 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. Because of these, people pay more and more attention on voluntary disclosure. Western scholars have done much more researches on it than internal scholars, especially on empirical research. In addition, as most of the prior researches focused on the data from listed companies in the USA, so many foreign research results on voluntary disclosure are not fit for listed Chinese companies effectively. Based on the research of voluntary disclosure's extent, this paper empirically examines the actuality of listed Chinese companies' corporate governance and its influence to voluntary disclosure and the relativity between them in annual reporting of listed Chinese companies.In this paper, we take 6 explanatory variables as the corporate governance characteristics by two sides: stock ownership structure and the directorate structure, which are the ownership concentration of stock, the stock proportion of management, the directorate size, the proportion of independent director, CEO duality and auditing committee. In addition, firm size, firm profitability and the growth rate of sell are the controls variables. This paper randomly selected 728 listed companies in Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange by its industrial ratio and then conducted empirical research. The results indicate that the directorate size, CEO duality and firm size are significantly and positively related to the extent of voluntary disclosure, while the coefficients for the other independent variables are insignificant. The results show that the corporate governance of listed Chinese companies has many problems and needs to be perfected. Meanwhile, the descriptive statistics on the extent of voluntary disclosure disclosed by 728 listed Chinese companies from 2004 to 2007 shows that listed Chinese companies' extent of voluntary disclosure is deficient on the whole, but it is increasing clearly.According to the empirical evidences, in order to improve the corporate governance of listed Chinese companies and increase the voluntary disclosure, this paper finally suggests that we pay more attention on optimizing the ownership structure of stock, enhancing the function of directorate, improving the system of independent director, perfecting the system of auditing committee, encouraging the voluntary disclosure and strengthen its supervision.