Measurement Of Enterprises' R&D Information Disclosure And Analysis On Its Influencing Factors

R&D has become the important sources of the core competitiveness for enterprises. If R&D investment is successful, the enterprise's future earning is immeasurable. Because the uncertainty for the results of R&D activities leads to the outside investors can not accurately estimate the enterprise's future value, this requires enterprises to increase the disclosure of R&D information which can reflect its innovation capacity, R&D information also becomes an important basis for investors to predict the enterprise's future value. The enterprises should actively disclosure R&D information, this not only can increase investors'confidence and attract more potential investors, but also can increase the stock price and enhance corporate value. Therefore, the discussion on how to strengthen the disclosure of R&D information has a strong practical significance, this paper is going to research the issue from an empirical perspective.There isn't a uniform understanding about the measurement for the disclosure of R&D information in theory. This paper constructs a R&D information disclosure index (RDI) to measure the disclosure degree of R&D information, The RDI includes 19 projects such as the amount of R&D investment, progress rate of R&D, declaration of R&D intellectual property rights and so on. Then take the annual reports in 2007 and 2008 of 126 pharmaceutical listed companies as the samples, according to the sampling standard of this paper, the final sample size is determined to be 207. Existing disclosure system does not require listed companies to provide detailed R&D information, and the direct access to enterprises'R&D information has a certain difficulty. Through extensive reading of the sample's full report and according to 19 R&D projects, this paper calculates the RDI which reflects the level of enterprises'R&D information disclosure in 2007 and 2008. And then the RDI is proved to be reasonable from the market level, that is, the average annual stock returns of the companies with higher RDI is higher than those companies with lower RDI.The factors that affect R&D information disclosure are divided into internal and external categories in this paper. Internal factors focus on describing the internal governance structure of listed companies, mainly considering whether it has the motive to disclosure R&D information, including company size, directors board size, ownership concentration, profitability and financial leverage. The external environment also is the important factors affecting the R&D disclosure, mainly describing the supervision of external market for corporate R&D disclosure, such as the authority of audit agency, the type of shares, the proportion of independent directors, etc., then the main factors is empirically tested from both internal and external side. The result shows that:(1) The level of R&D information disclosure for listed companies is low, and the disclosure presents a structure that is not balanced; (2) Company size, financial leverage, ownership concentration as well as the directors'board size are the mainly significant variables. R&D information disclosure of listed companies is significantly positive with the company size, and is negatively related with the ownership concentration, directors' board size and financial leverage, which are consistent with the expected assumptions.According to conclusions of this paper, the disclosure of R&D information for Chinese listed companies is not very good, so the relevant parties should take measures to encourage enterprises to increase the disclosure of R&D information, and give the policy proposals to perfect corporate R&D information disclosure from the relevant authority departments, enterprises and investors three levels.