The Influence Of Information Disclosure On Corporate Governance Of Listed Companies

The Modern Corporation and Private Property written by American scholars Berle A.A and Means in 1930's is regarded as the first masterpiece about corporate governance. In the book, on the basis of analyzing a lot of positive materials they made the conclusion that the control is transferred from the owners to the managers with the separation of ownership and control. In 1980's, western scholars passionately researched the corporate governance, which happened in the circumstances that managers made various measures to prevent other corporations from merging their own ones. But some of those measures were carried out with the cost of shareholders' benefit. As a result, how to protect their benefit became the major research point. When 90's came, the research of corporate governance was focused on the rising of institutional investors, social responsibility of corporation, corporate governance of multinational corporations and the corporate governance under knowledge economic, etc. As for the traditional corporate governance, some normative operation and consentaneous idea has come into being after discuss about concerned theory and practice in past more than several decades. But in new century, we have to face new problems of corporate governance again. In my opinion, the central point of corporate governance after 1980's is also how to protect shareholders benefit (minority shareholders is the most important objective in China), but the specific measures should be focused on information disclosure, so the paper will concentrate how information disclosure of listed corporations affects the corporation governance. On July 30th, 2002, in order to enforce the information disclosure of listed companies by more severe legislation the president of United State signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act with the overwhelming majority. With the basic objective of protecting the shareholders' benefit, this paper will expound how strengthen information disclosure to perfect corporate governance by discussing the related regulars in Sarbanes-Oxley Act.