| In recent years, there are more and more listed companies to change the accounting firms, some companies even replace their accounting firms more than one time in a year. We should be concerned about the situation. There are likely some potential profit motives behind changing the accounting firms. To avoiding the non-standard audit opinions, the listed companies’ management will change the accounting firms. In order to meeting the purpose of the managers’ earnings management, the listed company may be threat to dismiss the auditor. Accounting firms have conspired with the listed companies for the survival. These are serious impact on the audit quality of financial statements and the healthy development of the audit market.Early in1993, the China Securities Regulatory Commission had made a provision that change the accounting firm should be disclosed to the community as a major event. Whether it had market reactions or not for this major event? If had, what are the potential reasons? If not, how to explain? Different reasons for the change will bring different market reactions? These issues are worthy of our research. The article tries to check out something by analyzing samples which had changed their accounting firms.In this article, the efficient market theory, principal-agent theory and asymmetric information theory are discussed first to settle the theory base of the empirical research. Then, there is a summary of the number of our country’s listed companies to change the accounting firms and the situation of information disclosure from2008to2010. The result shows that, the number of change is basically the same in three years, excluding the impact of the merger wave of accounting firms in2009. But compared with the developed market abroad, the number is also large. For the situation of the information disclosure, there are many defects in the listed companies changing accounting firms. For example, the content is not comprehensive, the disclosure regime is imperfect, the disclosure is not timely and the reason of the event is not clear.The article researches the market reaction of changing accounting firms in our country using the method of event study. The method of event study is the most commonly used in studying the market reaction; calculate the abnormal return rate in time window, then get the result of whether the market react or not. This article selects the A-share listed companies which change accounting firms in the three years2008to2010as research samples and the date of information disclosure of the Board of Director as the research event date. Findings are as follows:in ten trading days before and after the announcement of the Board, the matter of changing the accounting firm which market reaction is very weak and has not reached the level of significance, and the market reaction’s sign is positive. In addition, the study departs samples as ST and non ST, standard audit opinions and non-standard audit opinions, voluntary changing and compelling changing groups. The research result shows that only the audit opinion group’s market reaction has the significant difference. For further information, the research combines the grouping criteria:on the basis of groups according to the financial condition and the audit opinion further depart the samples with the changing wishes. Through analyzing the samples, we get the conclusions that the degree of attention of the investors in the market of audit opinions is higher than the financial position and changing wishes. Secondly, investors pay more attention to the financial situation than changing wishes. The information of changing reasons is very important for investors, but they do not concern. This may be related to our information disclosure regime is not perfect.By a series of studies, we think China’s capital market has not yet reached the semi-strong efficient market, and the effectiveness of the market is low, the announcement information does not have information content. In the end of the article, give some improvement proposal. |
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