An Empirical Study On The Impact Corporate Governance On Intellectual Capital Disclosure

There are often different scarce economic resources in different economy times. Such as, land in agricultural economy times, funds in industrial economy times, and intellectual capital in the knowledge economy times, which is the indispensable core resource to create enterprise value. Knowledge economy is a kind of new-style economy based on knowledge, driven by innovation, and led by education, culture, research and development. Expanding the material resources can’t boom the knowledge economy any more, the growth of which has to depend on the intellectual capital management and use.In the increasingly competitive market economy, intellectual capital is not only the foundation of enterprise value creation, it’s also the representation of enterprise innovation capability, and the key element for enterprise core competitiveness and future development. If an enterprise doesn’t disclose its intellectual capital as required, the enterprise value and development potential won’t get reflected accordingly, the risk for information asymmetry and investment will be increased, and finally result in the investment decrease, and the obstacle of the enterprise future development and social resources disposition. So, intellectual capital disclosure becomes an important issue to be solved.Which factor will influence the intellectual capital disclosure? It is corporate governance consisted of internal governance and external governance. Internal corporate governance is a kind of institutional and systematic arrangement maintaining the relationship between business owners and operators, influencing the supply of the intellectual capital information, which includes general meeting of shareholders, the Board of Directors, board of supervisors and managers. The external governance which influences the demand of intellectual capital information and regulates the disclosure of the intellectual capital mainly consists of outside investors, government regulators, and public opinion. Thus, good corporate governance is the fundamental guarantee of corporate intellectual capital disclosure.Both theoretic and empirical methods are used in analyzing the impact of corporate governance on intellectual capital disclosure. It is of great significance to improve the disclosure of intellectual capital of China’s enterprises, enhance the corporate governance, reduce information asymmetry and investment risk, and promote the development of capital market.This paper is divided into five chapters. The main content of the chapters are as follows:Chapter1:Introduction. The background, the significance of this study, research ideas and methods, the main contents, the basic framework of this paper are provided in this chapter.Chapter2:Related literature review about intellectual capital disclosure. A detailed review of related literature was made based on both the international and domestic research results. From the previous research we found that intellectual capital disclosure differs in different countries, while in general, more and more enterprises are disclosing intellectual capital in their annual financial report with time going on. Many scholars study on the relation between intellectual capital disclosure and corporate value and its stock price, and great achievements are made accordingly. While few study on the factors influencing intellectual capital disclosure. Thus, it’s necessary and also meaningful to have a study on factors affecting intellectual capital disclosure.Chapter3:The related theory of intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance. This chapter laid the theoretical basis for this article. Related concepts about the intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance are introduced; economic foundation and the impact of corporate governance on intellectual capital disclosure are stated in this chapter.Chapter4:Empirical research. Six hypotheses are put forward from the perspectives of ownership structure and board of directors’characteristics based on theoretical analysis of intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance, by taking listed companies from2009to2010on GEM as samples. We quantify the intellectual capital information which scattered in the financial report as indexes with the method of the content analysis. Statistical software SPSS16.0is used in descriptive statistical analysis, correlation test and multiple regression analysis. The empirical research results show that:ownership concentration, executives shareholding percentage, the number of Board meetings and the Audit Committee all have a significant impact on the intellectual capital information disclosure level, while the proportion of independent directors, and the pluralism of board chairman and general manager have unapparent impact.Chapter5:Conclusions and suggestions. At the end of this chapter, we get conclusions through the analysis and put forward some rational policy proposals on the improvement of intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance, and point out some limitations existed in this paper, which need to be improved in the further research.The main contributions of this paper:(1) There are few researches on the impact of corporate governance on intellectual capital disclosure, with which we can have an insight into the status of intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance for Chinese listed companies.(2) Data used in this paper is the latest, which makes conclusions more persuasive in analyzing the current situation of China’s intellectual capital disclosure in companies listed on GEM.