The Research On The Relationship Between The Board Secretary’s Characteristics And The Quality Of Information Disclosure

The Board Secretary System originated in the United Kingdom and is a special legal system ofAnglo-American law system in National company law. The Board Secretary System was introduced in thelast90’s because of its unique value in business developments. With the increasing of companies that haveset up board secretaries and the need of improving securities markets, people’s attention on the boardsecretary has been transferring to its operation and governance effectiveness. The most powerful measureabout the board secretary is the new Corporation Law promulgated on January1,2006. The newCorporation Law clearly identified the status of board secretary from legal aspects and pointed out that theboard secretary is a company’s senior management. According to the item124, a listed company shall setup the board secretary, which is responsible for preparing the company’s shareholder and board meetings,filing company’s and shareholders’ documents, and conducting information disclosure processes.From the aspect of either taking responsible for investors or supervising company operation, themost direct role of the board secretary is disclosing information. However, illegal disclosure scandalshappen constantly, and therefore the quality of information disclosure of listed companies is worrying inChina. As a result, one of goals that the new Company Law mandates listed companies set up boardsecretary is to improve their information disclosure quality. Based on the implementation of the newCompany Law, this paper mainly studies the effects of board secretaries on information disclosure qualityafter they have become senior executives. This paper also discusses what characteristics of boardsecretaries are helpful in improving information disclosure quality. The main purpose of this paper is toprovide sounder reference in improving the board secretary system, and to provide new methods of regulating company operations and improving information disclosure qualities.According to the review of domestic and international literatures about information disclosureand the board secretary, few scholars combine the two together and study the influences on the quality ofinformation disclosure from the angle of the board secretary characteristics. Most scholars analyze therelationship between management and the quality of information disclosure from the perspective of theboard of directors, board of supervisors and independent directors. For the study of board secretary on onehand is around the value of the board secretary of system and problems existing in the theory analysis; onthe other hand is just discuss the role of board secretary in corporate governance by simple theory in thispaper. To this end, this paper attempts to take the characteristics of the board secretary as the breakthroughpoint to discuss the effects of board secretaries on information disclosure quality by collecting data andusing method of combining norms and empirical.This paper analyzes the relationship between management and the information disclosure fromthe perspective of the theory at first, explains the relevant theory of information disclosure and points outthe present status and influencing factors of information disclosure. Besides, it expounds the developingcourse of board secretary and the plight of the current secretary system in the board of directors in ourcountry which provides solid foundation for the practical examples in writing. On the foundation, this papercombines with the fulfillment of duties and living condition investigation from board secretary in China,selects the board secretary characteristics which influence the quality of information disclosure, putsforward the research hypothesis and building the model. Then it verifies theoretical assumptions throughthe empirical study method, and examines empirical results for robustness test. Finally, it summarizesresearch conclusion and puts forward relevant policy suggestions.In the empirical analysis of the relationship between the characteristics of board secretary and the quality of information disclosure, this paper selects the data of601listed companies of2009-2011inShenzhen exchange stock main board A-shares, takes the assessment results under the "credit archives"which is issued by Shenzhen stock exchange as the norm for the quality of information disclosure indexand takes age, education level, professional background, remuneration during the reporting period,shareholdings of board secretary as explained variable, then gives it a descriptive statistics on the whole.According to the information disclosure quality of good and bad, samples can be divided into two groups,then doing single variable variance analysis. And on the basis of the model it gives the binomial Logisticregression. The empirical results show that the board secretary in the company’s office term for informationdisclosure quality has significantly positive effect, the higher level of education and payment the boardsecretary accepts, the more help to improve the level of information disclosure. However, the professionalbackground and the share certificate of the board secretary is just play a weak role in the quality ofinformation disclosure and the influence is not significant.