Chinese Listed Companies' Annual Reports Selfishness Reason Trend

The self-serving attribution tendency has gradually become one of the important shenanigans that management chooses to manipulate the wordings on their annual reports. So far, western scholars have conducted some research and confirmed the existence of self-serving attribution to some extent. However, the study of self-serving attribution is still during the start-up phase with limited discussion and analysis in our country. Therefore, taking in-depth research on self-serving attribution tendency of the annual reports of public companies has not only theoretical significance to compensate for the barren research in this area, but also practical significance to attract attentions from vast report users and regulatory authorities in order to further the regulations for disclosure wordings of annual reports and to improve the information quality and the reliability and relevancy of annual reports.In this study, we take content analysis as our research method and annual reports of Chinese public companies as our sample. Based on the confirmation of the existence of self-serving attribution, we expand our discussion and empirical test to the relevancy of self-serving attribution procedure. Taking self-serving tendency as dependent variable and internal control index, industry classification and proprietary nature as independent variable, we conduct our empirical analysis by using EVIEWS and SPSS. The result demonstrates the existence of self-serving attribution in the annual reports of our public companies. The outcome indicates the significance relationship between self-serving attribution index and internal control index in a higher-quality sample group simultaneously, meaning that self-serving tendency is weaker in a higher internal control index and better internal control company. However, the relationship is insignificant in a low-quality sample group. Besides that, both industry classification and proprietary nature are not significantly related to self-serving attribution tendency no matter under high-quality group or low-quality group. In comparison to existing research result, we adopt a large sample to ensure the accuracy and reliability of our study. We apply content analysis and multiple regressions to support our analysis and take empirical test on cross-sectional data. The conclusion is relatively reliable.