Study On Economic Consequences Of Voluntary Accounting Information Disclosure

Shenzhen Stock Exchange issued The Guidance of Investor Relations management ofShenzhen Stock Exchange on October23of2003，which introduced the concept ofvoluntary information disclosure in the practice of investor relations management.What is the current situation and effect of voluntary accounting information disclosureten years later? Most of empirical researches of voluntary accounting informationdisclosure by domestic scholars are about the influence factors of voluntaryaccounting information disclosure. Some domestic scholars study the impacts ofvoluntary accounting information disclosure on firm value. Few scholars study theimpacts of voluntary accounting information disclosure on equity cost. At the sametime, some scholars study the relation between information disclosure and cost of debt.But so far, no domestic scholar has study the impacts of voluntary accountinginformation disclosure on cost of debt.This paper builds a index system of voluntary accounting information disclosure,and study the economic consequences of voluntary accounting information disclosurewith the key point of the impacts of it on cost of debt. The writer draws a sample of100listed companies in Shanghai Stock Market using the proportion of each industryas the standard, and gives scores to each sample company, which is chose as thedependent variable, by reading their annual reports. Choose the ratio of interestexpense to total liabilities to measure cost of debt, which is the independent variable.Choose firm size, profitability, debt asset ratio, asset structure and industrycharacteristics as control variables. The regression result shows that voluntaryaccounting information disclosure can reduce cost of debt, that is, there is a positiveeconomic consequence of voluntary accounting information disclosure. But thesignificance level is not so perfect which is0.073. The writer believes that there canbe two possible reasons: one side, the efficiency of Chinese capital market is so weak,even invalid. On the other hand, the reliability of voluntary accounting informationdisclosure of Chinese listed companies. At the same time, the regression result provesthe positive correlation between debt asset ratio and cost of debt. And the higher theproportion of current assets is, the lower cost of debt is.