A Study On The Relation Of The Corporate Ownership,Corporate Governance Reform And Timeliness Of Earnings

Earnings timeliness is an important factor of information disclosure, the quality and effectiveness of the earnings information issued by a listed company is very paid attention by the content of the investors and the board of directors. Earnings timeliness is that the surplus information is passed to the information user in a timely manner, and provide reference for investment decision makers, when the surplus information is passed to the securities market, it will speed up the response of the stock price discovery. This article study mainly about the earnings timeliness,from the company’s shareholding structure.In this paper, the measurement of earnings timeliness is mainly from two aspects to research,which is surplus report delay days and stock price discovery speed, the less surplus report days and the smaller the value of the stock price discovery speed shows the higher earnings timeliness, illustrates that the company’s surplus information disclosure is timely.This article selects 3983 annual observations,which is from 340 listed manufacturing companies of the Shanghai A shares,from 2000-2013, as the research sample.The first big shareholders according to their nature can be divided into state-owned enterprises, family (private) enterprises, foreign enterprises and institutional ownership (as control group), in addition,we ues the size of the equity to replace the propertiesof the corresponding shareholders, and then study that how the different shareholders would affect the earnings timeliness from two aspects. Finally, taking the time when the new accounting standards is applied into consideration, the sample is divided into wogroups:before and after the implementation, in order to study the impact of the new accounting standards on the earnings timeliness comparatively.Preliminary results show that comparing with the listed companies who have the lower ownership concentration, those companies have higher concentration, they have shorter surplus report days and more timely stock price discovery speed; And after the enforcement of the new accounting standards, the companies’stock price discovery rate and reporting delay have no effective progress, the companies in the surplus information disclosure "catch the last bus" phenomenon is still widespread.Further research shows that the relationship between ownership concentration and the timeliness of earnings is inverse U-shaped. The identity of the largest shareholder ownership and its proportion is better in explaining the stock price discovery than the surplus report delay, there is no obvious different effection on the relationship with the enforcement of the new accounting standards. In particular, the first largest shareholder as the nature of the state-owned enterprises, has a shorter surplus reporting lag and is more timely in rate of stock price discovery, the findings suggest that the nature of the goverment-owned enterprises plays a great role in the company convenient surplus information disclosure.As expected, the result show that family firms have lower timeliness of price discovery of earnings, consistent with these firms having an opaque information environment. Government-owned firms are in fact more timely as a result of the government’s commitment towards higher transparency and better corporate governance. New accounting standards, make all shareholders and the public obtain more reliable surplus information in a more timely way, however, it does not bring a faster stock price discovery.