Independent Director’s Team Heterogeneity, Information Disclosure And Earning’s Quality

The independent director system plays an irreplaceable role in corporate governance and the independent director system can inhibit the management’s agency problem and shareholder’s private benefits of control, protecting the rights and interests of minority shareholders. Therefore, the independent director system has been widely used around the world. Because the independent director has experts function and supervisory function, it may have a certain influence on the quality of accounting information and the quality of surplus to the listed companies. Most of previous researches on the independent director focus on the independent director individual characteristics or the independent director system’s influence on the quality of the accounting information and the quality of the surplus. But the actual situation is that the independent directors are members of the executive team, their decisions are the result of team work. This paper is based on senior management team related theory, researching how the independent director influences the quality of accounting information disclosure and the quality of the surplus.In this paper, we study the independent director system from a new angle of view that is the independent director team heterogeneity. This study is to test the relationship among the independent director team heterogeneity and information disclosure and the earnings management behavior of listed companies, and to research the mechanism of the independent director system. This article divides the independent director team heterogeneity into age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity and education background heterogeneity and industry background heterogeneity. In this paper, on the basis of summarizing the relevant research both at home and abroad, we use management and psychology related theory analysis to reason out the hypothesis of this article, then using empirical research method to test hypothesis, we get the following conclusions:1. The independent director team’s age heterogeneity, education background heterogeneity and industry background heterogeneity can significantly improve earnings quality of listed companies, inhibiting earnings management behavior; 2. Independent director team’s age heterogeneity and industry background heterogeneity can significantly improve the level of the accounting information disclosure of listed companies, improving the accounting information transparency.3. The listed company information’s disclosure level plays the role of intermediary effect in the process that the independent director team heterogeneity affects earnings quality of listed companies.