The Impact Of The Interlocking Directorates’ Ties On Voluntary Disclosure Of Information

In recent years, with the improvement of the domestic environmental information disclosure and voluntary disclosure of information on the role of the capital market is gradually revealed, how to improve the level of voluntary disclosure of information became a realistic subject. The voluntary information disclosure level can be affected by many factors, while most of the existing literatures were based on the traditional perspective of corporate governance without considering the influence of social relationships. As the core of enterprise organization, the board of directors has extremely important influence on the company’s strategic decision. The coupling phenomenon between interlocking directors is very common in companies, which may influence information disclosure in some ways. The purpose of this study is to find a evidence that interlocking directorates tie affects the level of voluntary disclosure of information, using the aspect of social relations between directors, thus providing a new research perspective for improve the level of companies’ voluntary information disclosure.Firstly, this paper summarizes the relevant research results, and expounds the related concepts and theories of the interlocking directors and voluntary information disclosure; secondly, it analyzes the present situation of interlocking directors and voluntary information disclosure level, exploring the relationships between the interlocking directorates and voluntary information disclosure, then put forward the hypothesis of this paper; furthermore, an empirical research on how interlocking directorates affect the voluntary disclosure of information is carried out, using social network analysis —— QAP(Quadratic Assignment Procedure), based on the annual report data from companies of Shenzhen stock exchange from 2011 to 2013. Results show that enterprises having interlocking directors were more consistency in the voluntary information disclosure level; both of the external and internal important interlocking directorates tie can affect the level of voluntary disclosure of information, and from the point of impact, the influence of the internal key chain directors should be more important than that of external chain directors; with the increase of interlocking directorates tie distance between enterprises, the voluntary information disclosure level of consistency presents a decrease trend. Finally, according to the result of empirical analysis, it put forward some proposals.