Research On The Relationship Between Product Market Competition,Competition Status And Voluntary Disclosure Of Intellectual Capital

The advent of the age of knowledge economy has reduced the status of physical capital,while the value creation ability of intellectual capital has been widely recognized by both theoretical and practical circles.It has become common that the high-tech listed company's market value is much higher than its book value in the stock market,where the intellectual capital should not be neglected in the process of value promotion.Therefore,the disclosure of financial information has gradually been unable to meet the needs of investors.In order to launch their own value,attract investment,and thus reduce capital costs,the enterprises need to further disclose their intellectual capital information.However,the intellectual capital information disclosed by the enterprises may be used by competitors and thus bring a negative impact on the status of disclosure company,which is known by some scholars as the proprietary cost of voluntary information disclosure.In this case,although voluntary information disclosure plays an important role in avoiding adverse selection,reducing financing costs and distinguishing themselves from competitors,it should arouse the attention of enterprises how to weigh the pros and cons and formulate reasonable strategy of intellectual capital information disclosure according to the competitive environment.The relationship between product market competition and voluntary information disclosure has been a focus in this research field.Nevertheless,most of the previous studies were conducted from the perspective of industry competition,and few scholars have studied the influence mechanism from the perspective of industry competition status,let alone the combined influence of product market competition and industry competition status on the voluntary information disclosure.As for the field of intellectual capital information disclosure,research involving product market competition is even less,and few scholars at home and abroad have studied the influence mechanism from the perspective of product market competition until now.Based on the previous research,this paper makes a theoretical analysis and empirical study on the influence of the degree of product market competition and the industry competition status on the intellectual capital voluntary information disclosure.In this study,intellectual capital voluntary information disclosure is measured by Intellectual Capital Information Disclosure Index of listed company in China,which is provided by Fuzhou University research group of Intellectual Capital Information Disclosure,while the degree of product market competition and the industry competition status are measured by Competitive Strategy Measure and weighted Lerner Index respectively.The research is conducted based on the theories including signal transmission,competitive capital market,legitimacy and proprietary cost.Considering both the degree of product market competition and the competition status of the industry,this paper takes the high-tech listed companies in A shares as a sample.First,this paper explores the respective and combined impact of the degree of product market competition and the industry competition status on the level of intellectual capital voluntary information disclosure.In the meantime,by using data grouped by the median industry competition status,this paper studies the heterogeneity in the impact of the degree of product market competition on voluntary information disclosure level of intellectual capital of high-tech listed company in different industry competition status,after which Bootstrap method is adopted for the significance test of their heterogeneity.Subsequently,the economic consequence that the voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital of enterprises may have on the industry competition status is further explored.After a series of robust tests on the above empirical results,such as replacing explanatory variables and replacing explanatory variables,conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1)The intensification of product market competition reduces the willingness of high-tech listed companies to actively disclose their intellectual capital information.(2)With the promotion of the industry competition status,the high-tech listed companies tend to disclose more information about their intellectual capital.(3)On different industry competition status,heterogeneity can be found in the influence of the degree of product market competition on the level of voluntary information disclosure of intellectual capital of high-tech listed companies.That is,a company with higher industry competition status tends to be more sensitive to the changes in the degree of competition.The level of intellectual capital voluntary information disclosure decreased faster with the degree of product market competition intensifying.(4)The intellectual capital voluntary information disclosure of listed companies have proprietary costs,which is not conducive to maintain the company's competitiveness and further enhance its industry competitive status.In this case,to reduce the voluntary information disclosure of intellectual capital is reasonable for enterprises to protect themselves.Finally,according to the empirical results,the following policy recommendations are put forward.First,government departments need to speed up the construction of intellectual capital information disclosure system in China.Second,the listed companies should pay attention to the influence of the external governance mechanism,rationally formulate the intellectual capital information disclosure policy according to the competitive environment,and strengthen the intellectual capital management.Third,the external investors should pay more attention to the information of intellectual capital,and analyze the investment value of the enterprises according to the characteristics of the industry and the industry status of enterprises,so as to reduce the risk of investment decision-making.