Voluntary Disclosure Bringing about Information 'Lemon' or 'Transparent'?: From Information Reliability Perspective

摘要

As China's capital market development, voluntary disclosure of listed companies' information has become an important part of the report, and is receiving more and more investors' attention. Voluntary disclosure of information is voluntarily provided by the operator, and is free of independent forensic audit. Investors can not identify that voluntary disclosure of information is true or false, and so the identity of information's provider often becomes a tool for investors to distinguish from true information. And disclosure is a crucial element in diminishing the information asymmetry between company and its investors; therefore there is a typical endogenous problem between level of voluntary disclosure and information quality. The empirical research to the relationship between voluntary information disclosure and information quality in academic circles continuously discussed that listed companies, who had different quality of information, were how to choose the level of voluntary disclosure, but the endogenous problem had been ignored in these research. In addition, there is no empirical research on the voluntary disclosure affecting information quality (information reliability). We select the listed companies from 2004 to 2007 in China as the study sample to study on the relationship between voluntary disclosure and information quality in China. The result shows that the higher the reliability of company information, the higher level of voluntary disclosure of information, however the level of voluntary disclosure of information has negative effects on information reliability. But then, the level of voluntary disclosure has far less influence on information reliability than the impact of information reliability on the voluntary disclosure of information. Overall, voluntary disclosure of information makes China's capital market more transparent.