An Empirical Study On The Impact Of The GEM Listed Companies' Information Disclosure Quality On Debt Financing Cost

Information disclosure is the core of market development,and the level of disclosure has become an important standard to judge the quality of listed companies.The disclosure of the companies' operating status,financial status and other information to the outside world provides a reasonable basis for investors and creditors to make decisions in the market.Although the information disclosure system of China's capital market is gradually improving,the occurrence of some disclosure violations in the market in recent years still indicates the existence of information asymmetry in the market,thus forming an obstacle to the allocation of market resources and the improvement of corporate financing efficiency.Especially for GEM,an emerging market,the characteristics of high risk and strong innovation of listed companies make them face greater financing constraints when financing compared with the Main-Board Market.As an important way of financing,debt financing has increased in proportion of external financing of GEM listed companies in recent years,and the reduction of debt financing cost has become an important problem to be solved in the process of improving financing efficiency of GEM listed companies.Banks and other creditors in the GEM listed companies credit risk assessment,the behavior of the companies' disclosure became the main way to creditors of the listed company information,therefore,the listed company information disclosure quality can affect the companies' debt financing cost is a problem worthy of attention and exploration.This article adopts the method of combining theoretical analysis and empirical test.First of all,in theory analysis,basing on the theories of information asymmetry,signal transmission and principal-agent,this paper expounds the influence mechanism of information disclosure quality on debt financing cost of listed companies from direct and indirect perspectives.In addition,agency cost was added into the indirect impact analysis,and three hypotheses were finally proposed,respectively: on the direct level,whether the quality of information disclosure will have an impact on the debt financing cost,whether the quality of information disclosure will have an impact on the companies' agency cost,and whether the quality of information disclosure can indirectly affect the companies' debt financing cost through theagency cost.In the process of empirical test,this paper selected the data of listed companies on GEM from 2014 to 2018,and on the basis of descriptive statistical analysis and correlation analysis,multiple regression analysis was used to verify whether the above three hypotheses are valid.Finally,the research finds that:(1)The improvement of the information disclosure quality of listed companies plays a certain role in promoting the reduction of corporate debt financing costs.(2)In the relationship between the quality of information disclosure and the cost of debt financing,the reduction of agency cost plays part of the intermediary role,that is,the improvement of the quality of information disclosure,alleviates the information asymmetry,reduces agency cost,and thus reduces the debt financing cost of the company.Finally,based on the research conclusions,suggestions are put forward from the GEM companies and the market level respectively.At the company level :(1)Improve the initiative of disclosing high-quality information;(2)Reduce agency costs.At the market level :(1)Refining information disclosure evaluation system;(2)Establish the information disclosure prediction system;(3)Improve the quality and transparency of information disclosure.