Is Listed Companys’ Corporate Governance Information Disclosure Useful?

Following the proposal of the concept of corporate governance,a large number of scholars have conducted researches on corporate governance.Most literature has demonstrated that corporate governance is of great importance,as perfected corporate governance can improve performance and even is highly related to the economic benefits of the public.Chinese regulatory departments also place high importance on the disclosure on listed company’s governance information,including the China Securities Regulatory Commission that has formulated relevant disclosure standards mandatorily requiring listed companies in China to disclose corporate governance information on their annual reports.Given the great importance of corporate governance and the mandatory requirement by relevant regulatory departments on it,corporate governance not only should be the significant information that investors attach great importance,but also the information that listed companies should actively disclose.In addition,information disclosure is also beneficial to listed companies themselves.The disclosure of corporate governance information constitutes a research subject worth scholarly researches.However,relevant researches on corporate governance information disclosure by listed companies in China are still scarce.The majority of these few related researches were conducted through manual reading to study disclosure problems.Therefore,the empirical study in this paper on corporate information disclosure has enriched the literature in the relevant field;further,by employing computers to analyze the texts of corporate governance information,this study has solved problems like small sample size and subjectivity on the approach of manual reading.Based on the text characteristics of the corporate governance section in annual reports of listed companies,that is text length,specificity,emotional inclination and similarity to the text of the previous year,this paper carries out an empirical study on the disclosure of corporate governance information.This paper is outlined in four empirical sections:first,the current situation on corporate governance disclosure by Chinese listed companies is analyzed mainly from perspectives of the four text characteristics of the corporate governance section in annual reports-text length,specificity,emotional inclination and similarity to the text of the previous year,followed by a verification on the factors that may affect the disclosure of corporate governance;second,by employing data on actual changes of corporate governance structures in listed companies,the paper empirically tested whether the disclosure of corporate governance has actively reflected these changes and further verified the disclosure qualities of corporate governance by Chinese listed companies;third,the paper tested if corporate gorvernace disclosure changed after alterations of corporate performances;finally,the question whether corporate governance disclosure by Chinese listed companies can reduce the costs of debt capitals and equity capitals were also empirically tested.Through empirical tests on these three aspects,the paper found that Chinese listed companies have not actively disclose the status of their corporate governance,these companies only observed the minimum requirements of the mandatory standards to carry out the disclosure,and the disclosures of corporate governance have not resulted in positive economic benefits to these companies.