Empirical Research On Market Effect Of Voluntary Accounting Policy Changes In Chinese Listed Companies

Voluntary accounting policy change is among the core content of the research of positive accounting theory. For assuring the comparability and fairness of accounting information, avoiding uselessness and misleading of accounting information by unchangeable accounting policy, Accounting Principles allow that enterprises can have accounting policy changes not only based on national laws, but also based on their practical operations. However, some enterprises just satisfy with their demand for benefit by voluntary accounting policy changes, especially for the listed companies. Lots of fruitful studies have been made by overseas accounting scholars, but our country only just starts in this aspect, and has no achievement that can explain and forecast the practical accounting. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the market effect of voluntary accounting policy changes.First, the paper will summarize and analyze the former research fruits, and then deeply introduce the relative knowledge according to substance and form of voluntary accounting policy changes, classical theory, financial influence, drivers'analysis, and market effect, grounding the academic base for empirical research.Second, by using the variance analysis, affair research method and cross-section regression analysis, the share prices of the listed companies those have voluntary accounting policy changes in 2003-2005 and chosen from Shanghai stock markets are analyzed, and their abnormal returning and cumulative abnormal returning are calculated and compared with those of controlling samples. It is found that, there exists apparent information noise in the behaviors of earnings management induced by policy-based factors which are carried through in voluntary accounting policy change; the accounting policy change's market effect of income-increasing group is more than that of the reverse one; and the study samples'market effect of voluntary accounting policy change is more than the controlling samples'market effect.Finally, the paper will point out the limitation and the future direction of this research, and also put forward some proposals for Chinese listed companies: strengthening the disposal of voluntary accounting policy change, consolidating the auditing supervision of voluntary accounting policy change, ameliorating market supervision system, and improving the level of investors.