The Research About The Influence Of Voluntary Disclosure Of Information On The Enterprise Value

Voluntary information disclosure is the information disclosed initiatively by listedcompanies, rather than the basic financial information according to the generallyaccepted accounting principles or specific requirements of the securities regulatoryauthorities. It is relative in terms of a concept, and is the disclosure of additionalinformation and expansion to the mandatoryinformation.Relative to the mandatorydisclosure of information involved in the "hard information", the voluntary disclosureof information reveals more "soft information" which the corporates disclosevoluntarily according to its strategy of voluntary disclosure to the capital markets.Andthe main purpose to disclose these informations is to show the company’s corecompetencies and competitive advantage so that it can stand from othercompetitors,raise additional funds and at last increase its value.According to the theory aspect of the voluntary disclosure act, we can startfrom the following perspective: accounting target has changed from the concept ofmanagement responsibility to the the concept of decision-useful,which provides aconceptual explanation; The theory of Asymmetric information is the substantiveinterpretation of voluntary disclosure; Contract theory and signaling theory provide amechanism of interpretation to the voluntary disclosure;With the content analysis method to construct a voluntary information disclosuresystem,which congtains5categories and35indicators,such as the backgroundinformation, the business information, the social responsibility information,the forecastinformation, and the information of manager’s analysis and discussion,this paperanalysis the2010annual report of the139Shanghai A-shares sample,and then havescores reflecting the level of voluntary disclosure.From the Descriptive statistics, the overall level of disclosure of listed companiesis not high, and the difference among all of the samples is not big and all at a low level.To each kind of information,the difference was more obvious:the social responsibilityinformation and the background information got the highest scores and the predictiveinformation did worst.The three other kinds were medium. But the predictiveinformation is precisely such a kind information that the investors most concernabout,which shows that in our country listed companies can’t supply enough information voluntarily to meet the needs in the capital market.So the regulatoryauthorities need to guide properly.When study the impact that voluntary disclosure of information gives to theenterprise value,this paper make the score of voluntary disclosure as the independentvariable, Tobin’s Q as the dependent variable,and select the company’s size,thefinancial leverage and the company’s growth as the control variables.Then establish amultiple regression model to carry out the empirical research. The result shows that thelevel of voluntary disclosure gives a significant impact to the enterprise value:thehigher the level of disclosure is, the greater the enterprise value is.In all kinds ofinformation, the information which can really bring value effect are businessinformation and the information of manager’s analysis and discussion.Although thebackground information and predictive information are positively correlated withenterprise value,this relationship isn’t significant.And the social responsibilityinformation has a non-significant negative correlation with the enterprise value.Taking into account that the different industries may lead to different tendencies involuntary disclosure and different ways to impact the enterprise value,this paper alongthe line of analysis before focuses the difference between a monopoly industry and acompetitive industry in the voluntary disclosure. We choose the electricity, gas andwater production and supply industry(water and electricity industry in short) and realestate as these two industry representatives.After the second sampling there are40companies.With the stepwise regression method,after make regression respectively inthese two industries,find that voluntary disclosure of information in the two industrieshas no significant differences,in the similar level and are all not high.This is a newview,which is different with the conclusion that before domestic and foreign scholarsconcluded.They believed that there were obvious differences between competitive andnon-competitive industries,and competitive industries were more inclined to voluntarilydisclose information. When we talk to various types of information disclosure betweenindustries,the difference is reflected.The results show that the companies in themonopoly industry tend to disclose more social responsibility information,while thecompanies in the competitive industry is more inclined to disclose the backgroundinformation.However, there is no relevence between the level of voluntary disclosureand the enterprise value in the monopoly industry. On the contrary, in the competitive industry,the higher the level of voluntary disclosure of business information, theenterprise value is higher.Based on the above conclusion,I give some advice to the listed company,regulators and investor:the listed companies should improve its level of voluntarydisclosure and make it more strategic, targeted and readable;the regulators should playthe guiding role of the supply of information, weigh the degree of supervision and takegood advantage of the monitoring and evaluation from the market intermediaries;andthe investors should invest in value-oriented, eliminate speculative and short-sightedbehavior, broaden the channels of contact with the information and methods,and keepcautious in dealing with corporate voluntary disclosure information.