A Study of Factors Influencing Voluntary Disclosure of Chinese Listed Companies

According to the disclosure motivation, information disclosure of listed companies can be divided into mandatory and voluntary information disclosure. The mandatory information disclosure can no longer meet the information demand of investors, while voluntary information disclosure is getting more recognition. This paper introduces the relevant literature of voluntary information disclosure, and analyses the internal and external factors influencing voluntary disclosure of Chinese listed companies in detail. Internal factors contain financial condition and corporate governance of company, while external factors include regulatory penalties, audit opinion, the development of regional market and degree of industrial competition. Then we set the data of the year 2009 of 212 Chinese manufacturing companies listed at the Shanghai Stock Exchange for the sample, and use structural equation modeling to make an empirical analysis between these factors and the level of voluntary information disclosure, based on voluntary disclosure evaluation index system constructed by ourselves. Finally, we make several policy recommendations on how to improve the level of voluntary information disclosure.