The timeliness of annual reports has received serious attention by the Chinese regulatory and professional bodies in recent years. Using 8294 company reports from the Chinese listed companies during 1993--2003, this paper analyzes the timeliness of annual reports by first examining the trend of reporting lags, separating the effects of 'good’ and 'bad’ news on timeliness, and then by using a multivariate regression to identify the determinants of reporting lags. It is found that there is a significant improvement on timeliness of reports although the shortening of reporting lags shows a U-shape over the data period. There is strong evidence that reporting lags were related to firm performance as bad news tended to hold back timely release of corporate reports. It is interesting to note that government policies have also played an important role in improving timeliness of corporate annual reporting in China but much more work needs to be done to make sure that listed companies provide more timely and reliable reports to investors and regulatory authorities.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 4 (2006) Issue (Month): 3 (November) Pages: 241-257 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF