1、 1 外文翻译 原文 Voluntary Information Disclosure and Corporate Governance The Empirical Evidence on Earnings Forecasts Material Source: Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics 50(2), 59-74 Author: Naohito Abe， Yessica C.Y.Chung Abstract This study investigates the determinants of companies voluntary informatio
2、n disclosure. Employing a large and unique dataset on the companies own earnings forecasts and their frequencies, we conducted an empirical analysis of the effects of a firms ownership, board, and capital structures on information disclosure. Our finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the cu
3、stom of cross-holding among companies strengthens entrenchment by managers. We also find that bank directors force managers to disclose information more frequently. In addition, our results show the borrowing ratio is positively associated with information frequency, suggesting that the manager is l
4、ikely to reveal more when his or her firm borrows money from financial institutions. However, additional borrowings beyond the minimum level of effective borrowings decrease the managements disclosing incentive. Key words: Voluntary information Disclosure; Corporate Governance; management earnings f
5、orecast; 1. Introduction The corporate governance literature has discussed many mechanisms for resolving the fundamental issue: the agency problem. Perhaps the most pervasive and important factor causing the agency problem between a manager and an investor is the informational asymmetries between th
6、em. If managers who are better informed about their future prospects have divergent incentives with their investors, they may expropriate investors benefits for their private objectives. One of the principal remedies to agency problems is the law. Regulatory interventions could give outside investor
7、s certain powers to protect their investment against expropriation by insiders, and meanwhile, require corporate insiders to 2 enforce investor protections, particularly on conveying inside information. In Japan, companies accessing capital markets are required to follow The Commercial Code and the
8、Securities and Exchange Law. The Commercial Code requires all kinds of companies to prepare individual financial statements, consisting of a balance sheet, an income statement, and a proposal for distribution and appropriation of retained earnings, and to disclose the balance sheet. In addition, the
9、 Securities and Exchange Law requires publicly held companies to prepare and disclose both consolidated and individual financial statements. Furthermore, to enhance the transparency of corporate accounting, since 1974, Tokyo Securities Exchange (TSE)has requested the managers of all exchange-listed
10、firms to submit a Brief Letter of Financial Results, or “Kessan Tanshin” in Japanese(hereafter Tanshin)within 70 days of the end of the fiscal year. Tanshin has been watched with keen interest by outside investors because it contains precious information that is not provided by annual reports. First
11、, traditional financial statements do not always provide the forward-looking information that outside investors might find useful. In contrast to annual reports, Tanshin reports forecast values for the coming years sales, ordinary income, profits, and dividends, not just the current years values. Se
12、cond, as opposed to earnings-related forecasts delivered by market analysts, Tanshin have been made by managers who have superior information to outside investors on their firms expected future performance, which outside financial analysts are not able to know. Moreover, rather than reporting interv
13、al estimates or implicit expects, Tanshin reports point earnings forecasts. Finally, all firms are required to disclose the forecasts at least once a year, but are virtually given a free hand in the decision on the timing and frequency of the release. The Japanese legal system gives managers the dis
14、cretion to reveal more or withhold corporate information. Some managers reveal information only once to meet the criterion, whereas others reveal information more than nine times in the same year. Figure 1 shows the trends of frequency from 1996 to 2004.We observe that most companies disclosed their
15、 earnings forecasts less than twice each year before 2000.In contrast, the number of disclosure began to exhibit heterogeneity in 2001.Although the precise reasons behind the increase are still to be investigated, we can point out several factors that might have contributed to the change. First, all
16、 the listed companies will be required to issue financial statements every quarter from 2008.Although the quarterly issuance of Tanshin is not required, it is possible that 3 some firms began to issue financial statements as well as Tanshin to achieve a smooth transition from an annual system to a q
17、uarterly system by adopting the future system in advance. Second, foreign investors have increased their presence in the Japanese stock market. It is possible that company managers felt increasing pressure from foreign investors to disclose information to the entire capital market. Third, more and m
18、ore listed companies began to rely on direct finance rather than indirect finance for financing their activities. If the role of the main bank system as a substitute for other good corporate governance mechanisms is deteriorating, the importance of information disclosure to the capital market for fi
19、rms must increase. The latter two aspects motivate this study. Tanshin data contain several characteristics that provide us with a good opportunity to investigate the relationship between information disclosure and firm characteristics. First, as noted above, all the listed companies have to issue a
20、t least one Tanshin report every year that contains forecast of sales, profit, etc., for the coming fiscal year. Therefore, our dataset can cover all the listed companies, which prevents self-selection bias. Second, the number of Tanshin issued by a company each year is not fixed. Some companies sub
21、mit nine Tanshin a year, whereas some issue just one a year. Therefore, we can utilize this information to identify companies willingness to disclose their situation to the public. Many previous works use the accuracy of analyst forecasts as a proxy of information disclosure. One of the potentially
22、serious problems in using the forecast errors is the effect of window dressing. This refers to a company that obtains exactly the same amount of profits as was forecast by analysts, either because the company previously gave the correct information to the public, or because the company manipulated t
23、he account information to ensure the reported profit matched the forecast value. Although frequency information is not completely free from window dressing effects, we expect the effects are not serious. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that uses Tanshin data for investigating the rela
24、tionship among managements earnings forecasts and firm characteristics. Using Japanese data provides an additional advantage for analyzing information disclosure. Japanese corporate governance has long been known as a system of bank- centered financing. Although the effectiveness of the so-called ma
25、in bank system is now under serious debate, many listed companies still borrow no negligible amounts of money from banks and accept former bankers on their board of directors. By utilizing detailed information on the bankcompany relationship in 4 Japan, we can investigate the effects of the main ban
26、k system on information disclosure. Accordingly, this study examines how a firms ownership structure, borrowing from financial institutions, relationship with banks, and scale influence the managers decision on information release. With the comprehensive data on Tanshin, this research contributes to
27、 corporate governance literature in three ways. First, this research makes a crucial contribution to the field of corporate disclosure by suggesting that managers earnings forecasts are overwhelmingly influenced by large shareholders. Furthermore, crossholding enhances the entrenchment concern resul
28、ting from opaque corporate information. Second, a manager whose company performed badly is inclined to release information more frequently, possibly in order to establish a reputation for transparent accounting reports. Third, financial institutions-oriented financing encourages managers to issue fr
29、equently. The remainder of this research is organized as follows. Section 2 provides our research hypotheses and methodology. Section 3 describes the data and descriptive statistics for all variables adopted in this research. Section 4 presents the empirical results of the determinants of the manage
30、rs disclosure decision, and conducts several robustness tests. Section 5 concludes this research. 4. Empirical Results In sum, the results in Table 5 support our hypotheses 1 and 3, suggesting that raising funds through financial institutions and attracting foreign investors push managers into consc
31、iously revealing earnings forecasts. Bank directors play a positive role in addressing the asymmetric information problem. On the other hand, our results do not support hypothesis 2, suggesting that stable large shareholders have an overwhelming power to negatively influence management forecasts. Me
32、anwhile, among the large shareholders, cross-holding worsens the effects on management announcements. Ironically, the higher disclosure frequency does not necessarily indicate that firms have better performance. Instead, it might indicate that managers increase disclosure frequency for the purpose o
33、f yielding a positive reputation effect. In sum, empirical evidence leads us to the conclusion that firms with concentrated ownership are relatively reluctant to disclose corporate information. More specifically, cross-holding heightens the asymmetric information problem. Interaction terms Firms wit
34、h a small scale or with decreasing performance tend to reveal information more frequently. We conjecture that that is because when firms 5 are at the limit of their advantage scale, or performing poorly, they compete with their industrial peers by revealing corporate information frequently in order
35、to attract public attention. In addition, we confirm the implication of previous studies, which is that information disclosure has a positive effect on reducing capital costs, and thereby firms tend to consciously reveal financial information to the public owing to their need for external finance. F
36、urther, our results are consistent with Diamonds (1984) work, which shows that delegated monitoring by a banker may be efficient as a means of avoiding duplication of monitoring by small investors, but contrast with former literature employing analysts forecast accuracy by Koga and Uchino (2006). 5.
37、 Conclusions This study has investigated the determinants of managers information disclosure decisions in Japanese listed firms. More specifically, we explore the effects of ownership structure, borrowings from financial institutions, bank relationship, and firm size on a managers disclosure frequen
38、cy. Our main findings are as follows.1) large shareholders have negative effects on a managers forecast frequency, and furthermore, large cross-holding shareholders increase the concern of entrenchment resulting from opaque corporate information; 2) a high borrowing ratio is favorable to information
39、 disclosure; 3) larger firms are reluctant to convey information to the public; and finally, 4) poorly performing firms are likely to advertise themselves via earnings forecasts. Our results are statistically robust and imply that companies whose shares are concentrated among a few groups do not reg
40、ard their information disclosure to the public as seriously as do other firms. Nevertheless, we recognize that a large residual effect remains and that this effect might be correlated with measures of the concentration of firms. The effects of the Top 10 shareholders rate and of the majority shareho
41、lders rate should be further clarified. Meanwhile, we would like to consider the effect of fluctuations in stock prices on managers disclosure decisions for our next project. Ultimately, we recognize that frequency of information disclosure does not completely address concerns about firm manipulatio
42、n. Although we are certain that this proxy is the best choice when alternatives are not known, we should continue our quest for better proxies. 6 译文 自愿性信息披露和公司治理 对企业盈利预测 的实证分析 资料来源 : 经济论文 丛刊 作 者：安倍 ，耶斯卡常 摘要 本文研究了公司自愿性信息披露的决定因素。我们 将一种独特的大型数据集应用于公司所有人的收入预测及频率预测，并对公司所有权、董事会、和资本结构对自愿性信息披露的影响进行了实证研究。我们的发
43、现符合一种假设，即存在交叉持股现象的公司能够加强管理层的固守性。我们发现银行董事会要求管理层更频繁地发布信息。另外，我们的研究结果显示借款比率与信息披露正相关，这表明当需要从金融机构借款时，经理很可能披露更多的信息。然而，超出最低水平的额外借款降低了管理层信息披露的积极性。 关键词：自愿性信息披露、公司治理、管理盈利预测 公司治理的文献讨论了许多根本性的问题解决机制，例 如代理问题。导致管理层与投资者之间的代理问题的最普遍也是最主要的因素是信息的不对称性。如果管理者对于他们的发展前景比投资者具有更好更明智的了解，他们可能会剥夺投资者的利益而用于私人谋利。 问题的主要解决途径之一就是法律。监管干
44、预可以赋予外来投资者一定的权利来保护他们被内部人士剥夺的权利，与此同时，要求企业内部人员执行公司对投资者的保护，特别是在输送内部消息方面。在日本，公司进入资本市场必须遵循商法和证券交易法的要求。商法要求各类公司必须准备各种财务报表的编制，包括资产负债表、利润表、所有者权益表，并披露各项 交易平衡。此外，证券交易法要求公司准备并披露统一的财务报表。另外，为了提高企业的会计透明度，自从 1974 年以来，东京证券交易所已要求所有在交易所上市的公司在财政年度结束的 70 日内提交一份简短的财务报表，或“丹参”（日语）。 丹参引起了外来投资者极大的兴趣关注，因为它包含了那些在法定年度报告中没有提及的珍
45、贵的信息资料。首先，传统的财务报表并不总是能提供那些对于外来投资者有用的前瞻性信息。相较于年度报告，丹参报告预测明年的销售、普通收入、利润和股息，而不仅仅是当年的信息。其次，相对于市场分析师提供的与收入相关的 预测，丹参由拥有甚至连经济分析师也不知道的外来投资者所期望的稳定的未来业绩的优越信息的上级管理者制定。此外，丹参不仅仅是报告区间估计或是暗示，而是显示了盈利预测。最后，所以公司都被要求必须披露预测值，至少每年一次，但实际上在实践及频率的规定上适度宽松。 7 日本的法律制度给予管理者更多的自由裁量权来透露或隐瞒公司信息。一些公司为了符合标准一年只披露一次，而另外一些在一些年份甚至披露九次之
46、多。我们发现大多数公司披露盈利预测信息比 2000 年以前多了将近两倍。相对的，披露数量在 2001 年开始表现异常。尽管增加的具体原 因仍需调查，但我们可以指出引起变化的一些因素。第一，所以上市公司将被要求从 2008 年起发布季度财务报告。尽管丹参报告不要求每季度发布，但是一些公司可能为了调整每年系统的平稳过渡而发布嫉妒丹参报告。第二，国外投资者也增加了他们在日本股票市场的投资。可能是由于公司管理层感受到了国外投资者对于整个资本市场的信息披露的要求的不断增加所带来的压力增加。第三，越来越多的上市公司开始依赖于直接投资而不是间接融资。如果良好的公司治理机制被银行主要系统制度替代的情况不断恶化
47、，对于资本市场的公司的信息披露的重要性必须增强。后面 两个方面推动了这项研究。 丹参数据的几个特点为我们提供了一个研究信息披露与公司治理之间的关系的好机会。首先，如上所述，所以上市公司已发布的丹参报告每一个至少包含未来年度的销售预测、盈利预测等。因此，我们的数据可以覆盖所以的上市公司，从而防止自我选择带来的偏见。其次，公司发布丹参报告的数量每一年都不是固定的。一些公司一年提交九次丹参报告，而一些则一年只提交一次。因此，我们可以利用这些信息来确定公司向公众披露信息的意愿程度。许多从前的研究利用预测分析的准确性作为代理信息披露。其中一个潜在的严重问题是预测误差的影 响。这涉及到公司获得与分析师预测
48、想等量的利润，要买因为公司从前想公众公布了正确的信息，要么因为公司为了确保报告的利润与预测值相同而操纵了账户信息。虽然频率信息并不是完全的窗口包装自由的影响，我们期望效果并不严重。就我们所知，这是第一个利用丹参数据探讨管理盈利与公司治理的关系的研究。 利用日本的经济数据为分析信息披露提供了一个额外的优势。日本的公司治理长期以来被认为以银行为中心的融资制度。虽然所谓的主要银行体系现在正在进行一场关于有效性的严肃辩论，但是许多上市公司仍然拥有不可忽视的银行贷款并且接受前任银行家成 为他们的董事。通过利用日本的银行 -企业关系的详细信息，我们可以研究主要银行系统在学习披露方面的影响。 因此，本研究通
49、过借鉴财政机构、银行关系和管理者的决策在学习发布上的规模影响来调查公司的股权结构运作。通过利用丹参的详细数据，本研究调查了公司的所有权结构在三方面如何有助于公司治理。第一，本研究在建议拥有绝对影响的大股东的管理盈利预测方面做出了重大贡献。此外交叉持股提高了由于公司信息不透明性引起的壕沟。第二，一个对于公司拥有重大影响的管理者可能为了提高公司透明的会计报告的声誉而更倾向于频繁的发布信息。第8 三，金 融机构鼓励管理者发布更多的信息。 这个研究的剩余部分被组织为以下各方面：章节 2 表明了我们的研究假设和方法。章节 3 描述了数据和本研究所采用的所有变量的描述性统计。章节 4提出了实证研究中关于经理层披露决定的影响因素的研究结果，并进行了几个准确的测试。章节 5 做出总结。 4实证结果 总之，实证结果支持了假设 1 和 3，通过金融机构和吸引外国投资者筹集资金的方式推动了企业揭示盈利预测的自觉性。银行的董事在处理信息不对称的问题上发挥了积极作用。另一方面，我们的结果不支持假设 2，这表明稳定的公司大股东有一个强势管理带来负面 影响预测。同时，在公司大股东，交叉持股现象的影响进一步恶化管理，揭露具有讽刺意味的是，更高的揭露频率并不一定表明公司具有良好的性能。相反，它可能表明管理者
