Do voluntary positive earnings forecasts of Chinese listed companies benefit publicly or privately?

Jing Zhang, Guihua Lu and Baoliang Liu

Nankai Business Review International, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 78-98

Abstract: Purpose - According to the Chinese Stock Exchange rules, the listed companies’ management earnings forecasts (MEFs) are divided into mandatory and voluntary earnings forecasts. Different information disclosure mechanisms may bring different economic consequences. Compared with the former, when, how frequently and what kind of voluntary earnings forecasts are disclosed almost entirely depends on the discretion of managers and the major shareholders[1]. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether listed companies’ voluntary earnings forecasts have self-benefited motives before the major shareholders’ selling of original non-tradable shares and how the capital market reacts in China. Design/methodology/approach - This paper uses multiple regression analyses to examine the influence of the major shareholders’ non-tradable shares selling motives on MEFs’ type and frequency of A-share listed companies and makes robust tests using the difference in difference model (DID). Findings - In the paper, it is found that before the major shareholders’ selling of original non-tradable shares, managers of listed companies are prone to release positive voluntary MEFs; during the shares reduction year of the major shareholders, the disclosure frequency of MEFs is much higher; these forecasts before the major stockholders’ selling have significant higher excess market returns. The evidence suggests that voluntary positive MEFs are for the major shareholders’ self-interested motive rather than for the open, fair and just disclosure purpose that damages the allocation efficiency of the capital market. Originality/value - This paper enriches the understanding of voluntary MEFs’ incentives literature and provides scientific evidence to improve the supervision of information disclosure and insider trading in Chinese security market.

Keywords: Selective information disclosure; Major shareholders’ selling of non-tradable shares; Voluntary management earnings forecasts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:nbripp:nbri-07-2017-0038

DOI: 10.1108/NBRI-07-2017-0038

Access Statistics for this article

Nankai Business Review International is currently edited by Dr Xuexiu Wang and Professor Li Wei'an

More articles in Nankai Business Review International from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().