Construction of the Voluntary Disclosure Indicator System of Listed Companies

Theoretically no consensus has been reached regarding how to evaluate the quality of voluntary disclosure of listed companies. In practice, scholars' researches in this regard also vary with their own characteristics. Many problems remain unsolved in the evaluation of the quality of voluntary disclosure, such as neglecting to define concept connotations, inconsistency in principles of determining evaluation indicators, great difference between evaluation indicator systems, etc.. With the release of the latest version of the Standards Concerning the Contents and Formats of Information Disclosure by Companies Offering Securities to the Public No.2 Contents and Formats of Annual Reports (Revised in 2012) (hereinafter referred to as the "Annual Report Standards") by China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), these issues are again brought up in the research field of "voluntary disclosure". Based on the 2012 revised Annual Report Standards, this paper identifies the voluntary information of listed companies that investors generally focus attention on, through sorting prior research results and adopting questionnaire survey and by reference to the research ideas of Botosan, and then constructs an indicator system for voluntary disclosure by listed companies suitable in China, so as to lay the foundation for further research of the subjects in relation to voluntary disclosure.