Board Secretary and Information Disclosure: Evidence from Chinese listed companies

Bo Wang

 Co-Presenters: Individual Presentation
College: College of Business and Public Management
Department: School of Accounting and Finance
 

Abstract:

The Chinese regulator requires all listed companies to elect a unique board secretary in the top management team. The typical responsibility includes ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of information disclosure, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations, educating the Board and top managers, acting as a liaison to regulators, answering inquiries and calls, and maintaining investor relations (Xing et al., 2019). The board secretary's role differs from the traditional CFO's role. Previous literature has found that the board secretary is associated with less financial misconduct (Liu et al., 2024), better management forecast earnings (Xing et al., 2019), weaker board management (Wang et al., 2019), and higher information quality (Li and Lee, 2022; Nowland et al., 2021; Quan et al., 2021; Xu et al., 2021). However, how the board secretary helps with information disclosure and external monitoring is still unclear.In this project, we fill this gap and investigate whether and to what extent the board secretary influences the financial analysts. The gender literature has shown that male and female top managers behave differently. We therefore examine whether female board secretaries help reduce the information asymmetry. Further, we test whether the board secretary's previous backgrounds would improve communication during the site visits and conference calls. Our sample combines the board secretary's data with the data of Chinese-listed companies and financial analysts. We will use multiple advanced regressions to reduce potential endogeneity concerns and explore potential underlying channels. Our project deepens the understanding of board secretaries and gender literature. It also helps evaluate the policy's effectiveness.