Disclosing for Promotion or Perquisites: Local Government Financial Disclosure Strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACT How to stimulate local officials to improve the financial disclosure quality is a fundamental question of the public accountability theory. Based on the manually collected data on disclosure quality of provincial final accounts report in China, this study examines the influence of provincial leaders’ utility goals on final accounts disclosure strategies. We find that provincial leaders voluntarily disclose higher-quality final accounts information in the first and last years of their tenure relative to other years. Furthermore, excellent governance performance and stronger position change expectations significantly increase the improvement degree of final accounts disclosure quality in the last years of the term. We also document that officials’ voluntary improvement in the final accounts disclosure quality directly leads to an increase in public satisfaction and trust in the government. Moreover, the voluntary improvement in the final accounts disclosure quality significantly strengthens the positive relationship between the governance performance and the promotion probability. Overall, based on the distinction between mandatory disclosure requirements and officials’ voluntary disclosure motives, this paper, from the perspective of officials’ utility goals, empirically investigates the micrologic behind local government’s financial disclosure decisions in authoritarian countries.