The Timeliness of Financial Reporting: A Comparative Study of the People#x0027;s Republic of China and the USA

Abstract

Timeliness of financial reporting is one of the attributes of good corporate governance identified by the OECD (1998, 2004) and World Bank (2001–2006). Shareholders and other stakeholders need information while it is still fresh and the more time that passes between year-end and disclosure, the more stale the information becomes and the less value it has. Several studies have examined the principle of timeliness of financial reporting in recent years. Some of those studies are listed in the reference section. One particularly interesting study by Haw et al. (2000) on the relationship between firm performance and the timing of annual report releases for Chinese firms found that companies with good news to report release their financial information sooner than do companies with bad news to report, and firms that report losses are even later in reporting their financial results. A few studies have examined timeliness using the same methodology used in the present study. For the most part, those studies used Russia as a case study (McGee 2006, 2007a—c; McGee and Tarangelo 2008). Those studies found that it takes Russian companies significantly longer to report their financial information than it does for companies in the more developed Western economies. Another study compared timeliness for new and old EU countries (McGee and Igoe 2008). That study found that the difference in reporting time is not significant. This chapter presents the results of a comparative study that examined the timeliness of financial reporting in the People’s Republic of China and the USA.