Empirical study demonstrates that board secretary expertise enhances earnings forecast quality in publicly listed firms, indicating executive professional backgrounds strengthen disclosure governance.
The role of board secretaries is a unique institutional feature in China. Individuals in this senior executive role are responsible for coordinating information disclosure. We study the impact of board secretaries on management earnings forecasts and find that their legal expertise, accounting expertise and foreign experience help improve management earnings forecast quality. The quality of forecasts, as indicated by their occurrence, frequency, precision and accuracy, is also positively associated with the role duality (e.g. board director, CFO or other senior executive role) and equity holdings of board secretaries and negatively associated with their political connection. The quality of forecasts is found to increase the compensation of board secretaries. Finally, we show that the equity holding of board secretaries reduces litigation risks and increases corporate philanthropic giving.
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Xing et al. (2017) studied this question.
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