Purpose As an important participant in capital market, institutional investors play a principal role in improving corporate governance. Most existing studies have focused on institutional ownership and its economic consequences. Nevertheless, they have not provided sufficient insight on the governance behavior of institutional investors as well as the underlying incentive mechanism. This paper aims to analyze the governance role of institutional investors in information disclosure and provide related evidence. Design/methodology/approach The authors propose a novel theory to analyze the institutional investors’ behavior of active governance and shows that such behavior significantly improves the quality of corporate information disclosure. The authors then conduct an empirical test by using the hand-collected data of institutional investors’ corporate visits during 2009-2014 in ChiNext. Findings This paper finds that the firms visited by institutional investors are more likely to have a greater tendency of disclosing more information than the firms that have never been visited. In particular, a higher frequency of visits or a larger number of participating institutional investors leads to a higher degree of disclosure. Consistent with the notion that on-site visits endow institutional investors with more frequent and active interaction with the firms, the authors find that the results are stronger for firms which are visited on-site, when compared with other information acquisition activities such as online meetings, conference calls and investor meetings. In addition, the effect of a site visit is greater when the site visit is conducted by securities companies or funds rather than insurance companies or QFIIs. Finally, the test of the direction of causality suggests that visits conducted by institutional investors leads to more information disclosure, rather than the reverse. Collectively, these results show that institutional investors’ participation enhances corporate information disclosure. Originality/value This paper explores the internal mechanism that institutional investors affect corporate governance by improving information disclosure through their corporate visits. This is the first study to investigate the influence of institutional investors’ corporate visits and their economic consequences.

中文翻译：

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机构投资者在信息披露中的治理作用

目的机构投资者作为资本市场的重要参与者，在改善公司治理方面起着主要作用。现有的大多数研究都集中在机构所有制及其经济后果上。然而，他们还没有对机构投资者的治理行为以及潜在的激励机制提供足够的见解。本文旨在分析机构投资者在信息披露中的治理作用，并提供相关证据。设计/方法/方法作者提出了一种新颖的理论来分析机构投资者的积极治理行为，并表明这种行为显着提高了公司信息披露的质量。然后，作者通过使用机构收集的2009-2014年ChiNext机构投资者公司访问的数据进行实证检验。结论本文发现，机构投资者访问的公司比从未访问过的公司更有可能公开更多的信息。特别是，较高的访问频率或更多的参与机构投资者会导致较高的披露度。与现场访问使机构投资者与公司进行更频繁和积极互动的观点一致，作者发现，与其他信息获取活动（如在线会议）相比，现场访问的公司的结果要强，电话会议和投资者会议。此外，当现场访问由证券公司或基金而不是保险公司或QFII进行时，现场访问的效果会更大。最后，对因果关系方向的检验表明，机构投资者进行的访问会导致更多的信息披露，而不是相反。总的来说，这些结果表明机构投资者的参与增强了公司信息的披露。原创性/价值本文探讨了机构投资者通过改善公司访问的信息披露来影响公司治理的内部机制。这是第一项调查机构投资者公司访问及其经济后果的研究。