上市公司审计委员会的履职活动与潜在绩效

The Work Performance Activities and Potential Performance of Audit Committees of Chinese Listed Corporations

董事会的履职活动是联通治理结构与治理成效的枢纽,对于公司的有效治理有着重要意义。文章就此问题,在审计委员会的履职活动层面探索性地解释了审慎治理与风险管理绩效的关系,并基于2009-2011年国内A股市场的主板上市公司,实证检验了审计委员会的实际履职活动及其影响因素与潜在绩效。研究发现:(1)我国上市公司审计委员会的履职质量堪忧,仅有不到40%的履职活动既可信又活跃,大多数公司的履职现状亟待改善。(2)股权集中度高的公司履职质量较差,大公司、成长性低和债务风险高的公司审计委员会表现较为活跃。(3)当审计委员会的履职活动既可信又活跃时,所在公司有较低的业绩波动;当可信度较低时,看似勤勉的公司反而有更大的业绩波动;当履职可信而活跃度较低时,与业绩波动的相关性不稳健。文章说明审慎治理有助于降低公司风险,督促审慎履职、做到真实勤勉而非表象勤勉是治理有效的基础。未来研究可以在董事会层面就审慎治理机制等方面做进一步深化。

The work performance activities of the boards is the important foundation to realize effective corporate governance, and is also the intermediate hinge connecting governance structure and governance effectiveness. This paper provides an exploratory interpretation of the relationship between corporate governance and risk management performance from a perspective of work performance activities of audit committees, and empirically tests work performance activities, influencing factors and potential performance of audit committees based on listed companies on the main board of A-share market from 2009 to 2011. It comes to the results as follows： firstly, as a whole, the work performance activities of audit committees of Chinese listed companies make people worried, and only less than forty percent of their work performance activities is both credible and active, so the work performance status should be urgently improved;secondly, companies with high-level ownership concentration have poorer quality of work performance of audit committees, and audit committees are active in big companies or companies with low growth and high debt risks; thirdly,when the work performance activities of audit committees are credible and active, their companies have lower performance fluctuations; when the credibility of work performance of audit committees is lower, their companies which appear to be diligent have bigger performance fluctuations instead; when work performance of audit committees is credible but has lower liveness, the correlation between work performance activities and performance fluctuations is not robust. The conclusions above-mentioned reveal prudential governance can help to reduce corporate risks and urge prudential performance, and only true diligence, rather than apparent diligence,is the base of effective governance. It needs to further study prudential governance mechanisms at the level of the board of directors.