Summary: | 碩士 === 長榮大學 === 管理學院經營管理碩士班 === 107 === This study examines the effects of proprietary information protection on informativeness of accounting earnings. Proprietary information has characteristic features at different levels, like region, industry, firm, and transaction. I base my research on those factors at latter two levels and collect the released data from listed firms in Taiwan. First, I find that industries with higher knowledge intensities have higher informativeness of earnings. Second, high-tech firms with high knowledge intensity are negatively associated with earnings informativeness. In terms of knowledge intensities, the effects of employees’ education status create higher significant negative effect in high-tech industries than research and development (R&D, hereinafter) intensity. Finally, using disclosure-based and litigation-based related party transaction (RPT, hereinafter) secrecy measures as the driver of corporate information protection, I find when employees’ education status is higher, relative to other industries, high-tech firms pursuing RPT secrecy are consistently and negatively associated with informativeness of accounting earnings, but not consistent for R&D intensity. However, the effects of different RPT secrecy measures associated with employees’ education status on accounting earnings informativeness has no significant difference.
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