Abstract: In recent years, the contradiction between the increasing information demand of investors and the lack of transparency of the audit committee has become increasingly prominent, and an important controversy over regulatory reform is how to balance the benefits and costs of audit committee information disclosure. Based on that, this paper empirically tests the benefits of audit committee transparency from the perspective of accounting information quality by using the quasi-natural experiment of the Shanghai Stock Exchange mandatory disclosure of audit committee work information in 2013. Empirical evidence shows that the improvement of audit committee transparency has significantly improved the quality of corporate accounting information, and this effect is more pronounced in companies with higher misstatement risks and agency costs; further, the improvement of audit committee transparency improves the quality of accounting information by promoting the effectiveness of audit committee performance. The conclusion confirms the benefits of audit committee transparency from the perspective of accounting information quality, and provides supporting empirical evidence for the supervision reform of audit committee transparency being explored in various countries.

Key words: audit committee, transparency, accounting information quality, regulatory reform