中文摘要：

本文选择深交所信息披露考评结果与证券分析师盈余预测精度作为上市公司信息披露质量的衡量指标，使用2006年深市上市公司的相关数据，实证检验了审计委员会与上市公司信息披露质量之间的关系。研究发现，与未设置审计委员会的上市公司相比，设立审计委员会的上市公司具有更高的信息披露质量，审计委员会的独立性对提高上市公司信息披露质量有着积极的促进作用。本文的政策含义是，在进一步完善资本市场的过程中应重视上市公司审计委员会建设。

英文摘要：

The audit committee system is a very important institutional arrangement in the corporate governance structure. Foreign research suggests that the audit committee should play an active role in strengthening internal control auditing and control over financial reporting while ensuring the authenticity as well as reliability of financial reports. Therefore, audit committees should lead to an improvement in the quality of information disclosure. The audit committee system was introduced into China in 2002. While there is already some literature that discusses the efficiency of audit committees in Chinese listed companies, very little of that literature focuses on the relationship between audit committees and disclosure quality. In this paper we empirically examine whether this system improves the quality of information disclosure of listed companies in China, and the relationship between the independence of audit committees and the quality of information disclosure. Taking into account the difficulties inherent in the direct measurement of the quality of information disclosure, we employ two variables as agent variables of disclosure quality： （1） the degree of disclosure published by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange （SZSE）; and （2） financial analysts＇ forecast accuracy as suggested by Lang et al. （2003）. We then evaluate the effects of audit committees on disclosure quality using a firm-level dataset comprised of 428 listed companies. It is found that audit committees improve listed companies＇ disclosure quality. Furthermore, there is a positive statistical relationship between the independence of audit committees and disclosure quality. These results pass a series of robustness checks. Our research implies that the Chinese system of audit committees is to some extent effective, but still needs further improvement. The policy implication to be drawn from this analysis is that more attention should be paid to the audit committee system during the creation of efficient capital markets in China.