Abstract: Corporate site visits are a series of information acquisition activities that allow institutional investors and securities analysts etc. to visit the location of listed companies and communicate with their managers and other employees face to face. The visitors can observe the companies’ production lines and understand the companies’ development strategies deeply. Based on the hand-collected information of investors of listed companies in Shenzhen main board market from 2012 to 2013, this paper measures the information environment of the listed companies with the degree of information asymmetry to examine the characteristics of institutional investors’ corporate site visits, such as the disclosure forms, industry distribution, frequency and time distribution, etc, then to study the impact of information asymmetry indicators on institutional investors’ site visits. The findings indicate that the inside and outside information environment of listed companies would both affect the site visiting behaviors of the institutional investors. The higher the quality of the listed companies’ information disclosure with institutional investors following in time at the earlier stage, the greater the probability and the more times of site visits will be made by the institutional investors. However, the uncertainty of the companies only has a significantly positive impact on the probability of institutional investors’ site visits.

Key words: institutional investor; site visits; information environment; characteristics analysis