The Impact Of Audit Committees Personal Characteristics On Earnings Management: Evidence From China

This study investigates the influence of audit committees personal characteristics on the firms earnings management behavior using Chinas publicly traded firms during 2004-2010. Overall, our findings suggest that audit committees several personal characteristics, such as age, gender, education level, and working experience, are associated with earnings management, which in turn may affect the quality of financial reporting. The results are robust after controlling the size, independence, meeting frequency of audit committee, and other firm specific characteristics. The results are consistent with the predictions based on the Upper Echelons Theory. The contributions to the earnings management literature and implications for regulators and investors are also discussed

The Network Of Interlocking Directorates And Firm Performance In Transition Economies: Evidence From China

Using a Chinese sample containing 8727 firm-years over the period from 2005 to 2010, we investigate the economic effect of interlocking directorate networks, and find that firms with central position measured by network centrality in interlocking directorate networks earn superior one- to three-year ahead performance measured by return on assets (ROA) and return on Sales (ROS). We also show that the economic effect of interlocking directorate network is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Our evidence is important, because it shows that to some extent the interlocking directorate network can serve as an solution to the institutional voids which are derived from the reform in Chinese translation economy

What Do We Know About The Variance Of Audit Quality? An Empirical Study From The Perspective Of Individual Auditor

In this paper, we analyze the variance in audit quality among a broad cross-section of listed firms in Chinese stock market from 1999 to 2012. The purpose of the analysis is to identify the importance of audit firm, audit client, and engagement auditor effects on the variance in audit quality. Using discretionary accruals and financial restatement to surrogate audit quality and based on simultaneous ANOVA method, we find that engagement auditor can add about 19% of incremental explanatory power to the variance in audit quality. As expected, audit firm effects and audit client effects also have significant influence on audit quality, which can add about 2% and 16% of incremental explanatory power to the variance in audit quality. In addition, we find that, relative to engagement auditors with short audit experience, engagement auditors with longer audit experience have no significant incremental power in explaining variance in audit quality. The analysis enriches previous studies by investigating audit client’s role and engagement auditor’s role in determining audit quality. Our study highlights the importance of understanding audit quality from the perspective of individual auditor

The Effect Of Service-Driven Market Orientation On Service Innovation: Literature Review And New Research Framework

The aim of this paper is to analyse the literature regarding the association between service-driven market orientation and innovation in service organizations as well as create conceptual framework about this relationship. Scholars have suggested that the service firms implementing service-driven market orientation can perform significantly better than traditional market-orientation and become increasingly aware of market demands better than their competitors. The service firms need to react quickly and effectively to changing customers’ demands. Bring in the service-driven market orientation model for service sector leads to critical advantages and particularly their benefits on service innovation. The recent work examined the market orientation-innovation relationship regarding the service industries. An examination regarding the market orientation in service organization is presented along with the conceptual framework and conceptual model is recommended

The effect of mandatory regulation on corporate social responsibility reporting quality: evidence from China

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure has attracted attention from regulatory bodies and academics over the past few decades. Due to the unreliability resulted from CSR voluntary disclosure, an increasing number of researchers are calling for more government regulation on CSR disclosure. Based on 1830 standalone CSR reports disclosed by the Chinese-listed firms during 2009-2012, we examine the effect of mandatory regulation on CSR reporting quality. We further hypothesize and test for the moderating effect of firm size and other characteristics on the link between government regulation on CSR reporting quality. Our results suggest that government mandatory regulation leads to an overall improvement in CSR reporting quality. We also find that this positive effect is greater when firms are larger and have better financial performance, but less when firms are controlled by government. Our study provides a direct answer to the recent calling for mandatory disclosure on CSR reports, and helps to understand why recent studies of social disclosure regulation suggest that government interventions do not seem to resolve the problems that are generally attributed to voluntary disclosures. Our findings should be of interest to the academics, regulators, and investors

Do audit committees reduce the agency costs of ownership structure?

We investigate the agency costs of corporate ownership structure and the role of audit committees in mitigating their effect. Using China as a laboratory, where audit committees are voluntary, we study the demand for and value relevance of audit committees conditional on the various agency costs of corporate ownership. Audit committees complement existing internal governance systems by reducing the agency conflicts embedded in ownership structure. They are always value relevant, the magnitude of which depends upon the level and complexity of the ownership lattice. Audit committees substitute for inefficient external regulatory environments, particularly where weak legal institutions predominate. Our results are robust to firm size, investment level and financial leverage

Determinants of the component structure of intraday return distributions

There is existing evidence of equity returns having a mixture distribution with multiple component structures. Following the increasing interest in intraday trading, this article examines determinants of intraday equity return distributions and finds that greater information flow and stock liquidity reduce the number of components while greater heterogeneity amongst traders increases the number of components. These results show that when empirically modelling intraday return distributions allowance needs to be made for their time varying nature and the fact that they are conditional on the liquidity and information flow of a stock. In addition, the results reinforce the recent emphasis by market regulators on information flow and liquidity being key to increasing transparency and reducing uncertainty (multiple components in the return distribution).

CEO Ability and Corporate Social Responsibility

This study examines the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) ability on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. We find that firms’ CSR performance increases with CEO ability. Specifically, firms with more able CEOs are associated with more socially responsible activities and fewer socially irresponsible activities, and are associated with more stakeholder CSR rather than third-party CSR. We further find that the positive relation between CEO ability and CSR is weakened for CEO who is also the chair of the board and for CEO who is close to retirement; and is weakened when the CSR emphasis exerted by a firm’s external environment is high. Our results are robust after controlling for firm fixed effects and to the use of multiple measures of CSR performance and CEO ability. Overall, our evidence is consistent with our conjecture that more able CEOs have less career concerns so that these CEOs are more willing to undertake long-term investments in socially beneficial activities, leading to better CSR performance.Gaoliang Tian acknowledges financial support for this project from National Natural Science Foundation of China (71372163) and Special Scientific Research Plan of Education Department of Shaanxi Provincial Government of China (16JK2056)