Auditor changes and debt financing : evidence from China

The role of independent auditors is to ensure the accuracy and the credibility of the financial statements. Independent auditors help in reducing agency costs and serve as a monitoring function for creditors. A change in an auditor–client relationship may provide useful information to creditors. Creditors may consider the signal of auditor changes, which affects information risks, as a factor in determining the terms of debts. After several major audit scandals, awareness of the importance of audit quality has increased. Audit partner changes and audit firm changes have been implemented in some jurisdictions to enhance the audit quality. Since China requires disclosure by signing partners’ names on audit reports, audit partner rotations can be identified. The direction of audit firm changes can be downward, lateral, and upward audit firm changes. In this thesis, the effects on debt financing of auditor changes at both audit firm and audit partner levels in different directions are comprehensively investigated. This thesis addresses the importance of understanding the association between audit firm/ partner changes and debt financing. I find that, overall, auditor changes worsen debt financing in various situations. The findings of this thesis should have important implications for investors, corporate financial managers, and regulators

Zheng He Remains in Africa

In recent years, China has sought to extend its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from Central Asia and Southeast Asia to Africa. This article argues that Chinese officials, aided by Chinese maritime archaeologists, journalists and researchers, have used discourses of heritage and history as a form of soft padding to justify China's infrastructure projects in Africa. Zheng He, a Ming dynasty admiral, who had allegedly visited East Africa in four of his seven famous voyages across the Indian Ocean, is particularly important in China's narrative of its historical relations with Africa. The details of Zheng He's engagement with Africa remain contested by historians, especially those in Western academia. The Chinese government thus supports 'sub-initiatives' of heritage and history construction, namely maritime archaeology, travel journalism and student fellowships, to substantiate the legacy of Zheng He in Africa. By suggesting that China and Africa also share the legacy of having been exploited, humiliated and victimized by European colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals have fashioned the BRI into an anti-imperialist discourse for acceptance by their African counterparts

The Analysis of Rigid Frames by Electronic Computer

Rigid frames as well as gable frames have been widely used for structures serving various functions such as highway bridges and industrial plants. However because of their high indeterminacy, exact analysis by some conventional methods such as slope deflection and moment distribution would involve too much work for practical design. For this reason, many structural engineers would turn to some short-cuts and base their design on some approximate analysis this of course would reduce the accuracy or reduce the reliability of the structure. One of the purposes of this paper is to introduce a simple approach for the analysis of some typical fixed and rigid frames by using the IBM-1620 electronic computer. The main purpose of this paper is to establish some programs for the computer in such a way that they may be general applicable for the analysis of any frame in the form mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Y repeated execution of the programs with input data which involve only the depth and the coordinates at the ends of the members of the frame and the external loads which are applied to the frame, a final result for the redundants of the frame will be typed out through the console typewriter of the computer. This paper is intended to give a systematic and simple method that anyone who knows but little about indeterminate structures as well as computers may effectively analyze a somewhat complicated frame within minutes by following the operational instruction given in Appendix II of this paper

Review of Qingmo Zhongri jiaoyu wenhua jiaoliu zhi yanjiu (Research on Educational and Cultural Interaction between China and Japan during the Late Qing Era). By Lu Shunchang. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2012. (清末中日教育文化交流之研究／吕顺著．北京：商务印书馆，2012．RMB 32.00元，401.)

Book Review

The Founding of Singapore and the Chinese Kongsis of West Borneo (ca.1819-1840)

Many historians have examined why Singapore failed to be a major trading center before the nineteenth century. This paper revisits the current scholarly literature on the founding of Singapore to make two arguments. First, I argue that we cannot understand the founding of Singapore and its role in the British Second Empire without delineating Singapore\u27s role as a forest- and marine-goods metropolis in the precolonial Chinese trading networks of Southeast Asia. Second, I try to show how the Chinese kongsis 公司 of West Borneo turned Singapore into a forest- and marine-goods metropolis, formed their own political and social institutions, and collectively functioned as a third autonomous pseudostate power alongside the British and the Dutch. This reconceptualization enables us to see the founding of Singapore as a joint enterprise, and not a solely British achievement

WHERE IS THE LOCUS OF DIFFICULTY IN RECOGNIZING FOREIGN-ACCENTED WORDS? NEIGHBORHOOD DENSITY AND PHONOTACTIC PROBABILITY EFFECTS ON THE RECOGNITION OF FOREIGN-ACCENTED WORDS BY NATIVE ENGLISH LISTENERS

This series of experiments (1) examined whether native listeners experience recognition difficulty in all kinds of foreign-accented words or only in a subset of words with certain lexical and sub-lexical characteristics-- neighborhood density and phonotactic probability; (2) identified the locus of foreign-accented word recognition difficulty, and (3) investigated how accent-induced mismatches impact the lexical retrieval process. Experiments 1 and 4 examined the recognition of native-produced and foreign-accented words varying in neighborhood density with auditory lexical decision and perceptual identification tasks respectively, which emphasize the lexical level of processing. Findings from Experiment 1 revealed increased accent-induced processing cost in reaction times, especially for words with many similar sounding words, implying that native listeners increase their reliance on top-down lexical knowledge during foreign-accented word recognition. Analysis of perception errors from Experiment 4 found the misperceptions in the foreign-accented condition to be more similar to the target words than those in the native-produced condition. This suggests that accent-induced mismatches tend to activate similar sounding words as alternative word candidates, which possibly pose increased lexical competition for the target word and result in greater processing costs for foreign-accented word recognition at the lexical level. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the sub-lexical processing of the foreign-accented words varying in neighborhood density and phonotactic probability respectively with a same-different matching task, which emphasizes the sub-lexical level of processing. Findings from both experiments revealed no extra processing costs , in either reaction times or accuracy rates, for the foreign-accented stimuli, implying that the sub-lexical processing of the foreign-accented words is as good as that of the native-produced words. Taken together, the overall recognition difficulty of foreign-accented stimuli, as well as the differentially increased processing difficulty for accented dense words (observed in Experiment 1), mainly stems from the lexical level, due to the increased lexical competition posed by the similar sounding word candidates

The Influence of the Clustering Coefficient on Spoken Word Recognition

The clustering coefficient refers to the proportion of phonological neighbors of a target word that are also neighbors of each other. The influence of the clustering coefficient on spoken word recognition was examined in the present study. In a same-different task, no significant effects of clustering coefficient were observed. In a perceptual identification task, words with a low clustering coefficient (i.e., few neighbors are interconnected) were more accurately identified than words with a high clustering coefficient (i.e., many neighbors are interconnected). In a lexical decision task, words with a low clustering coefficient were responded to more quickly than words with a high clustering coefficient. These findings suggest that the nature of relationships among the neighbors of the target word influences the lexical processing of the target word in the context of spoken word recognition