We examine enforcement action in China’s emerging markets by focusing on the agents that impose this action and the role played by supervisory boards. Using newly available databases, we find that supervisory boards play an active role when Chinese listed companies face enforcement action. Listed firms with larger supervisory boards are more likely to have more severe sanctions imposed upon them by the China Security Regulatory Commission, and listed companies that face more severe enforcement actions have more supervisory board meetings. (...) Our findings are of interest, as supervisory boards in China are generally perceived to be dysfunctional. This study contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, we shed light on the effects of supervisory boards whose role in a fraud setting has not yet been examined. Second, the study has important policy implications for governance reform. Finally, our analyses provide the most up-to-date picture of fraud and governance issues in China’s ever-growing markets. (shrink)

We analyze whether audit partners suffered damage to their professional reputations with the demise of Zhongtianqin, formerly the largest audit firm in China, after an audit failure enabled a major client, Yinguangxia, to fraudulently exaggerate its earnings in a high-profile scandal resembling the Andersen–Enron events in the US. This involves evaluating whether the reputational damage sustained by partners implicated in the scandal spreads to other partners in the same audit firm. We isolate whether impaired reputation impedes partners who were not (...) complicit in the ZTQ–YGX events from attracting new clients or keeping existing ones. Our evidence implies that the market shares of these partners fell after ZTQ’s collapse, supporting that guiltless partners’ reputations were tarnished. We also find that these partners are less likely to be employed by reputable audit firms. The clients of these partners tend to have lower earnings response coefficients, implying that investors downgrade the perceived quality of their audits. Moreover, compared to a matched sample, the former ZTQ partners tend to charge lower audit fees after the firm’s collapse. Finally, we exploit the unique structure of ZTQ to provide evidence consistent with the prediction that the former partners from the branch that handled the YGX audits experienced worse damage to their reputations. In a setting with minimal auditor discipline stemming from civil litigation, our results lend support to the intuition that partners’ reputation concerns motivate them to protect audit quality by closely monitoring other partners in the firm. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the prevailing state ownership in the Chinese stock market on corporate governance and the financial regulatory system, respectively, as the internal and external monitoring mechanisms to deter corporate fraud and protect investors. In line with the literature that state ownership exaggerates the agency problem, we find that the retained state ownership in privatised firms increases the incidence of regulatory enforcements against fraud. For the state-owned enterprises (SOEs), however, larger state ownership is associated with a (...) lower incidence of enforcement actions. This is attributed to the mutual political affiliation of the fraudulent SOEs and the regulatory commission. A new regulation "Solutions for Listed Firm Checks" promulgated in March 2001 has mitigated this effect by empowering the regulatory commission to increase the severity of regulatory conditions. Our evidence confirms the improvement in the regulatory environment and investor protection in the Chinese stock market brought about by the regulatory reform and development. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to evaluate auditors’ perceived responsibility for fraud detection. Auditors play a critical role in managing fraud risk within organizations. Although professional standards and guidance prescribe responsibility in the area, little is known about auditors’ sense of responsibility for fraud detection, the factors affecting perceived responsibility, and how responsibility affects auditor performance. We use the triangle model of responsibility as a theoretical basis for examining responsibility and the effects of accountability, fraud type, and auditor type (...) on auditors’ perceived fraud detection responsibility. We also test how perceived responsibility affects auditor brainstorming performance given the importance of brainstorming in audits. A sample of 878 auditors participated in an experiment with accountability pressure and fraud type manipulated randomly between subjects. As predicted, accountable auditors report higher detection responsibility than anonymous auditors. We also find a significant fraud type × auditor type interaction with external auditors perceiving the most detection responsibility for financial statement fraud, while internal auditors report similar detection responsibility for all fraud types. Analysis of the triangle model’s formative links reveals that professional obligation and personal control are significantly related to responsibility, while task clarity is not. Finally, the results indicate that perceived responsibility positively affects the number of detection procedures brainstormed and partially mediates the significant accountability–brainstorming relation. (shrink)

This study adds to the theory of family business management by exploring the effects of family ownership on the corporate misconduct of small firms in the United States. The empirical findings indicate that small family-owned firms are less likely to commit misconduct than small non-family-owned firms. We interpret this finding as family firms aiming to achieve the trans-generational succession of moral capital. Further investigation shows a nonlinear family-ownership–misconduct relationship. A negative relationship between them only appears in mature firms. We further (...) show that for relatively mature firms, only family firms with older owners are less likely to commit corporate misconduct. (shrink)

This paper examines the effectiveness of public enforcement by studying the effects of regulatory intervention to curb tunneling through intercorporate loans in China. Specifically, we explore whether public enforcement efforts in 2006 resulted in less tunneling, and ultimately in increased performance for tunneling firms. We show that tunneling is among the dominant factors increasing the likelihood of becoming blacklisted. We also find that firms’ tunneling mechanisms decreased significantly after the regulatory shock, and that their performance increased significantly compared to non-tunneling (...) firms after the regulatory shock. Finally, we find a positive market reaction to the public announcement of tunneling both for firms that have been blacklisted and other tunneling firms that are not blacklisted. Collectively, these results suggest that public enforcement in the presence of a credible threat succeeds in deterring the effect on tunneling behavior in China. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emerging effect of mutual fund involvement on the agency problem between majority and minority shareholders during the pre-IFRS period in China indicated by earnings informativeness from an ethical perspective. We find that the presence of mutual fund hampers earnings informativeness implying that mutual funds in general, at their early stage in China, are not yet capable of serving as an effective monitor. This finding is in sharp contrast to the role of institutional investors in mature markets (...) as documented in the literature. However, mutual funds affiliated with banks have been found to be effective to improve earnings informativeness of Chinese listed companies, and the impact is more pronounced among those affiliated with joint-equity banks compared to their counterparts affiliated with state-owned banks. (shrink)

We investigate the regulatory sanctions imposed on independent directors for their firms’ financial frauds in China. These regulatory sanctions are prima-facie evidence of significant lapses in business ethics. During the period 2003–2010, 302-person-time independent directors were penalized by the regulator, and the two stock exchanges. We find that the independent directors with accounting experiences are more likely to be penalized by the CSRC, though they do not suffer more severe penalties than do the other sanctioned independent directors. We also find (...) that independent directors suffer less severe penalties than do the insider directors. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the sanctions on independent directors are tied to their assumed ethical and legal responsibilities. Following a regulatory sanction, penalized independent directors experience a significant decline in the number of other board seats held. However, they can gain board seats in better quality firms. We find that interlocked firms that share penalized independent directors with the fraud firm do not suffer from a valuation decline. Overall, our results suggest that regulatory sanctions have not triggered further sanctions on the penalized directors in the labor market but they have, instead, created a disincentive for these directors to serve on the company boards of high-risk firms. (shrink)

This study examines whether sanctions imposed by the China Securities Regulatory Commission against individual auditors result in greater auditor conservatism. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we find that clients of sanctioned individual auditors have lower discretionary accruals in the post-sanction period than in the pre-sanction period when compared to a matched control group of clients audited by individual auditors who were not sanctioned. Our findings suggest that sanctions imposed by the CSRC on individual auditors can lead to improvements in audit (...) quality by increasing the conservatism of the sanctioned auditors. That is, individual auditors are more likely to resist their clients’ income-increasing accounting manipulations after being sanctioned by the CSRC. (shrink)

Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) requirements and expectations of gendered verbal and nonverbal communication styles as well as appearance. We move on to address the impact of family on corporate leadership opportunities and success, discussing the asymmetrical evaluation of an individual’s potential, authority, and competence based on gender stereotypes of familial obligations and expectations. Finally, we address how gender impacts access to networking and sponsorship opportunities and the long-term effects of systematic limitations on women’s inclusion in the upper echelons of corporate leadership. We conclude with a summary of the questions and issues raised by our discussion and direct individuals to consider how different ethical systems and moral requirements might influence their interpretations of gender and leadership in the corporate workplace. (shrink)

We examine the dynamics between enforcement actions and the responses from both the board of directors and supervisory boards amid China's governance reform. Rather than examining determinants of fraudulent activities, we investigate, after enforcement actions are imposed, whether the board of directors and supervisory boards react differently, and whether their different reactions play a role in preventing future occurrences of frauds. We find that both boards react to enforcement actions, but only the responses from the board of directors help us (...) curb future enforcements under certain circumstances. The supervisory board fails to play any role in preventing future enforcements, even though it is one of the two monitoring mechanisms in the listed companies. Policy implications are discussed. (shrink)