For a transitional market with a short history like that of Vietnam, corporate governance is a critical area of improvement. The issuance of Circular 121 in 2012 marked an important milestone of corporate governance reform in Vietnam as it includes stricter and more well-defined regulations learned from international best practices. Among them is the requirement that independent directors should make up at least one-third of the board of directors. Although improving financial reporting is not at the heart of Circular 121, (...) this Circular is expected to reduce earnings management through the mandatory requirement of board independence. Using data collected from a sample of 523 non-financial listed firms from 2009 – 2016, this study finds no significant relationship between earnings management and the proportion of independent directors, and Circular 121 has no impact on this relationship. These results are consistent across different regression approaches and various robustness tests, suggesting that board independence and corporate governance reform are not effective tools in mitigating earnings management. (shrink)

Addressing organizational wrongdoing (OW) is crucial for sustainable development. However, there seems to be a lack of structured analysis of this concept within the realm of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). This study aims to map the economic, business, and management literature on OW in relation to the SDGs using metadata extracted from 374 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database for the period 2000–2023. This study highlights the need for a more systematic approach to understanding (...) complex OW phenomena in the sustainable context. It proposes the foundation for a novel conceptual framework and suggests future research directions. Additionally, this study emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary research for developing comprehensive strategies that align organizational practices with sustainable development objectives. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

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)