Do goodwill impairments affect audit opinions? Evidence from China

There has been a steady growth of goodwill impairments in the Chinese stock market since the adoption of the impairment approach in accounting. The influence of goodwill impairments on a firm’s financial position and profitability give reason to doubt its current and future performance. We examine whether auditors, as a crucial external monitor, identify the information risks of goodwill impairments and express their concerns about financial reporting quality in their audit opinions. Using a sample of firms listed on China’s A-share market from 2007 to 2017, we test the association between goodwill impairments and the type of audit opinion received in the same financial period. Our findings are as follows. First, the probability of receiving a modified opinion increases with the amount of goodwill impairments. Second, the positive association between goodwill impairments and modified audit opinions is driven primarily by earnings management risks. Third, this positive association is more salient when auditors are industry experts and there is no auditor–client mismatch. Fourth, auditors are more sensitive to the amount of goodwill impairments than to their mere existence. Overall, we document that auditors perceive goodwill impairments as a signal of information risks and communicate their concerns to investors to avoid litigation.     

The structure of information release and the factor structure of returns

We model how firms releasing information on different dates causes the CAPM to fail, requiring an additional factor based on the information structure to price assets. We exemplify this mechanism’s empirical relevance using quarterly earnings announcements, which cluster across months along size and book-to-market. Seventy percent of the alpha reduction from including SMB and HML occurs in the four main earnings announcement months. The information structure factor accounts for all of SMB and HML’s seasonal alpha reduction and one third of their overall alpha reduction. Controlling for size and book-to-market, exposures to SMB and HML vary with firms’ earnings announcement month.     

Relative-to-rival corporate philanthropy,product market competitiveness,and stakeholders

Unlike most of the literature that examines the relationship between corporate philanthropy and financial performance, this study investigates the mechanisms through which corporate socially responsible behaviors produce financial outcomes. We propose that corporate philanthropy improves corporate competitiveness by eliciting positive responses from stakeholders, who assess a firm’s philanthropic contribution in relation to its rivals to determine what level of support they wish to provide to the firm. We predict that a firm’s philanthropy relative to its rivals has a positive effect on its product market competitiveness, and that this positive effect is moderated by three conditions that influence stakeholder response: stakeholder attention to philanthropy, its perceived legitimacy, and expectations of corporate giving. Our predictions are generally supported by our analyses. Overall, this paper shows that strategic philanthropy has a quantitative dimension, and firms obtain the market competitiveness associated with corporate philanthropy by integrating their rivals’ positions into their decision making.     

Uncertainty,Control, and Karl Polanyi’s Protective Response

Post-Keynesian institutionalist economists like Wallace Peterson and John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that the impact of uncertainty on economic wellbeing depends in part on the degree of control people have over the sources and consequences of it. Given the inability of government and other large institutions to reduce uncertainty or to provide citizens with the ability to manage it, mediating structures are considered as an alternative means of promoting economic security. The article concludes by describing and evaluating several of these alternatives.     

我国入境旅游发展现状、趋势预测及策略分析

通过对1997—2006年我国旅游服务贸易出口国际市场占有率指数、旅游服务贸易竞争优势指数和显示性比较优势指数的比较，可以看出我国旅游服务贸易国际竞争力尚不强。结合1978—2007我国历年入境旅游人次和外汇收入数据，通过建立时间序列模型，可以对未来五年我国入境旅游发展趋势进行预测。建议根据我国入境旅游消费结构特征，采用从宏观上实行差异化引导等策略。     

What Prompts the People＇s Bank of China to Change Its Monetary Policy Stance？ Evidence from a Discrete Choice Model

In the present paper, we model the policy stance of the People＇s Bank of China （PBC） as a latent variable, and the discrete changes in the reserve requirement ratio, policy interest rates, and the scale of open market operations are taken as signals of movement of this latent variable. We run a discrete choice regression that relates these observed indicators of policy stance to major trends of macroeconomic and financial developments, which are represented by common factors extracted from a large number of variables. The predicted value of the estimated model can then be interpreted as the implicit policy stance of the PBC. In a second step, we estimate how much of the variation in the PBC＇ s implicit stance can be explained by measures of its policy objectives on inflation, growth and financial stability. We find that deviations of CPI inflation from an implicit target and deviations of broad money growth from the announced targets, but not output gaps, figure significantly in the PBC＇s policy changes.     

From rationality to hyperreality: paradigm poker

This paper, following McGoun's (1997) seminal article comparing the economy of financial securities to a hyperreal poker game, argues that finance and accounting researchers should take the “linguistic turn” that has rejuvenated theory and research in many, if not most, of the social science and humanities in recent decades. In general terms, this means following Ludwig Wittgenstein's language game paradigm rather than Karl Popper's scientific deductive hypothesis testing methodology. The paper illustrates this by drawing on some of Jean Baudrillard's' ideas, particularly his concept of hyperreality and his phases of the image theoretic.The paper presents a poststructuralist genealogical analysis of the radical ruptures and reformulation of the meaning attributed to the accounting sign of earnings over the feudal, counterfeit, production, and simulation eras. It concludes that, as with many other signs in contemporary society, the earnings sign no longer has any relationship with, nor does it any longer refer to, any real or intrinsic profit but instead floats ungrounded in today's financial economy.The paper recommends that researchers in finance and accounting adopt paradigms from literary theory, semiotics, linguistics, and semiology rather than continue to rely on economics-based theory, which has lost its power for explaining and predicting happenings in today's financial economy of self-referencing models and images.     

Stock price reactions to earnings announcements: evidence from Chinese markets

We examine the stock price reactions to changes in earnings per share (EPS) in the Chinese stock markets. We find that domestic A-share investors do not correctly anticipate the changes in earnings and fail to adjust new earnngs information quickly, but international B-share investors can predict earnings changes better than A-share investors. As a result, abnormal returns (ARs) can be obtained by trading on the earnings information, but for A shares only. An explanation is that most A-share holders are individuals with short-term investment horizon while most B-share holders are large institutions that trade on more detailed and accurate financial information not immediately available to A-share holders.     

Independent Movement or Government Subcontractor? – Strategic Responses of Voluntary Organizations to Institutional Processes

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors that can explain differing responses of voluntary organizations to the pressure of homogenization that follows from interaction with public authorities. The paper is theoretically based on institutional organization theory and resource dependence theory, and empirically on research on voluntary organizations in the social sector. It is asserted that the following factors may explain voluntary organizations' ability to maintain autonomous in relation to public organizations: the characteristics of the organizational field, the focal organization's relations to the dominating organization in the field, organization characteristics and intra–organizational processes and strategies.     

The effect of exchange rate changes on trade balances in the short and long run

Using generalized impulse response functions, this study tests for the trade J‐curve for three transitional central European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland – in their bilateral trade with respect to Germany. Our findings suggest that for each country there are some characteristics associated with a J‐curve effect: after a (real or nominal) depreciation the export‐to‐import ratio briefly drops to below its initial value within a few months and then rises to a long run equilibrium value higher than the initial one.