政府环境审计能够促进企业绿色创新吗

手工整理国家审计署层面的政府环境审计数据,以 2007—2019 年沪深 A 股上市公司为研究对象,使用多期双重差分法探讨了政府环境审计对企业绿色创新的影响。研究发现,政府环境审计能够显著促进企业绿色创新,且这一促进作用在媒体监督较强时更显著。分析影响机制发现,政府环境审计主要通过环境规制机制和环保补贴机制来促进企业绿色创新,其中环境规制机制表现为环境处罚力度提高和环境税收水平提升,环保补贴机制表现为环保补贴力度提高。检验经济后果发现,政府环境审计视角下的企业绿色创新不仅能够提高其环境绩效,表现出环境有效性,更能够提高其经济绩效和经济效率,表现出经济有效性。研究结论丰富了政府环境审计的有效性研究和企业绿色创新的制度因素研究,为审计部门完善政府环境审计制度以推进绿色创新经济发展提供了决策参考。     

The Economic Consequences of Perk Disclosure

In December 2006, the SEC issued new rules requiring enhanced disclosure by public U.S. firms of perquisites granted to their executives. The rules applied to perquisites granted in fiscal year 2006 and thereafter. Because the rules were implemented quickly, the perks disclosed for 2006 reflect the arrangements firms made under prior disclosure rules: firms could not revise perks to reflect the new rules until 2007. For firms that disclose for the first time in 2006, we predict and find that perks decrease in 2007, reflecting both the costs of increased disclosure and enhanced monitoring. This decrease in perks is offset by higher levels of non‐perk compensation, however. We also predict and find that the effect of perk disclosure by formerly non‐disclosing firms in 2006 leads to higher perks in 2007 for firms that were disclosing perks prior to the rule change.     

基于现代审计风险模型的国企高管经济责任审计风险及其防范

随着中办、国办关于国企主要领导经济责任审计新规的发布,国企高管经济责任审计已经进入了新的阶段。由于经济责任审计固有的特征,在国企高管经济责任审计的过程中,必然存在各种不确定性所导致的审计风险。在对国企经济责任审计风险特征分析基础上,建立了国企高管经济责任审计风险的模型,指出了国企高管经济责任审计不但具有传统意义上的重大错报风险×检查风险,也存在其特有的评价风险和处理处罚风险。在对经济责任审计的各种风险进行分析的基础上,最后提出了防范国企高管经济责任审计风险的措施。     

公众参与环境审计的意愿与参与方式的调查研究——以长春市为例

由于环境审计监督对象的特殊性,社会公众作为资源环境的所有者,是当之无愧的环境线索发现主体。文章通过对长春市333位社会公众发放调查问卷,对社会公众参与环境审计的意愿及方式进行了描述性统计,了解到目前社会公众参与环境审计意愿较强,但较多出自于对"小我"利益的关注,缺少监督环境审计的大局观与责任感;由于公众对环境审计了解不够、对参与环境审计顾虑较多以及政府开设的环境审计渠道不畅等原因的存在,目前社会公众未能很好地参与环境审计监督中来。政府应当通过良好的制度设计、加强政策宣传、提升公共管理能力、多样化参与平台等方式提高公众参与环境审计的信心与可行性,以恰当履行社会公众作为环境线索发现主体的职能,提高公共受托责任视角下中国环境审计的免疫力。     

Economic Consequences of IFRS Adoption: The Role of Changes in Disclosure Quality*

This study adopts a two‐step approach to highlight the disclosure quality channel that drives economic consequences of IFRS adoption. This approach helps address the identification challenge noted by prior research and offers direct evidence on the role of disclosure quality. In the first step, we document the impact of the IFRS mandate on changes in disclosure quality proxied by the granularity of line item disclosure in financial statements. We find that IFRS‐adopting firms provide more disaggregated information upon IFRS adoption, such as more granular disclosure of intangible assets and long‐term investments on the balance sheet and greater disaggregation of depreciation, amortization, and nonoperating income items on the income statement. In the second step, we link the observed disclosure changes to the benefits and costs of IFRS adoption. We show that greater disaggregated information due to IFRS adoption enhances market liquidity and decreases information asymmetry, but does not affect audit fees differentially. Our evidence has implications for standard setters as they evaluate cost‐benefit trade‐offs when considering disclosure changes in the future.     

Who Benefits from Inconsistent Multinational Tax Transfer‐Pricing Rules?*

This paper uses a strategic tax compliance model to examine taxpayer reporting and tax authority audit strategies in an international setting with two tax authorities. The setting features both information asymmetry between the taxpayer and the tax authorities and inconsistent tax transfer‐pricing rules. The latter creates the possibility of each country trying to tax the same income. We study the effect of the probability of transfer‐price rule inconsistency on the strategies and payoffs of the taxpayer and the tax authorities. We find that an increase in the probability of transfer‐price rule inconsistency induces more aggressive auditing by governments. It therefore deters taxpayers from shifting income to the country with the lower tax rate in situations in which the transfer‐pricing rules are consistent, and can either increase or decrease the income reported to the low‐tax‐rate country in cases in which the transfer‐pricing rules are inconsistent. We find that an increase in transfer‐price rule inconsistency could either increase or decrease the taxpayer's expected tax liability and could either increase or decrease the deadweight loss from auditing. Our results call into question the conventional wisdom that the prospect of double taxation due to transfer‐price rule inconsistency increases a firm's expected tax liability and governments' expected audit costs.     

What Blows in with the Wind?

The shift toward renewable forms of energy for electricity generation in the electricity generation industry has clear implications for the spatial distribution of generating plant. Traditional forms of generation are typically located close to the load or population centers, while wind‐ and solar‐powered generation must be located where the energy source is found. In the case of wind, this has meant significant new investment in wind plant in primarily rural areas that have been in secular economic decline. This article investigates the localized economic impacts of the rapid increase in wind power capacity at the county level in Texas. Unlike input‐output impact analysis that relies primarily on levels of inputs to estimate gross impacts, we use traditional econometric methods to estimate net localized impacts in terms of employment, personal income, property tax base, and key public school expenditure levels. While we find evidence that both direct and indirect employment impacts are modest, significant increases in per capita income accompany wind power development. County and school property tax rolls also realize important benefits from the local siting of utility scale wind power, although peculiarities in Texas school funding shift localized property tax benefits to the state.     

Lessons from the 2008 Financial Crisis: Policy Responses to External Shocks in Uruguay

The 2008 global economic crisis affected the Uruguayan economy through two main channels: collapse in global trade and drop in capital flows. In response to the crisis, the Uruguayan government increased public consumption and investment and expanded social benefits to unemployed workers. We apply a computable general equilibrium model linked to microsimulations to analyze the distributional impacts of these policies and assess their effectiveness. We find that an increase in public investment was the only policy effective in mitigating the negative impact of the crisis on extreme poverty. The other policies reinforced the negative impact of the crisis on the poor. All three policies are costly and have an important impact on macroeconomic variables and the structure of production and export, while they have only slight or negative results on poverty and household income. More focalized policies, such as direct cash transfers, might have better results in terms of cost‐benefit.     

The Sarbanes‐Oxley Act and Exit Strategies of Private Firms

The costs and benefits of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) have been oft‐debated since the inception of the Act. Much of the extant literature has assessed the costs and benefits of SOX to publicly traded companies. We focus on the costs of SOX compliance for private firms wanting to exit the private market via either an acquisition by a public firm or an IPO. Consistent with our predictions we establish two principal findings. First, SOX appears to have shifted the preferences of private firms from going public to exiting the private market via acquisition by a public acquirer. Second, private target deal multiples are increasing in variables that proxy for a private target's level of pre‐acquisition SOX compliance. These findings suggest that SOX‐related costs have both restricted the action space of possible exit strategies for private firms and led to lower deal multiples for those private acquisition targets that are less likely to be SOX compliant prior to acquisition.     

Audit Fee Differential,Audit Effort,and Litigation Risk: An Examination of ADR Firms

Prior studies find that audit fees are higher for cross‐listed firms, and these studies primarily attribute the incremental fees to added litigation costs. In this study, we investigate whether the higher audit fees that foreign firms cross‐listed in the United States pay are also attributable to incremental audit effort associated with U.S. disclosure requirements and a more stringent U.S. auditing environment. By comparing audit fees of foreign cross‐listed firms to U.S. domiciled firms and to non‐cross‐listed foreign firms, we are able to decompose incremental audit fees into portions attributable to added audit effort and to added litigation costs. We find that, on average, foreign firms cross‐listed in the United States pay significantly higher fees than domestic U.S. firms and foreign firms that do not cross‐list. Furthermore, we find that audit effort is almost as important as litigation costs in explaining the higher fees associated with foreign cross‐listed firms; our estimates suggest that between 29 percent and 48 percent of the incremental fees are attributable to incremental audit effort. In addition, the total cross‐listing premium is increasing in the difference between the U.S. auditing regulatory environment and that of the home country of the cross‐listed firm. Our study improves our understanding of the role of audit effort in explaining the added fees charged by auditors when foreign firms cross‐list in the United States.     

我国可持续能源审计的实施框架研究

随着传统能源在全球范围内日益减少,可持续能源在未来各国经济体的发展中都将扮演重要角色.可持续能源审计成为监督、提高可持续能源使用绩效的重要工具.文章结合最高审计机关国际组织(INTOSAI)环境审计工作组发布的《可持续能源审计指南》,探讨了可持续能源审计的审计主题、评价标准、审计程序等内容,根据我国可持续能源及其审计现状,从胜任能力、主题选择、质量控制、业务指导等方面提出了相关建议.     

Does Disclosure Regulation Work? Evidence from International IPO Markets*

This study examines whether IPO disclosure requirements mandated by countries’ securities laws are associated with variation in IPO underpricing in international IPO markets. Our empirical analysis uses a unique sample of 6,025 IPOs from 34 countries over the period from 1995 to 2002. We show for the first time that the stringency of disclosure requirements for IPO prospectuses is negatively associated with the extent of IPO underpricing, after controlling for various country‐ and firm‐level determinants of underpricing. Moreover, we find that the disclosure effect on IPO underpricing is moderated by the extent of a country’s capital market integration. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the view that increased disclosure regulation appears to reduce IPO underpricing and hence the cost of equity, and that institutional factors such as capital market integration play an important role in understanding the economic consequences of disclosure regulation in international IPO markets.     

Private Intermediary Innovation and Market Liquidity: Evidence from the Pink Sheets® Market

In 2007, Pink Sheets LLC assigned each Pink Sheets^® company to a disclosure tier and on its website affixed a colorful graphic to its stock symbol signifying the company's public disclosure level. This unique innovation allows us to investigate the impact of increased salience of disclosure practices on liquidity. Using a difference‐in‐difference design, we find evidence that firms classified into the Current Information category experienced an increase in liquidity while firms classified into the No Information category experienced a decrease in liquidity, both relative to other unclassified over‐the‐counter firms. This suggests that increases in the salience of disclosure practices via assignment to disclosure tiers affect investors’ attention, leading to changes in trading behavior that ultimately translate into liquidity changes. We also provide evidence that some investors anticipated the resulting liquidity changes because stock returns around a key event date leading up to the release of the disclosure tiers are positively associated with subsequent liquidity changes.     

Customer Concentration and Public Disclosure: Evidence from Management Earnings and Sales Forecasts

This study examines the association between customer base concentration and corporate public disclosure policy. When the customer base is more concentrated, large customers face lower costs of accessing the supplier firm's private information, reducing customers' overall demand for the supplier's public information, suggesting a negative association between customer concentration and the amount of public disclosure. Alternatively, large customers have greater bargaining power and may demand that the supplier firm provide more public disclosures. Consistent with customer concentration facilitating private information flow from the supplier to customers, we find that the frequencies of management earnings and sales forecasts are negatively associated with customer concentration among firms with major corporate customers. These associations are stronger when the supplier and customers are engaged in more relationship-specific investments, when customers' private information acquisition costs are lower, and when it is less costly for customers to find another supplier.     

企业社会责任能降低股价同步性吗？——基于强制披露企业社会责任报告的准自然实验

中国2008 年沪深证券交易所强制披露社会责任报告政策为笔者研究其政策效应提供了准 自然实验,文章以2006-2011 年中国A 股上市公司为样本,分别从信息不对称和代理成本两条路 径研究强制披露社会责任报告对股价同步性的影响。运用PSM-DID 双重差分模型研究发现: 强制 披露社会责任报告与股价同步性呈现显著负相关关系,说明强制披露社会责任报告有助于降低股 价同步性,在通过安慰剂实验、变量替换和平行效应检验等稳健性检验后,以上结论仍成立。对 影响路径的分析发现,强制披露社会责任报告通过降低信息不对称和代理成本影响未来股价同步 性。     

风险导向审计在公共工程绩效审计中的应用

近年来,我国投入大量资金建设社会公共工程,以期保证国计民生和提高人民群众生活水平。加强对公共工程的绩效审计是加强公共事业监督的重要举措。尝试从公共工程的特点出发,阐述将现代风险导向审计方法引入公共工程绩效审计的思路。     

The effectiveness and costs of nonpharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19 containment: A border discontinuous difference-in-difference approach

We examine the effectiveness and costs of alternative nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for COVID-19 containment. Using a border discontinuous difference-in-difference approach, we find that the enforcement of rigid NPIs reduces the number of new COVID-19 cases by 10.8% in China, comparied with cities with less NPIs. Among the three NPIs, contact tracing is much more effective than the other two NPIs, namely, public information provision and social distancing. The connections of mayors to the upper-level politicians reinforce the city's implementation of rigid NPIs. These networks also serve as an informal signaling channel to the neighboring cities, encouraging the adjacent cities to impose strict NPIs to curb the spread of COVID-19. We further estimate the long-term costs of the NPIs – a net present value of 2153 yuan per child in the human capital loss attributed to more prolonged school closure alone.     

消费者教育在市场促销中的运用

随着干部人事制度改革的深化和党风廉政建设的加强 ,经济责任审计正凸现其重要作用。本文就如何搞好经济责任审计阐述了应该遵循的有关原则———依法审计原则、协调配合原则、经济为主原则、客观公正原则、“先审后离”原则等。     

U.S. Auditors' Perceptions of the PCAOB Inspection Process: A Behavioral Examination

This study examines U.S. auditors' observations of the PCAOB inspection process, and its impact on their work, in order to understand the current U.S. regulatory audit climate. Using 20 interviews with experienced auditors, we consider behavioral factors (e.g., perceived power of and trust in the PCAOB) that can impact the level and form of auditor compliance according to theory from the slippery slope framework on audit regulation (Kirchler et al. 2008; Dowling et al. 2018). Our participants described an audit climate with a powerful regulator. They reported that their desire to receive “clean” inspection reports has had a substantial impact on audit procedures and quality control. However, our participants do not appear to have high trust in the PCAOB, as they questioned aspects of the inspection process and its expectations. Accordingly, we conclude that U.S. public company auditors operate in an antagonistic environment in which auditors perceive the PCAOB has high coercive power. In other words, they comply due to fear of enforcement rather than agreement with the PCAOB's views on audit quality. Some auditors also indicated that they consider both the costs and benefits of compliance. Theoretical intuition implies that any future increases to perceived costs relative to perceived benefits of compliance could ultimately decrease the PCAOB's coercive power and reduce U.S. auditor compliance. Our findings have implications for regulators and researchers interested in understanding behavioral factors that may influence regulatory compliance.     

The Effect of Competition on Process and Outcome Quality of Hospital Care in the Netherlands

We examine the impact of competition on outcome and process indicators of hospital quality. While earlier literature on the relationship between competition and hospital quality mainly focused on outcome indicators, we argue that the inclusion of process indicators in the analysis can provide supplementary information about the effect of competitive pressure on hospitals’ incentives. In particular, these indicators are less noisy than outcome indicators and are important as a management tool. Our panel dataset covers all Dutch general and academic hospitals in the period 2004–2008, during which the transparency of hospital quality information increased substantially due to the disclosure of hospitals’ quality indicators. We find that competition among hospitals located within the hospital catchment area explains differences in several process indicators, but fails to explain differences in outcome indicators. The results suggest that hospitals facing more competition organize diagnostic processes more efficiently; however, they have more operation cancellations at short notice and more delays of hip fracture injury operations for elderly patients. This suggests that competition affects the allocation of hospital personnel efforts even when outcomes have not been affected.