Consideration of the Role of Guanxi in the Ethical Judgments of Chinese Managers

The importance of personal connections and relationships, or guanxi when doing business with the Chinese is widely acknowledged amongst Western academics and business managers alike. However, aspects of guanxi-related behaviours in the workplace are often misunderstood by Westerners with some going so far as to equate guanxi with forms of corruption. This study extends earlier study of Tan and Snell: 2002, Journal of Business Ethics 41(December), 361–384) in its investigation of the underlying modes of moral reasoning in ethical decisions relating to aspects of guanxi, amongst Hong Kong managers. Managers’ ethical judgements and underlying moral reasoning relating to a series of guanxi-related behaviours were recorded. Content analysis yielded categories that correspond with categories of moral reasoning described in Kohlberg’s (1969, Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand McNally, Chicago, pp. 347–480) model. As hypothesised, it was found that harsher ethical evaluations of guanxi-related behaviours were positively correlated with the stage of moral reasoning. The most common types of reasoning were those corresponding to Kohlberg’s stages four and five which relate to moral reasoning based on law and order, and on reason rather than emotion. Stage 6, concerned with more universalistic approaches to moral reasoning, was utilised considerably less, consistent with popularly held beliefs of the relativistic nature of Chinese ethics.     

Regulatory Sanctions on Independent Directors and Their Consequences to the Director Labor Market: Evidence from China

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 (the China Securities Regulatory Commission—the CSRC), 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.     

Financial Ratio Adjustment: Industry-Wide Effects or Strategic Management

This paper proposes an alternative model for analyzing financial ratio behavior. The model postulates that (1) firms' financial ratios reflect unexpected changes in industry conditions; and (2) managers attempt to move their financial ratio toward the long-run desirable target. This model is employed to assess the relative weights of financial ratio movement that are associated with these two forces. The results show that changes in financial ratios can be due to both external shocks and strategic adjustment by management. The amount of financial ratio smoothing due to strategic adjustment appears to be substantial. Furthermore, the speed of convergence toward the optimal targets varies across industries and firms of different size.     

Searching Stationarity in the Real Exchange Rates: Application of the SUR Estimator

In the foreign exchange market, all national currencies are priced in terms of a common numeraire (usually the U.S. dollar); hence, cross-currency correlation is likely to be important in the empirical investigation of stationarity. Recently, the SUR estimator is employed to account for the effects of cross-currency correlation on the long-run purchasing power parity. Under the SUR framework, this paper examines the joint unit-root null and the ADF-based panel unit root. Data of 30 currencies, spans from 1980 to 1999, are used for empirical analysis and the results are supportive.     

合并纳税制度的国际比较及对中国的启示

发达国家为了提高本国企业的国际竞争力、吸引投资,普遍实施企业集团合并纳税制度。我国现行的合并纳税制度在保持税收公平和税收中性、控制国内税收流失和国有资产流失、国际税收协调等方面存在诸多不完善之处,不仅使中国企业集团在国际市场上处于不利位置,也制约了企业的稳定发展。因此,应通过比较和分析中国与其他国家的企业集团合并纳税制度,找出中国合并纳税制度的不足之处,并加以完善。