When Auditors Say ‘No,’ Does the Market Listen?

Previous research on whether the market responds to auditors’ opinions has provided mixed results. We revisit this issue in China, where individual investors who are more likely to neglect value-relevant information dominate the stock market. In addition to going concern opinions (GCOs), China permits modified audit opinions (MAOs) on violations of accounting standards or disclosure rules (GAAP/DISC MAOs), providing an opportunity not available in the literature to enrich the study of audit-opinion pricing. We find that, ceteris paribus, MAO recipients underperform in the future and have a higher incidence of adverse outcomes such as misreporting and stock delisting, and the market reacts negatively to MAOs during the short window around MAO disclosure. Importantly, MAO disclosure is not followed by negative long-term stock returns, suggesting stock price adjustments to MAOs are speedy and unbiased. These findings hold for both GCOs and GAAP/DISC MAOs. Together, our findings support the informativeness of audit opinions and cast doubt on the argument that investors inefficiently price audit opinions due to information-processing bias.     

Debt Covenant Restriction,Financial Misreporting,and Auditor Monitoring*

Theory suggests that financial report-based debt covenants engender incentives for the manager to relax covenant constraints through accounting choices in order to avoid costly covenant violations. Prior studies directly testing this hypothesis in the context of financial misreporting fail to find consistent evidence. Using a more refined measure of debt covenant restriction, we find that debt covenant restriction is positively associated with the probability of financial statement misstatements. This positive association is driven by performance covenants rather than capital covenants and is more consistent with the manager striving to avoid a “false-positive” violation than to delay the violation. Our results also imply that managers resort to both income-increasing and non–income-increasing misreporting to relieve covenant constraints and rely more on the latter when faced with greater earnings management constraints. Additionally, the auditor charges higher audit fees to firms with more binding covenants even outside the violation state, and audit fees increase with constraints relative to both performance and capital covenants, reflecting greater financial reporting risk and bankruptcy risk, respectively. Within capital covenants, we find some evidence of even higher audit fees for tighter intangible-inclusive versus intangible-exclusive capital covenants. Lastly, our evidence suggests that the positive association between covenant constraints and misreporting is attenuated when the auditor has more experience with debt covenants, has greater bargaining power over the client, or faces greater litigation risk.     

HAZOP在地下非煤矿山人员伤亡事故中的应用探讨

危险与可操作性研究(HAZOP)能够在化工企业成功运用,同样也可以在矿业工程领域得到很好的应用。HAZOP在非煤地下矿山人员伤亡事故中的应用,通过对事故发生、初期事故处理、撤离工作区、撤离矿井四个节点的分析,找出井下人员伤亡事故的原因并加以控制。     

Regional disparity of embedded carbon footprint and its sources in China: a consumption perspective

Carbon emission reduction could be achieved through extensive cooperation between relevant groups such as businesses, governments and consumers. Generally, carbon emissions stem from consumer behaviour. To tackle the increasingly serious energy crisis and climate change in China, it is thus vital to control carbon emissions generated by the country's urban consumers. From a consumption perspective, we utilize a self-organizing feature map model to analyse the spatial differentiation of per capita embedded carbon footprint (ECF) in urban China. We found that the spatial differentiation is significant with the per capita ECF of the east coastal area at a high level and that per capita disposable income is the key factor affecting ECF. Based on these findings, potential business opportunities to develop low-carbon products are discussed.     

再论我国公司法人格否认制度

10年前的2005年我国在新颁布的《公司法》中大胆的吸收了西方公司法中的一项重要制度，即公司法人格否认制度。该制度的产生是为了规避在股东有限责任的背景下股东滥用有限责任从而损害债权人的利益的问题。我国企业在进行了公司制的改革后，也同样存在着股东可能滥用有限责任的问题，因此在公司法中规定法人格否认是必须的。但是，从10来的司法实践来看，公司法人格否认制度还没有能够完全发挥其限制股东滥用有限责任，保护无辜债权人的立法目的。本文针对在司法实践中存在的问题，在理论上提出一些建议，以求进一步完善公司法人格否认制度。     

Opportunities to reduce road traffic injury: new insights from the study of urban areas

Abstract

Over the past four decades considerable efforts have been taken to mitigate the growing burden of road injury. With increasing urbanisation along with global mobility that demands not only safe but equitable, efficient and clean (reduced carbon footprint) transport, the responses to dealing with the burgeoning road traffic injury in low- and middle-income countries has become increasingly complex. In this paper, we apply unique methods to identify important strategies that could be implemented to reduce road traffic injury in the Asia-Pacific region; a region comprising large middle-income countries (China and India) that are currently in the throes of rapid motorisation. Using a convolutional neural network approach, we clustered countries containing a total of 1632 cities from around the world into groups based on urban characteristics related to road and public transport infrastructure. We then analysed 20 countries (containing 689 cities) from the Asia-Pacific region and assessed the global burden of disease attributed to road traffic injury and these various urban characteristics. This study demonstrates the utility of employing image recognition methods to discover new insights that afford urban and transport planning opportunities to mitigate road traffic injury at a regional and global scale.     

Productivity change in the privatized water sector in China (1999–2006)

Journal of Productivity Analysis - We estimate the effects of the Chinese water sector’s privatization reforms based on firm-level panel data from 1999 to 2006. By applying a translog...