Effects of Ethnic Identity on Perceived Advertisers’ Motives in Values Advocacy Advertising

The current study examined Asian American consumers’ responses to values advocacy advertising through the interaction of levels of ethnic identification (weak or strong Asian ethnic identification) and culturally embedded ads (low and high in Asian/White culturally embedded ads) in evaluating altruistic motives of advertisers and purchase intention through an experimental design. The findings suggest that low Asian ethnic identifiers may identify with the advertiser employing Asian spokespersons with Asian cultural cues and in turn, perceive that the advertisers advocate social causes with altruistic motives. However, they did not feel congruent with the advertisers utilizing values advocacy ads with low Asian cultural cues (only featuring Asian spokespersons) more than with low/high White cultural cues (featuring White spokespersons with and without White cultural cues).The findings were discussed based on ethnic schema and attribution theory. Further, the present study discusses how Asian American consumers view ads through their different lenses toward meanings of race and culture based on their different levels of ethnic identification.     

Quality of Financial Statements and Tenure of Statement-Related Personnel

This study investigates the association between quality of financial statements and tenure of statement-related personnel. First, we examined whether there is still a significant association between financial statement quality and the tenure of audit partners who are responsible for the quality assurance of financial statements after the implementation of mandatory audit partner rotation. We addressed this issue by using a sample of Taiwanese companies, with which no significant association between audit partner tenure and the magnitude of discretionary accruals （DA）, a common proxy for financial statement quality, was found. Second, we investigated whether an association exists between the financial statement quality and the tenure of management who is responsible for the preparation of financial statements. We also addressed this issue by using Taiwanese data and found a significant association between management tenure （MT） and the magnitude of DA. Our findings provide evidence that audit partner tenure would neither improve nor deteriorate the quality assurance of a financial statement, when there is a mandatory audit partner rotation after a fixed period of time. Whereas how MT affects financial statement quality after the enactment of the mandatory audit partner rotation is dependent on the management position. Increasing tenure of chief executive officer （CEO） and chief financial officer （CFO） will enhance and hinder financial statement quality respectively. In the end, we found a significant interaction of tenure between auditor and CFO. This result implies that the downward bias of CFO on the financial statement preparation can be mitigated by auditors with increasing tenure.