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This paper examines the relationship between accounting information quality and capital investment choice from the perspective of accounting information’s governance function. Measuring capital investment choice as the correlation of growth of operating income between company and industry, this paper investigates whether and to what extent companies focus on their core business. The results show that the higher the quality of publicly listed firms’ accounting information, the stronger that correlation, particularly when the corporate governance of the listed company is poor. The findings imply that accounting information quality can thus optimize the capital investment choice, which complements and strengthens the functioning of corporate governance. Hence, regulators should pay more attention to the market’s power to supervise the behavior of listed firms, improve the governance functions of accounting information and increase the efficiency of capital allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using China’s A-share listed firms from 2007 to 2011, this paper empirically tests how media governance affects firms’ levels of overinvestment and whether external supervision and informal institutional mechanisms reduce these levels. We find that media governance and overinvestment are significantly negatively related. When firms are located in a district with a stronger media governance environment their levels of overinvestment are lower, indicating that media governance significantly restricts overinvestment behavior. When internal corporate governance efficiency is low, the negative relationship between the media environment and overinvestment behavior is significantly enhanced, indicating that when internal governance or formal systems have reduced efficacy, an important complementary role is played by external supervision and the informal institutional environment. After considering endogeneity and different measures of overinvestment and other related variables, the conclusions remain unchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The severe haze pollution brought about by China's extensive economic growth has attracted widespread attention from the academia and the international community. Based on the streaming data of the air quality index (AQI), PM2.5, and PM10 from 370 cities in China, this paper uses heatmaps to characterize the haze pollution governance of Chinese cities. Then, the meta-frontier efficiency, group frontier efficiency, and inefficiency under meta-frontier of the haze pollution governance of 101 key cities in China are measured using a directional distance function methodology. The sources of inefficiency of haze pollution governance are also analyzed. Although there have been improvements in AQI, PM2.5, and PM10 for most Chinese cities in recent years, the efficiency of haze pollution governance remains relatively low. In particular, the technology gap between the group frontiers and the meta-frontier of haze pollution governance of central China's cities is growing. Also, the inefficiencies of haze pollution governance mainly stem from the inefficient use and management of the resource inputs, rather than the technology gap. Unlabelled Image • Visualizing the haze pollution governance of Chinese cities based on the streaming data • Measurement of meta-frontier and group frontier efficiency of haze pollution governance • The technology gap between the group frontiers and meta-frontier of haze pollution governance • Analysis on the sources of inefficiency of haze pollution governance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]