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This paper investigates the relationship between cross-shareholding networks and internal controls quality using a sample of all listed A-share firms in China during 2007–2020. We find that the higher the centrality of cross-shareholding networks, the lower the quality of internal control. This finding passes a series of robustness regressions. Moreover, we further test the influence channel of cross-shareholding on the internal control quality and find that the agency cost is the corresponding intermediary. That is, the cross-shareholding network increases the agency cost of the firm and thus reduces the quality of internal control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outsourcing, which has become an important employment strategy, is of increasing interest in both management theory and practice. This paper investigates the determinants of outsourcing from the perspective of CEO overconfidence using manually collected outsourcing data from Chinese A-share listed companies for the period 2012–2020. The empirical results show that firms with overconfident CEOs are more likely to adopt outsourcing strategies, and the asset specificity mitigates the positive effect of CEO overconfidence on outsourcing decisions. Furthermore, we find the moderating effect of asset specificity occurs mainly in private firms rather than SOEs and in large firms rather than small firms. Our results indicate inefficiencies associated with overconfidence should be classified as honest mistakes rather than deliberate actions, and strong corporate governance mechanisms help overconfident CEOs avoid making honest mistakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the enactment of Document No. 18 as a quasi-natural event, we take a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2017 to test the impact of depoliticization on stock price crash risk based on the difference-in-differences (DID) model. Our results show that depoliticization reduces future stock price crash risk more significantly among non-state-owned enterprises. Furthermore, depoliticization can mitigate stock price crash risk through the effects of financing needs, censorship risk and agency cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, it was common for companies to issue assessable stock. With assessable stock, a company's board of directors could request additional payments beyond the initial stock price. Typically, shareholders forfeited their stock ownership if assessments remained unpaid; defaulted shares were sold at auction. This form of securitization became popular in extractive industries, such as gold and silver mining. In this article, I provide a description of its legal history and a detailed case study of large companies with mining claims on the Comstock lode between 1860 and 1877, considered an exemplar of successful mine development with assessable stock. I also examine several hypotheses used to explain the practice of issuing assessable stock, such as limiting agency and information costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By employing the Chinese listed firm's data from 2010 to 2017, this study explores the impact of share pledging on firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Empirical results indicate a negative relationship between share pledging and CSR performance. This effect is robust after using alternative measures and different regression methods, and also consistent after tackling the endogenous issues. Furthermore, we find that risk-taking and agency cost are two possible underlying mechanisms through which share pledging reduces CSR. In addition, CSR reduction caused by share pledging leads to poorer economic performance and lower market value of firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of pay gap on the quality of the internal control. Using state-owned enterprises listed in China from 2012 to 2019 as samples, we find new evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the pay gap and internal control quality, which includes the executives' internal pay gap, external pay gap, and executives-employees pay gap. Furthermore, we also find that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the pay gap and the internal control quality in state-owned enterprises with commercial competition, but we don't find similar results for the samples of state-owned enterprises with specific functions. In addition, we provide evidence that the pay gap not only has a direct impact on internal control quality but also has an indirect impact on internal control quality through agency costs. This study supplements research on internal control quality from the perspective of incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of herding behaviour of Chinese Securities Investment Funds (SIFs) on firm value by taking stock price informativeness and agency cost as intermediary variables. It constructs LSV model to measure herding behaviour of SIFs, and develops logarithmic conversion method of the goodness-of-fit to characterize stock price informativeness. The stepwise regression method is employed for empirical analysis and it is found that: (i) The herding behaviour of SIFs significantly negatively affects the stock price informativeness, and the former is 'intentional herding' that ignores personal private information. (ii) The stock price informativeness is positively related to firm value, while agency cost has a significant negative influence on firm value. (iii) The stock price informativeness and agency cost play significant partial mediating effects between the herding behaviour of SIFs and firm value, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road network requires timely maintenance to keep pavement surface in good condition for reduction of fuel consumption with the limited budget. This study focused on development of pavement preservation strategies in the road network considering multi-objective optimization of agency cost and environmental impact (in terms of CO2 emission). Field data from long-term pavment performance (LTPP) database were used to quantify the impact of pavement preservation treatments (crack seal, chip seal, and thin overlay) on the changes of surface roughness. The emission rate functions of vehicles with respect to speed and pavement surface condition were developed using Motor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) with the updated tire rolling resistance coefficients. The multi-objective optimization problem was solved using the Simulated Constraint Boundary Model (SCBM) method. The final solution was recommended based on the minimized distance from the utopia point to the Pareto front. The results show that the optimization solutions are affected by the available budget, existing pavement condition, truck traffic, and unacceptable level of pavement roughness. For multi-objective optimization of minimizing both agency cost and CO2 emission, the recommended preservation treatments among different segments is a combination of crack seal and thin overlay in most cases. These findings can be used by highway agencies to make road maintenance decisions considering the tradeoff between agency cost and environmental impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From an agency theory perspective, we find the increase of stock liquidity will lead to more dividend payouts. There are two potential channels, the 'outcome hypothesis' (La Porta et al. 2000) and the 'creditors substitute hypothesis' (Brockman and Unlu 2009), through which stock liquidity could increase dividend payouts. We confirm that stock liquidity influences dividend payouts mainly through the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to determine what causes the phenomenon of disappearing dividends, which mostly occurs in stock exchanges in developed and emerging countries. This is the phenomenon of the decreasing probability of issuers to choose to pay dividends (cash, stock, and mixed) rather than not to pay. The results of multinomial logit model show, that size and profitability have a significant positive effect on cash, stock, and mixed dividend decisions. The decision not to pay dividends is influenced by low agency costs, high debt, over-liquidity, and excessive investment opportunities. To overcome this phenomenon, all stakeholders must be able to manage the above cause variables in an integrated manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effect of CEO succession via overall hierarchical jumps on Chinese firm performance and agency cost. It categorizes hierarchical jumps into low, medium and high level. The study reveals through panel regression analysis that the CEOs appointed via medium hierarchical jumps substantially enhance firm performance. Conversely, the successors appointed through low and high hierarchical jumps have relatively no effect on firm profitability. Conclusively, this research evaluates that the aged CEOs should be preferred among the CEOs successors via high hierarchical jumps, which have mitigated the agency problem decisively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the constraints on carbon emissions due to their impact on global warming, carbon disclosure has become an important way to deliver signals to the market. We examine the benefits associated with carbon disclosure from the standpoint of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for China’s manufacturing industries from 2010 to 2014. We divide corporations into heavily polluting and non-heavily polluting groups in order to control the industry factor. Based on the Principal-Agent Theory, we empirically test the relationship between carbon disclosure and financial transparency, and we evaluate the effect of carbon disclosure on agency costs and operations. Our results highlight that carbon disclosure is negatively associated with agency costs. However, we do not find enough evidence to prove what role financial transparency plays in the relationship between carbon disclosure and agency cost. Therefore, the influence of financial transparency as a mechanism is not yet clear. This study provides a way to look at the intentions of firms that disclose carbon information, and it also enhances the literature on carbon disclosure and agency costs in China based on Chinese data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the determinants of corporate giving (CG) in Taiwan according to agency cost (AC) and value enhancement (VE) theories. Panel regression test results reveal several new and interesting pieces of evidence. First, VE determinants outweigh AC determinants in explainingCGthere. Second, the positive link between the currentCGratio (CGR) and the laggedCGR(CGR(-1)) suggests the consistent nature ofCG. Third, after the global financial crisis in 2008, the influence of debt leverage onCGRvanished, but the impact of managerial insiders’ shareholdings onCGRbecame significant. Last, the influences of VE determinants andCGR(-1) onCGRremain during both pre-crisis and post-crisis periods. Moreover, after the crisis,CGwas still motivated to create current value for shareholders, and was apparently used as a business strategy to signal companies’ financial or managerial stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study inter-firm credit (also known as trade credit (TC) or the delayed payment a supplier allows its downstream customer on a product sale) with an emphasis on its unique features in Korea. It is the prominence of chaebol-affiliated firms in the Korean economy that makes Korea unique because chaebol firms are linked together by common ownership and thus distort the assumption common to all theories of TC that the input supplier is independent from its customer. We find several aspects of TC use by chaebols. First, viewed as input purchasers, these firms take more TC (the chaebol effect). The amount of TC taken is positively related to purchases from other chaebol affiliates (the affiliate effect), and with the degree of the chairman's ownership-control disparity (the ownership multiplier effect). Also TC as proportion of short-term debt increases significantly after profit growth (the profit effect). Furthermore, chaebol members give less TC although this is strongly correlated with transactions with affiliates. We suggest a unifying interpretation of these patterns based on agency cost: TC, by substituting for external financing and reducing monitoring by outsiders, presents controlling minority owners the opportunity to misuse their greater control for their own benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we revisit the theoretical motives of corporate cash holdings while concentrating on the effect of political connections. In particular, we postulate two competing hypotheses for the effects that political connections can have on cash holdings: ‘substitution effect hypothesis’ and ‘complementary effect hypothesis’. Using the data on Pakistani firms over the period 2002–2010, we find that connected firms hold significantly larger cash reserves than their non-connected counterparts, thus confirming the ‘complementary hypothesis’, which suggests that agency problems lead connected firms to accumulate large amount of cash. Further, this effect is found to be more pronounced in dictatorial as opposed to democratic regimes indicating the presence of higher degrees of political patronage in that period. Finally, we also find differences in the complementary effect based on firm characteristics. Our results suggest that the firm size and leverage have increasing effects on the cash holdings of connected firms, contrary to the mainstream literature standpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of underwriter and top management team prestige have been shown to signal the underlying quality of a company in an initial public offering (IPO). We extend these measures to include the entire coalition (i.e., managers, board, venture capitalists (VCs), underwriters, auditors, and both sets of lawyers) and surprisingly find VCs to have the highest explanatory power in predicting IPO outcomes (completion or withdrawal). Companies with deep management and a separation of the CEO/chair role are more likely to hire prestigious underwriters and successfully complete IPOs. Although companies with prestigious VCs are more likely to have prestigious underwriters, companies with VC-backing are more likely to withdraw the offering, likely to take advantage of better market opportunities. Companies with prestigious underwriters are more likely to have successful IPOs, although we show that the capabilities of underwriters and other intermediaries are more likely driven by activity level (i.e., market share), rather than prestige in affecting IPO outcome. Using an agency framework, we test how signals of monitoring, information asymmetry, bonding, and incentive alignment affect IPO outcomes and show that signals of lower agency costs are associated with a greater likelihood of IPO completion. Finally, because many of these measures are shown to endogenously affect IPO completion, a selection bias may exist in previous IPO studies as up to 70% of IPOs filed annually are not completed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the relationship between managers' private profit and agency cost using dynamic modelling methods. We conclude that the agency cost is a concave function of the managers' private profit and that the managers' private profit will lead to more investment cash outflow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]