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This paper exploits the random assignment rule embedded in Chinese education system to investigate the external effect of better-educated parents in a class on students’ academic outcomes. Using a ...

Using a sample of 4195 observations from 19 emerging markets, we investigate how internal corporate governance, external monitoring, and legal and business environment jointly affect a firm’s managerial effectiveness in environmental information transparency in an international setting. The empirical results show that in emerging economies, firms with stronger corporate governance mechanisms tend to adopt an external control strategy in order to mitigate owner-manager agency conflicts. Furthermore, internal corporate governance mechanisms are found to directly increase firm transparency concerning environmental damage and to indirectly do so through external control device. The legal and business environments of countries in which firms operate moderate these relationships.

Using a sample of 8232 firms from 81 countries, we investigate the effect of government ownership on financial constraint and the effect of financial constraint on corporate performance. In addition, we address the moderating role of country-level corruption on those two relationships. Results show that government-owned firms face fewer financial constraints and that firms with fewer financial constraints perform better. Furthermore, we find that the association between government ownership and financial constraint and the association between financial constraint and corporate performance are less pronounced for firms operating in countries with a lower level of corruption.

We investigate how family involvement in the ownership, management, or governance of a business affects its engagement in earnings management both directly and indirectly through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Using a sample of S&P 500 companies, we find that family firms tend to have higher CSR performance, which can help them to maintain legitimacy and preserve socio-emotional wealth. Family firms also engage in less accrual-based earnings management, although they are indistinguishable from non-family firms in terms of real earnings management. In contrast to previous research, we find that CSR performance is not significantly associated with either accrual-based or real earnings management behavior after we account for the effect of family involvement. Our findings suggest that the association between CSR performance and family involvement is the primary driver of the relation between CSR performance and earnings management documented in previous research.

Using a sample of 5486 observations from 25 countries between 2009 and 2013, we investigate the signaling effects of anti-misconduct policies on market valuation, and address the roles played by internal corporate governance mechanisms and external institutional environments. The results show that effective corporate governance mechanisms lead to higher-quality anti-misconduct policies. Furthermore, we find that although anti-misconduct policies alone do not affect market valuation in general, they do improve market valuation in countries with stronger legal and regulatory environments.

Using a sample of politically affiliated private firms in China, we explore the relation between corporate financial distress and earnings management. We further examine the joint moderating effects of political affiliation and regional development on this relation. The findings suggest that financially distressed firms engage more in reporting small positive earnings relative to financially healthy firms. In addition, political affiliation weakens the association between financial distress and small positive earnings management. A three-way interaction analysis indicates that the moderating effect of political affiliation is influenced by regional development.

This paper sheds light on the incongruent findings concerning the relationship between family involvement and firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). While prior studies have mainly taken the perspective of families’ socioemotional wealth preservation, we approach this relationship from the perspective of behavioral agency theory, highlighting the important role played by CEOs’ family memberships. Specifically, we posit that family firms are more likely to invest in CSR when their CEOs are members of the controlling families. Furthermore, we examine how family firms can employ long-term incentives to encourage non-family CEOs to act in the interests of the controlling families to preserve SEW and thus enhancing family firms’ CSR performance. We tested our hypotheses using hand-collected data of family firms included in the S&P 500 index, in the period of 2003–2010. The empirical findings support our hypotheses that (a) family firms with family members as the CEOs have better CSR performance and (b) family firms tend to provide a high level of long-term incentives to non-family than family CEOs. In addition, long-term incentives strongly motivate CEOs to improve firms’ CSR performance, regardless of their family memberships.

Using a sample consisting of 1,160,801 observations of privately held firms, we explore the relationship between earnings quality and privately held firms’ debt financing, access to debt, and cost of debt, as well as the moderating effects of provincial-level economic development on this relationship. Our findings indicate that better earnings quality increases private firms’ access to debt financing and lowers their cost of debt. The empirical results also show that these effects are more pronounced in less developed provinces.

Building upon recent research which indicates that debt markets rather than equity markets shape financial reporting, this study examines how conditionally conservative financial reporting relates to the yield spread of corporate bond issues. Our findings suggest that the debt contract efficiency/information costs view of conditional conservatism, documented in private debt contracts, does not generalize to public debt contracts. Instead, a debt contract renegotiation costs perspective seems to better capture the dynamics of the public debt markets, with conditionally conservative reporting being associated with higher yield spread of corporate bond issues. Additional subsample test results indicate that the association between conditional conservatism and bond yield spreads is more pronounced in non-investment grade bonds, for bond issuers with more financial distress, and for bonds that are issued before the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. This study fills a gap in the conservatism literature, which focuses primarily on equity or private bank loan markets with traditional debt contract efficiency/information costs view.