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Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of board secretaries’ characteristics on annual report readability using an original method that evaluates the readability of Chinese characters. Design/methodology/approach The authors manually collect board secretaries’ characteristics from the China Securities Market and Accounting Research database and obtain annual reports from the China Information website. Ordinary least square regression is applied to evaluate the impact, and then robustness tests and additional regression analyses are conducted. Findings Board secretaries’ legal-professional expertise, international expertise and role duality improve annual report readability. However, their political connections are negatively associated with it. The effect of expertise (role duality) is more pronounced for firms with lower ex ante litigation risk (board secretaries with equity holdings). Furthermore, higher readability increases the compensation of board secretaries, whereas lower readability increases their turnover. Finally, annual report readability is positively related to firm performance. Research limitations/implications The authors only investigate listed firms in China from 2007 to 2017 because of the difficulties of obtaining data and text mining. Practical implications The authors provide managerial insights for regulators aiming to establish an effective governance mechanism with Chinese characteristics. First, certain requirements for board secretaries’ expertise can improve annual report readability. Further, firms can consider appointing board members or senior executives as board secretaries to enhance disclosure quality. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to verify the effect of board secretaries’ characteristics on disclosure quality, especially annual report readability. Moreover, this study proposes a novel measure of annual report readability for Chinese texts.

Due to the importance and challenges, the issue of innovation has been a major one for decades in academia. In this paper, we investigate the effect that stock options have on radical and increment...

Purpose: In practice, an increasing number of economic entities have begun to consider strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an opportunity to create a win-win situation for the organisation and the society. The existing literature has yet to soundly corroborate the role of strategic CSR in corporate innovation. This study examines the relationship between strategic CSR and innovation. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical regression models are estimated to analyse the data collected from 2817 firms yielding 18 845 firm–year observations from 2001 to 2014 in the United States. Findings/results: The findings indicate that firms with strategic CSR generate more and better innovation outputs. The positive effect is more pronounced when institutional ownership is lower, when firm size is larger, and when product market competition is more intense. In terms of economic consequences, firms with strategic CSR actually have higher commercial value and are less likely to suffer loss from failed innovation. Practical implications: To establish a sustainable relationship with stakeholders and realise the long-term development of business and society, enterprises should engage in strategic CSR in a planned manner based on their own resources and professional expertise. Originality/value: The study sheds light on a growing body of literature that investigates the real consequences of firms’ strategic CSR, and explains the growing recognition of the importance of strategic CSR.

This study attempts to develop a novel method to measure the importance of the characteristics closely related to the carrying capacity measurement of coastal parks by using the hierarchical method with the Monte Carlo simulation approach. One big advantage of MCAHP approach is able to effectively avoid the subjectivity of survey responses in the data collection process, leading to more reliable assessment results. Empirical results indicate the newly developed method provides a better framework for identifying the significance of the concerned factors and also produces a significant cost-saving and revenue-increasing outcome for coastal park resource uses and yet enhance tourists’ satisfaction.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of the recognized nature-and-activity-based attributes on the level of park's admission fee charges using a panel data of 29 coastal recreation parks in Dalian city of China. A total of seven different Hedonic pricing model specifications are used in the estimating process. The results indicate that a numerous attributes have statistically significant effects (α ≤ 0.10) on the level of park admission fee charges. In terms of the economic valuation, marine sightseeing results in the highest value of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) of $6.4 as its quality rank improves to a designated higher level. As expected that the park congestion has a negative effect on the MWTP (−$0.47) and overall park's rankings have a positive effect ($0.05) on park's MWTP. However, many recreation activities accommodated by the park sites exhibit a relatively weak effect on the park entrance fee charges. One possible reason is perhaps owing to the single admission package fee pol...

We study the influence of managerial cognitive bias on corporate debt policy in China. We develop a theoretical model of capital structure that incorporates tax benefits of debt and predicts how managerial cognitive bias can lead to suboptimal capital structure choices. We find that when managerial cognitive bias is severe, the firm tends to choose overly-conservative or overly-aggressive debt levels, and the debt level is unrelated to the tax rate. In contrast, when managerial cognitive bias is mild, the firm responds to the tax benefit of debt and tends to choose a debt level that is positively related to the tax rate. We contribute to the literature by introducing managerial cognitive bias into the decision making process. We study how cognitive bias can affect capital structure decisions by incorporating the prospect theory in developing a capital structure model.