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We investigate whether the presence of major corporate customers affects managerial bad news withholding behaviors. Using data from a large sample of U.S. firms, we find that firms with a more concentrated customer base have a greater tendency to withhold bad news. Furthermore, we show an amplified effect of customer concentration on bad news withholding for firms that rely more on major customers and an attenuated effect for firms whose major customers would face higher costs to switch suppliers. We also show that the effect of customer concentration on bad news withholding is weaker for firms with stronger auditor monitoring. Overall, we find that a concentrated customer base imposes performance pressure on managers, which induces them to withhold bad news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medication errors, which could often be detected in advance, are a significant cause of patient deaths each year, highlighting the critical importance of medication safety. The rapid advancement of data analysis technologies has made intelligent medication assistance applications possible, and these applications rely heavily on medical knowledge graphs. However, current knowledge graph construction techniques are predominantly focused on general domains, leaving a gap in specialized fields, particularly in the medical domain for medication assistance. The specialized nature of medical knowledge and the distinct distribution of vocabulary between general and biomedical texts pose challenges. Applying general natural language processing techniques directly to the medical domain often results in lower accuracy due to the inadequate utilization of contextual semantics and entity information. To address these issues and enhance knowledge graph production, this paper proposes an optimized model for named entity recognition and relationship extraction in the Chinese medical domain. Key innovations include utilizing Medical Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (MCBERT) for character-level embeddings pre-trained on Chinese biomedical corpora, employing Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) networks for extracting enriched contextual features, integrating a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer for optimal label sequence output, using the Piecewise Convolutional Neural Network (PCNN) to capture comprehensive semantic information and fusing it with entity features for better classification accuracy, and implementing a microservices architecture for the medication assistance review system. These enhancements significantly improve the accuracy of entity relationship classification in Chinese medical texts. The model achieved good performance in recognizing most entity types, with an accuracy of 88.3%, a recall rate of 85.8%, and an F1 score of 87.0%. In the relationship extraction stage, the accuracy reached 85.7%, the recall rate 82.5%, and the F1 score 84.0%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although theoretical studies suggest that customers may have an impact on a supplier firm's accounting practices, empirical evidence remains limited and inconclusive. We posit that geographic clustering increases the likelihood of communication between customers and that managers who perceive this likelihood will make more disciplined revenue reporting decisions. Using major customer data from China, we find that firms with more geographically clustered customers report less absolute discretionary revenue. This result is more pronounced when the supplier's customers are more likely to communicate with each other, when their demand for information is stronger, when supplier-customer information asymmetry is more severe, and when the supplier has less bargaining power. The main results survive after addressing endogeneity concerns and a serial of other robustness tests. Our findings offer insight into how the relationship between customers relates to earnings quality and we extend the literature on corporate geographic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis produces a measure of aggregate corporate profits (national income and product accounts [NIPA] earnings), which is an integral component of the accounting for gross domestic product (GDP). Interesting features of NIPA earnings include consistent accounting rules over time and determination with little or no managerial discretion. Thus, NIPA earnings provide a useful benchmark for generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings, especially in parsing out the effects of real-economy versus the accounting in explaining the documented temporal increase in volatility and decline in persistence of GAAP earnings. We find that GAAP and NIPA earnings are closely related in the early years, with similar means and standard deviations, and with earnings changes correlating at.90 during 1950-1983. This close relation substantially deteriorates, however, during the second half of the sample period, 1984-2016. Although the behavior of NIPA earnings remains roughly the same, the volatility of GAAP earnings increases 10-fold, and the correlation between GAAP and NIPA earnings changes falls to.39. Additional tests reveal that the increase in the volatility of GAAP earnings is mostly due to rapid earnings reversals, especially the effect of large transient items during economic downturns. The frequency and severity of such downturns, however, are roughly the same across the two periods. In addition, there is little change in the properties of aggregate cash flow from operations and revenue over time. Overall, this evidence suggests that in addition to changes in the real economy, changing GAAP rules and their application are significant factors in the changing properties of GAAP earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study the contagion effects of accounting restatements issued by foreign firms traded in the United States. Specifically, we predict and find that accounting restatements that negatively affect the share prices of the restating foreign firms raise investor concerns that nonrestating foreign firms from the same home countries have similar accounting issues, and therefore induce a negative stock market reaction to nonrestating home country peer firms. We refer to this as a restatement-induced home country contagion effect. On average, nonrestating home country peer firms experience a negative stock market return of approximately −0.69% over a 3-day window around the restatement announcement. Moreover, we hypothesize and show that the strength of the home market rule of law (ROL) affects investor assessment of the likelihood that peer firms have similar accounting issues, and therefore affects the magnitude of the contagion. Specifically, nonrestating home country peer firms from countries with weak ROL experience an average stock price decline of approximately −1.32%, whereas peer firms from strong ROL countries experience an average negative return of only −0.26% over the 3-day window around the restatement. These results suggest that restatements filed by weak ROL firms are perceived to be more "contagious" than those filed by strong ROL firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the recent debate on the media, this paper examines the effect of media coverage on firm earnings management. Even if prior studies (Dyck et al., 2010; Miller, 2006) have documented the media's role in detecting and deterring accounting fraud (or extreme earnings management), it is unclear ex ante whether the media amplifies or curbs less egregious earnings management. Our results show that media coverage is negatively associated with both accrual‐based and real earnings management, suggesting that the media serves as an external monitor that curbs managers' opportunistic earnings management behaviors. Further analyses show that the effect of media coverage on earnings management is more pronounced when monitoring from auditors is weak and when the other information intermediaries are active. Overall, the findings suggest a monitoring role of the media in firm financial reporting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Exfoliatied kaolinite (E-Kaol) was prepared by intercalating DMSO and KAc into kaolinite successively followed by irradiation under ultrasonic. The modified kaolinite was then introduced to polypropylene (PP) by melt blending in order to improve the fire performance of the composite. The flammability and thermal behaviors of PP composite were analyzed by limit oxygen index, vertical burning test, cone calorimeter test, and thermal-gravimetric analysis, respectively. The microstructure of PP composites was characterized by Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscope (SEM). It was demonstrated the presence of only 1 phr E-Kaol could improve the LOI values of PP/MCAPP/ATH composite from 26.4 to 28.0, and decrease the peak value of heat release rate and smoke production rate of the PP/MCAPP/ATH by 60.7% and 39.1%, respectively, compared with that of PP sample. Morphology analysis by SEM showed that E-Kaol in PP composite was beneficial to forming rigid and compact char structure. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2015, 132, 41761. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]