British Accounting Review最新文献

The aim of this paper is to add to the discussion on hybrids and valuing. We argue that more dynamic theorising is needed to understand hybridity. The aim is thus to further the discussion and to nuance the theorisation of hybrids and values by focusing on their emergence and shifts. The study is qualitative, and the empirical base is the handling of the pandemic in a Swedish county council and a municipality. The research question is: How and why did values emerge and shift in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic? Our first contribution is the development of concepts whereby we centre hybridisation, purification, and re-hybridisation, as well as the concepts of first- and second-order dissonance. The second contribution is the enhancement of our understanding of the dynamics of hybrids. Our theorising adds to studies indicating the risk of hybrid settings collapsing and then reverting to pure states because of what we call second-order dissonance. Pure states, however, are always at risk of first-order dissonance and of exploding into hybrid states. Our observations advance research into both valuing and accounting, which tends to focus on specific established values, or on how accounting for a value emerges.

Corporate governance in China may offer implications and useful insights for corporate governance theory and practices in other countries. This paper aims to provide a “thought leadership” piece to enhance understanding of corporate governance in China, describing the “China model” of corporate governance practice and theory. We focus on and discuss the uniqueness of corporate governance in China from eight aspects: large shareholders, institutional investors, board of directors, managerial incentives, information intermediaries, laws and regulations, three types of markets, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). We also discuss papers published in the special section on the theme of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility in China. These studies further our understanding of the China model of corporate governance.

The aim of this paper is to illuminate how a hybrid organisation tasked with developing the Turin-Lyon Highspeed Railway, TELT, has played a pivotal role in the government of a French-Italian collaborative megaproject. Using a Foucauldian approach, we undertook a longitudinal analysis of TELT to investigate the accounting and performance challenges faced as this hybrid organisation attempted to meet the diverse goals and values of multiple stakeholders. The technologies introduced new work planning techniques, excavating, building prototypes, estimating and certifying standard costs, and implementing time and space controls based on cost classifications. The idea behind all these measures was to normalise the risks associated with the megaproject, and thus zero any cost overruns during the project's lifecycle. TELT's ‘winning spirit’ succeeded in navigating a bi-national business value chain spanning governments, contractors, and sub-contracting companies. Different forms of reporting were used concurrently – some for financial disclosure, others for auditing to comply with national and European auditing regulations as enforced by the two governments. Non-financial information was also disclosed to diverse, and sometimes conflicting stakeholders, to increase social value and reduce information asymmetry. The study reveals how a wide range of experts intervened to solve problems at the meso-political and micro-organisational levels.

Using a large dataset with over half a million observations for 161 thousand Chinese firms, we examine the role of political affiliation on the debt maturity of firms experiencing varying levels of financial volatility. Our findings indicate that politically affiliated firms have reduced capacity to adjust their debt maturity when firm-specific risk rises. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this effect is stronger for firms affiliated with local levels of government relative to central levels. We argue that political affiliation can play a disciplining role in environments where credit is controlled by the state and politicians’ careers depend on local economic performance.

Coping with accountability challenges is an essential part of how actors in hybrid organisations make sense of their responsibility to distinctive groups of stakeholders. Drawing on institutional theory and a logics perspective, we explore how the strategic apex in a Swedish municipal housing corporation constructs accountability in relation to the tensions that arise therein. Our case study highlights that the strategic apex deals with the challenges associated with multiple accountability logics via the process of evoking the principals. Given the invisibility of the legal owner, the strategic apex evokes the principal(s) through the additional processes of negotiating resource allocation, compromising and interest alignment, and creating team structures. Our findings contribute to the emergent literature on how hybrid organisations construct accountability and manage related challenges. Furthermore, our analysis of how individual actors and teams deal with the tension between individual and collective actions in the accountability domain advances current knowledge of the processes through which these actors cope with accountability challenges in hybrid organisations.

The China Securities Investor Services Centre (CSISC) is a unique governance mechanism in China, backed by the Chinese regulator. This institution holds 100 shares of each public firm in the pilot regions and monitors large shareholders by exercising its rights. Using a difference-in-difference (DID) methodology, the study investigates a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2013 to 2017 to evaluate the role of regulatory minority shareholders in curbing corporate fraud, yielding consistent and robust results. The findings of the mechanism tests indicate that CSISC shareholding significantly reduces the propensity for fraud while increasing the probability of fraud detection. The results of heterogeneity tests show that the effect of CSISC shareholdings on corporate fraud is more pronounced in firms with severe internal agency problems and poorer external governance environments. Additional analyses examine the impact of CSISC shareholdings on different types of corporate fraud and show that it significantly reduces disclosure and operational fraud. This research has important implications for improving minority shareholder protection in countries with concentrated ownership structures and for constraining corporate fraud.

This study empirically examines the determinants and consequences of firms’ issuance of sales/production reports. Our findings demonstrate that firms choose to issue these reports in order to meet the information needs of investors, supply chain participants, and industry peers. As a result, these firms experience higher firm value, attributed to improvements in the information environment, increased trade credits, and strengthened tacit collusion. Our results remain robust when considering endogeneity and when replacing the binary issuance variable with the frequency of sales/production reports. Furthermore, the stock market shows a significant response to the information contained in these reports, reflected in larger abnormal returns and trading volumes, and the market reaction is positively related to the news conveyed by these reports. Overall, our findings indicate that the issuance of sales/production reports brings about economic benefits.

This study examines the effect of local government debt (LGD) on corporate tax avoidance using a sample of Chinese-listed firms from 2007 to 2019. We find a negative relationship between LGD and tax avoidance only in the municipal state-owned enterprises (SOEs) controlled by the municipal government, suggesting that municipal officials focus on municipal SOEs to raise tax revenues to alleviate debt pressures. Further discussions show that the negative effect of LGD on municipal SOEs' tax avoidance is pronounced in politically connected managers, cities with worse fiscal situations and only present at the early phase of officials' tenure but insignificant later. We examine the economic consequences of politically driven tax planning and find that municipal SOEs with lower tax avoidance subsequently receive more government contracts as favor returns. Such favor exchange changes the distribution of current and future cash flows of the municipal SOEs, which are mainly determined by adjusting the composition of current accruals (i.e., more income-increasing earning management) and cash flow items (i.e., less tax avoidance). This study sheds light on the “two-way favor exchange” between governments and firms and provides implications for understanding local government leaders' heterogeneous incentives for tax enforcement and firms’ competing incentives for tax avoidance.