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This study aims to examine the effect of board gender diversity on corporate litigation in China’s listed firms. The key questions this study addresses are: what are the effect of board gender diversity on corporate litigation in terms of both the frequency and severity of consequence, is there any heterogeneous effects of the relationships across firm performance?

A sample consists of 25,668 firm-year observations from over 3,340 firms is examined using logistic regression analysis and negative binomial regression analysis. The authors also use event study method and ordinary least square (OLS) regression to explore female directors’ effects on reducing the negative consequences of litigation. The logistic regression and OLS regression are reestimated with interaction terms when examining the firm performance heterogeneity.

The authors document that firms with greater female representation on their boards experience fewer and less severe corporate litigations. Moreover, in high-performing firms, board gender diversity plays a more potent role in reducing the frequency and consequences of corporate litigation than low-performing firms.

This study is among the first to examine the relationship between board gender diversity and the comprehensive corporate litigations under Chinese context. It sheds new light on China’s boardroom dynamics, offering valuable empirical implication to Chinese corporate policymakers on the role of female directors.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how the negative effect of litigation risk on firm performance could be controlled through the channel of voluntary disclosure and under the condition of institutional ownership.

To get the objectives, the study analyzed an unbalanced panel of 918 non-financial listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 18. To capture any expected unobserved heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation in the unbalanced sample, the authors have applied fixed effect regression with robust standard errors clustered at the firms' levels as suggested by Newey and West (1987).

The research provides that the good disclosure practices and presence of institutional ownership in corporations raise the trust of the investors by making the corporate operation clear in the eyes of the stakeholders. This increases the corporate credibility and as consequence corporations are protected against litigation risk. Thus, in the light of the information asymmetry and signaling theories, voluntary disclosure practices, and financial institutions' ownership, bridges the information gap and transmit a positive signal in the market regarding the better financial performance of the corporations.

These findings are helpful for the corporate managers for effective strategic decisions, regulatory authorities for policy formulation, and individual investors for developing a diversified investment portfolio.

By applying the mediation and moderation effects, the research enhances the understanding of the underlying causes of the association between a firm's litigation risk and its performance. The current research contributes to the literature, that agency issues which create litigation risk could be settled internally with voluntary disclosure practices and externally with institutional ownership.

Existing studies suggest that negative impacts emanating from corporate fraud revelations may diffuse to other firms through lower trust and lower market participation. Extending this literature stream, the authors examine whether corporate fraud revelations are associated with higher costs of raising capital through initial public offerings (IPOs) for industry peers.

The authors employ several analysis techniques including univariate analysis, multivariate regressions, propensity score matching methodology, and probit estimation. The sample consists of 3,015 US IPO firms for the 1996–2021 period.

By adopting US private securities class action lawsuits as a proxy for the presence of corporate fraud, the authors find that fraud revelations are associated with higher IPO underpricing, higher post-IPO stock return volatility and increased likelihood of withdrawal from the offering for industry peers. The findings are robust to alternative industry definitions and litigation proxies and to the inclusion of a battery of controls, including industry, state and year fixed effects.

This study presents private firms with an additional industry litigation factor to consider when assessing the marginal costs of going public.

The study aims to determine whether a relationship exists between the potential significance of corporate controversies for stakeholders and how organisations respond to them in their annual and sustainability reports.

This paper employs content analysis on annual and sustainability reports of 48 listed companies from the Refinitiv database. The logit regression was used to estimate the model.

The study revealed that the main factors increasing the probability of a controversial issue being addressed in a corporate report are the controversy’s potential significance, companies’ financial performance and lawsuits.

Our study has three major limitations. These are a relatively small sample of companies and reports, focusing on disclosures made in corporate reports and omitting other channels of communication, for example, social media, and a certain amount of subjectivity in the process of coding information.

Former studies show that corporations face a serious risk of their hypocritical strategies becoming too evident for stakeholder groups. Our findings suggest that the risk is already materialising and may undermine the idea of CSR and sustainability reporting.

Our research focuses on high-profile adverse incidents widely reported in the media, the omission of which from corporate reports seems to constitute a particular case of organised hypocrite. It also demonstrates that companies use an impression management strategy to defuse adverse publicity and that major controversies cause minor ones to be omitted from their reports.

This study aims to investigate the extent to which audit committee (AC) members who are formally independent are truly independent in practice, and what challenges they face that undermine their independence.

The study utilizes semi-structured interviews with 18 members of the AC in Jordan.

The responses indicate that AC is mostly labelled as independent but fails to play an effective monitoring role due to different institutional factors. These factors include family ownership, government ownership, culture, compensation package and the lack of qualified directors.

This research addresses this gap by presenting qualitative evidence from a civil law jurisdiction, featured by a developing financial market, a prevalence of family businesses, limited investor protection and a low risk of litigation. Additionally, this study aims to rectify the current imbalance between qualitative and quantitative studies on AC and bridge the gap between research conducted in developed countries and their developing counterparts.

This study offers valuable insights for regulatory authorities to engage in a more profound contemplation of extant governance regulations. Also, this study offers useful feedback for nomination committees of public companies, and it also has an implication for shareholders as they rely on independent directors to protect their investment. Furthermore, implications of the findings derived from this research possess the potential for generalization to other developing nations characterized by akin institutional contexts, notably encompassing the countries situated in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

This research introduces novel qualitative empirical evidence from a distinctive jurisdiction governed by civil law, thereby enriching the existing scholarly discourse. It also contributes to the AC literature by suggesting that it is not only the existence of conventionally independent ACs that affect the integrity of financial statements, but also the absence of social ties and other contextual obstacles.

This study aims to investigate the association between executives with foreign backgrounds and the audit fees paid by the Chinese-listed firms over the period from 2010 to 2020.

To examine the association between executives’ foreign experience and audit fees, this study constructs the following empirical model: Lnfee_i,t = β₀ + β₁Foreign background_i,t + ∑β_j Control_i,t + YearFE + IndFE + ε_i,t (1).

This study finds that auditors charge higher fees for firms hiring more executives with foreign backgrounds. The results are robust to a battery of robustness checks, including fixed effects, alternative measures of independent variable, controlling for other characteristics of executives and auditors and entropy balancing method.

This study sheds light on how executives’ foreign backgrounds affect audit fees, enriching the literature on executive heterogeneity and audit fees and providing important implications for audit practitioners.

This study aims to analyze how sustainability, through an efficient knowledge management (KM) system, can serve as a driving force with respect to corporate culture and reputation. The research questions that guided this study are mainly the following: Are KM and sustainability related? Can culture strengthen the link between KM and sustainability? Can the link between KM and sustainability be affected by reputation?

The methodological approach adopted corresponds to qualitative research of analysis on the reference literature in the international field, also supported by empirical analysis.

In this study, the authors show that there is no explicit correlation between sustainability and KM. This relationship, in fact, is not underlined in nonfinancial reporting because it is absent or because it is not considered relevant. Too often sustainability is reduced to a mere relational and reputational tool, ignoring the fact it must be considered a consequence and not the main goal to improve companies’ culture.

The sample studied by the authors refers to the top 40 companies listed on the Italian market, not allowing to generalize the findings across the international context.

The practical implications that could result from making explicit the relationship between sustainability and KM are multiple: the substantial benefits of the reputational aspect, an increase in the economic value related to sustainability; to ensure the going concern of the company and implement its ability to produce and share value in the long term.

The social benefits of a stronger relationship between sustainability and KM are related to the possibility to improve the wealth of all the stakeholders.

This paper analyzes the links between sustainability and KM to understand the influence of these factors on corporate culture and reputation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether repeated alliances between two members of a patent pool boost enterprise innovation. Furthermore, this paper intends to determine whether the innovation performance becomes higher or lower based on the partnership characteristics.

In this empirical study, hierarchical regression is used to analyze the longitudinal data obtained from 12 patent pools managed by MPEG LA during a time period ranging from 2006 to 2018. The members of patent pools comprise research institutions, firms and universities. Research analyses are performed based on a sample of 68,400 member pairs who had established repeated alliances. The information regarding such pairs is gathered from public databases.

Repeated alliances positively correlate with enterprise innovation performance in patent pools; this performance is higher when the two enterprises have exploratory collaborations. Conversely, the performance is lower when the partners have a similar technology base and are engaged in a technological competition (competitive learning and patent litigation). Moreover, the performance is lower when one partner demonstrates higher network centrality and richer structural holes than the other partner.

Patent pools play an instrumental role in eliminating patent-licensing barriers, thereby allowing mutual acquisition of complementary technologies, and cooperatively strengthening technology development. From the perspective of theories of coopetition, knowledge management and social network, this study explores the impact of patent pools on enterprise innovation performance and ascertains the moderating roles of technology coopetition, technology similarity and network position, thereby expanding the scope of innovation effect in the context of patent pools.

The worldwide imposition of lockdown measures to control the 2020 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has shifted most executive communications with external stakeholders online, resulting in quick responses from stakeholders. This study aims to understand how presentational styles exhibited in online communication induce immediate audience responses and empirically test the effectiveness of reactive impression management tactics.

The authors analyze presentational styles using MP3 files containing executive utterances during earnings call conferences held by S&P 100-listed firms after June 2020, the quarter after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Using timestamps, the authors link each utterance to a 1-minute interval change in the ask/bid prices of the stocks that occurs a minute after the corresponding utterance begins.

Exhibiting an informational presentation style in earnings calls leads to positive and immediate audience responses. Managers tend to increase their reliance on promotional presentation styles rather than on informational ones when quarterly earnings exceed market forecasts.

Drawing on organizational genre theory, this research identifies the discrepancy between the presentation styles that audiences positively respond to and those that managers tend to exhibit in earnings calls and provides a reactive impression management typology for immediate responses from online audiences.

This study aims to examine the impact of board characteristics on firm performance while also exploring the influential mechanisms that help Chinese listed companies establish effective boards of directors and strengthen their corporate governance mechanisms.

This paper uses machine learning methods to investigate the predictive ability of the board of directors' characteristics on firm performance based on the data from Chinese A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges in China during 2008–2021. This study further analyzes board characteristics with relatively strong predictive ability and their predictive models on firm performance.

The results show that nonlinear machine learning methods are more effective than traditional linear models in analyzing the impact of board characteristics on Chinese firm performance. Among the series characteristics of the board of directors, the contribution ratio in prediction from directors compensation, director shareholding ratio, the average age of directors and directors' educational level are significant, and these characteristics have a roughly nonlinear correlation to the prediction of firm performance; the improvement of the predictive ability of board characteristics on firm performance in state-owned enterprises in China performs better than that in private enterprises.

The findings of this study provide valuable suggestions for enriching the theory of board governance, strengthening board construction and optimizing the effectiveness of board governance. Furthermore, these impacts can serve as a valuable reference for board construction and selection, aiding in the rational selection of boards to establish an efficient and high-performing board of directors.

The study findings unequivocally demonstrate the superiority of nonlinear machine learning approaches over traditional linear models in examining the relationship between board characteristics and firm performance in China. Within the suite of board characteristics, director compensation, shareholding ratio, average age and educational level are particularly noteworthy, consistently demonstrating strong, nonlinear associations with firm performance. Within the suite of board characteristics, director compensation, shareholding ratio, average age and educational level are particularly noteworthy, consistently demonstrating strong, nonlinear associations with firm performance. The study reveals that the predictive performance of board attributes is generally more robust for state-owned enterprises in China in comparison to their counterparts in the private sector.