Search results

This chapter examines China’s corporate governance and accounting environment that shapes the adoption of internationally acceptable principles and standards. Specifically, it examines international influences, including supranational organizations; foreign investors and international accounting firms; domestic institutional influences, including the political system, economic system, legal system, and cultural system; and accounting infrastructure. China’s convergence is driven by desired efficiency of the corporate sector and legitimacy of participating in the global market. Influenced heavily by international forces in the context of globalization, corporate governance and accounting practices are increasingly becoming in line with internationally acceptable standards and codes. While convergence assists China in obtaining legitimacy, improving efficiency is likely to be adversely affected given that corporate governance and accounting in China operate in an environment that differs considerably from those of Anglo-American countries. An examination of the corporate governance and accounting environment in China suggests heavy government involvement within underdeveloped institutions. While the Chinese government has made impressive progress in developing the corporate governance and accounting environment for the market economy, China’s unique institutional setting is likely to affect how the imported concepts are interpreted and implemented.

This paper gives a selective review on some recent developments of nonparametric methods in both continuous and discrete time finance, particularly in the areas of nonparametric estimation and testing of diffusion processes, nonparametric testing of parametric diffusion models, nonparametric pricing of derivatives, nonparametric estimation and hypothesis testing for nonlinear pricing kernel, and nonparametric predictability of asset returns. For each financial context, the paper discusses the suitable statistical concepts, models, and modeling procedures, as well as some of their applications to financial data. Their relative strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Much theoretical and empirical research is needed in this area, and more importantly, the paper points to several aspects that deserve further investigation.

The assumption that the family migrates as a unit downplays migrants’ circularity. This chapter focuses on China's rural–urban labor migrants that travel back and forth between the sites of work and home community and between places of work. I argue that migrants and their households pursue work flexibility in order to obtain the best of the urban and rural worlds, by gaining earnings from urban work and at the same time maintaining social and economic security in the countryside. Work flexibility demands flexibility in household organization, in the form of division of labor and collaboration between genders, generations, and households. Based on a study in Sichuan, I examine household biographies and narratives to identify migrants’ work and household strategies.

Migrants change jobs frequently, switch from one type of work to another and one location to another readily, and often return to the home village for months or even years before pursuing migrant work again. Not only are migrants ready to split the household between the city and the countryside, but also they frequently change from one form of division of labor to another. The inside–outside model, where the wife stays in the village and the husband does migrant work, used to be the dominant arrangement. Over time, the outside–outside model, where both the husband and wife migrate to work and leave behind other family members, is increasingly popular. This is facilitated by intergenerational and interhousehold division of labor in the form of assistance by the extended family. Intergenerational division of labor takes place when the second generation is replacing the parents in migrant work. This research's findings support the notion that rural–urban migrants are fast becoming a hybrid segment of Chinese society, playing dual roles of farmers and urban workers and straddling the peasant and urban worlds.

Online hotel ratings, a form of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), are becoming increasingly important to tourism and hospitality management. Using sentiment analysis based on the big data technique, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings from the perspective of customers’ motives in the context of eWOM, and to further identify the moderating effects of review characteristics.

The authors first retrieve 273,457 customer-generated reviews from a well-known online travel agency in China using automated data crawlers. Next, they exploit two different sentiment analysis methods to obtain sentiment scores. Finally, empirical studies based on threshold regressions are conducted to establish the asymmetric relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings.

The results suggest that the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings is asymmetric, and a negative sentiment score will exert a larger decline in online hotel ratings, compared to a positive sentiment score. Meanwhile, the reviewer level and reviews with pictures have moderating effects on the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings. Moreover, two different types of sentiment scores output by different sentiment analysis methods verify the results of this study.

The moderating effects of reviewer level and reviews with pictures offer new insights for hotel managers to make different customer service policies and for customers to select a hotel based on reviews from the online travel agency.

This paper contributes to the literature by applying big data analysis to the issues in hotel management. Based on the eWOM communication theories, this study extends previous study by providing an analysis framework for the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings from the perspective of customers’ motives in the context of eWOM.

The objective of this study is to examine how the heterogeneity of the institutional environments within a single country influences International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) convergence and earnings quality based on a meso- and multi-level approach.

Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to capture the between-group heteroskedasticity and within-cluster interdependence, this study investigates the simultaneous effect by incorporating institutional factors residing at different hierarchical levels and the interaction effects of factors within the same level on IFRS convergence and earnings quality in the largest IFRS adopter, China.

The results show that after IFRS convergence (i.e. 2007–2015), earnings quality decreases in terms of conservatism. However, the further analysis indicates that the strong institutional environment could mitigate the negative impact of IFRS on conservatism.

Consistent with the emphasis of heterogeneity within a country by Terracciano et al. (Science, 2005, 310 (5745)), this study indicates that the heterogeneity in the institutional environments and the simultaneous effect of the multilevel institutional environments within a single country cannot be ignored. This study also indicates that, equally important, research methodology plays a substantial role in investigating the outcomes of IFRS convergence. Finally, this study, based on an integrated theory, adopts a meso-paradigm linking macro- and micro-level institutions to provide comprehensive insights into IFRS convergence and conservatism.

Neglecting to wear a safety helmet can result in serious injuries at construction sites, but the cause of such unsafe behavior has not been fully understood. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a means of systematically understanding on the causes of non-helmet use behaviors at construction sites.

This paper utilizes the system dynamics (SD) modeling to portray the construction system works at project, management and individual levels to understand the relative importance of safety climate and productivity pressures. A real-time helmet use behavior tracking system (the Eye on Project (EOP)) is developed to provide an objective record of helmet use practices. Using the data collected from the EOP, the proposed SD model can be calibrated to simulate the influence of safety climate and productivity pressures on the non-helmet use behaviors of construction workers.

The data collected from 91 responses through the questionnaire survey were utilized to develop the SD model, which consists of two balancing loops and two reinforced loops. The mean absolute percentage error is further used to evaluate the model. The results show that a positive safety climate significantly reduced the rate of non-helmet use behavior.

This study divided the primary contributors of non-helmet use behavior into three levels for the SD model development. The SD model can be used to develop policies for mitigating helmet misuse, which in turn improves the safety performance of construction sites.

The use of digital technology in firms has drawn attention of innovation management scholars and policy-makers, especially the imitation of digital technology and competition among peer firms. Drawing on dynamic competition theory, this paper examines how firms react to their peers' digital innovation behavior and the effect of external environment mechanisms on the magnitude of peer effects.

This paper utilizes a text mining method to construct a baseline model with a Tobit estimator using data obtained for Chinese listed firms.

The findings suggest that peer effects on digital innovation behavior are robust and significant positive in China. Moreover, peer effects on digital innovation participation are positively magnified by firms' strong social network and high Fintech development. However, peer effects are relatively higher in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs), low-profitability and high R&D firms.

The authors' findings contribute to the digital management literature by showing that firms need digital technological imitation and diffusion of innovations in the digital era.

Managers should provide insights into firms' imitation of their peers' acts to preserve competitive parity. Besides, firms should integrate employees within the organization and communicate digital innovation concepts and behaviors to external peer firms.

First, this paper contributes to explaining how firms change their digital innovation strategy through the influence of peers' digital innovation behavior. Second, this paper fills the literature gaps related to the moderating effects of external environment factors in peer effects of digital innovation behavior.