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This paper aims to study the following two questions. Do earnings announcements stimulate investors to participate in online discussions? Does online investment forum participation affect the market’s reaction to earnings news?

The authors collect all the online posts, which were related to the internet service companies and posted in a Chinese financial forum, guba.eastmoney.com (Guba), during the period between June 30, 2008 and December 31, 2015. Multiple linear regression analysis is used to test the questions.

The study finds that the earnings announcements induce online discussion. In addition, before the earnings announcement, online posting activity does not affect earnings response coefficient but can weaken the positive association between the magnitude of the upcoming earnings surprise and abnormal trading volume. In contrast, after the earnings announcement, online forum participation can facilitate the incorporation of earnings surprise into the price.

This study contributes to the literature studying the impact of social media on market reaction to earnings news by providing evidence that the price discovery process can be affected by the online investment forum. Several policy implications are also provided.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of the 2008 Chinese stimulus program on earnings management.

Using a sample period from 2004 to 2011 (per-stimulus period: 2004-2007 and post-stimulus period: 2008-2011), the authors compare the change in earnings management between the firms that received the stimulus funds and those that did not receive the stimulus funds.

The authors find that from the pre- to post-stimulus period, the recipient firms experienced a greater increase in downward accrual management and a greater decrease in real management than the non-recipient firms did. This result is primarily driven by the non-state-owned enterprises and firms using non-Big-Four auditors.

The results suggest that the earnings management level is ultimately determined by the underlying economic and political factors influencing managers’ and auditors’ incentives (Cohen, 2008; Ball et al., 2003). Meanwhile, some mechanisms, such as high-quality audit (Eshleman and Guo, 2014) and state ownership (Wang and Yung, 2011) can also play a role in determining the level of earnings management.

This study explores the impact of parents’ and children’s early expectations on children’s later school persistence and completion of compulsory and secondary education, paying special attention to the parent-child agreement in early educational expectations. Results from analyzing longitudinal data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF) show that children often carry educational expectations quite different from their parents’. Consistent with previous research, children’s and their parents’ early expectations are strong predictors of children’s later educational attainment. More importantly, the analysis reveals that children benefit greatly when they share with their parents’ high expectations. Those children whose high expectations aligned with their parents fair best in later educational outcomes: They are more likely to complete compulsory education and secondary education. The combined determination of parents and children can help moderate the negative impact of poverty and facilitate children’s continued efforts in fulfilling their expectations. This positive impact holds even for children from the most impoverished families. This study points to the importance to recognize that there are non-material resources that family could provide to advance children’s education.

This paper aims to investigate the relationships between several macro‐economic indicators and real estate investment in China.

This study proposes the “investment preference theory” to explain that bank deposits, stock investment and real estate investment are three important investment vehicles to Chinese households.

The authors find that interest rate, an important monetary aggregate indicator – M2 – and the size of new equity offering are negatively related to real estate investment, which may imply that Chinese investors would prefer to channel their funds to stock market and high‐interest‐rate‐bearing bank deposits to keep a good balance between risk and high return on investment while higher interest rate also increases the cost of borrowing for the property buyers.

This is one of the first studies which investigated the connections behind Chinese consumers' real estate investment and empirically tested the choices among bank deposit, stock and property investment. This study hopefully deepens the understanding towards the consumer investment behaviors in housing investment decisions.

The widespread family businesses play an important role in the national economy of developed countries in Europe and North America, or of developing countries in East Asia. However, family business succession is a worldwide difficult problem. The innovative family business succession practices of Robert Bosch GmbH, the German family company which has a history of 130 years (1886-2016), basically follow the trend of evolving from family businesses to social enterprises after further socialization. However, it has its own innovation and uniqueness which is worthy of reference by Chinese family businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of operating cycle on the differential persistence of accruals and cash flow, and the market reaction to the different components of earnings across firms with various operating cycles.

By examining the US public firms' earnings and the capital market reaction to different components of earnings, from 1964 to 1993, it is found that the longer the operating cycle, the lesser will be the persistent of accruals.

This result is consistent with Sloan's theory that the differential persistence of accruals is attributable to estimation errors in accruals. Moreover, the market efficiency test shows that the mispricing of accruals is greater for firms with longer operating cycle, indicating that investors fixate on earnings, while ignoring the persistence of accruals among firms with different earnings quality.

This paper adds to the growing literature that has begun to examine the factors affecting accrual persistence and accrual mispricing by indicating that the length of operating cycle can play a role. In addition, it provides fresh evidence that the market fixates on earnings, thus emphasizing the importance of contextual analysis of financial statement. Finally, it corroborates Sloan and Xie that estimation errors in accruals drive the lower persistence of accruals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how networks of boards of directors affect relative performance evaluation (RPE) in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation.

In this study, the authors propose that an interlocking network is an important inter-corporate setting, which has a bearing on whether boards decide to use RPE in CEO compensation. They adopt four typical graph measures to depict the centrality/position of each board in the interlock network: degree, betweenness, eigenvector and closeness, and study their impacts on RPE use.

The authors find that firms that have more connected board members and whose board members are connected to better connected firms are more likely to reward their CEOs contingent on their peers’ performance, indicating that information transmission along the board interlock network facilitates the adoption of RPE. This result is robust to alternative measures for board interlock networks and various types of CEO compensation. It highlights the role of interlocking directorates in disseminating information and practice of RPE use along board network.

The authors use social network analysis to measure the relationships and flows between the connected nodes and study the impact on executive compensation design.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of tenure on earnings management.

Analytical model; multivariate regression analysis.

The paper predicts that managers are conservative in managing earnings when they first start to take top managerial positions, and then become aggressive in the next few years. Once they reach the maximum level of earnings management, they will become conservative again and report earnings less aggressively. This inverted U-shaped relationship between tenure and earnings management is confirmed by the data from the Chinese stock market.

It is based on China stock market data. Generalization of the research results to other countries is limited.

With the knowledge of when earnings management is more likely to occur, regulators can set up policies targeting firms and managers with certain characteristics, instead of requiring observances from all firms and managers. This limited scope can greatly reduce the costs of preventing and identifying earnings management, while effectively maintaining the quality of earnings in the meantime.

This paper examines the earnings management behavior related to CEO tenure. It is hoped that the research results can improve the overall understanding of earnings management, then social wealth spent on preventing and identifying it could be reduced.

It is an original work.

The purpose of this paper is report the importance of research publications for the tenure promotion and for faculty in accounting, finance, and information system (IS) areas, developing valid criteria for the assessment of quality in related journals is necessary.

Existing rankings are usually based on a survey among faculty members, while ignoring the chairs' critical role in tenure evaluation. This paper uses department chairs' responses to a survey asking to assess relative journal quality, and hence provides quantitative standards to measure research productivity. The rankings are primarily obtained by the familiarity‐rank position index method. Different sets of rankings for the decision‐makers in universities, with various requirements for research are provide.

It is found that the rankings in accounting and finance areas are consistent with the prior research, but the rankings in the IS have changed significantly. This difference to the rapid growth in the field of IS is attributed. The robustness check also corroborates the ranking lists.

In addition, this paper reports not only a comprehensive ranking list including most journals in accounting, finance, and IS areas, but also separate rankings in each field.

This study examines how informal business networks achieve marketing goals in socially uncertain contexts. Drawing from multiple historical sources, Shangbangs, a type of business network that thrived in pre-1949 China, are analyzed.

The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) undergirds a study of Shangbangs’ historicity (i.e. their socio-historically embedded multiplicity, including organizational forms, activities and connotations.

As informal regional, professional, project-based, special-product-based or mixed marketing networks, Shangbangs relied on “flexible specialization” and coupled multiple business needs to market goods and services, business organizations, specific social values and, when necessary, to debrand business rivals.

This analysis extends theories about marketing networks by probing their subtypes, diverse marketing activities, multipronged channels and relationship building with social entities (including underground societies, business associations and guilds) in response to pre-1949 China’s market uncertainties. Substantiating an alternative approach to “flexible specialization” and marketing innovations within the pre-1949 Chinese economy shows how a parallel theoretical framework can complement western-based marketing theories.

This first comprehensive analysis of Shangbangs, an innovative historical Chinese marketing network outside the conventional market-corporate dichotomy, can inform theory building for marketing strategy-making and management conditioned by social contexts.