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Article
Publication date: 1 April 2024

Xin Liu, Siyi Liu, Jiani Wang and Hanwen Chen

This study examines the relationship between internal control and corporate environmental responsibility.

Abstract

Purpose

This study examines the relationship between internal control and corporate environmental responsibility.

Design/methodology/approach

Unlike US studies that concentrate solely on internal control over financial reporting, this study uses a comprehensive index that encompasses internal control over financial reporting, operations, and compliance. Corporate environmental responsibility is measured by environmental investments. Our research sample comprises Chinese listed firms from 2010 to 2018.

Findings

The results demonstrate a positive correlation between internal control and corporate environmental investments. Furthermore, we find that firms with high-quality internal control can improve their financial and environmental performance through environmental investments. After decomposing internal control into its five components, we show that the control environment, control activities, and information and communication components exhibit stronger effects on environmental investments than the risk assessment and monitoring components. Finally, the cross-sectional analyses reveal that the positive effect of internal control is more pronounced in private firms and in firms that are subject to weaker environmental regulation.

Originality/value

By focusing on the effect of a comprehensive internal mechanism on corporate environmental responsibility in China, this study contributes to the literature in developed-country settings that overwhelmingly focuses on the impact of external stakeholders and regulations.

Details

International Journal of Emerging Markets, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-8809

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 October 2022

Hanwen Chen, Siyi Liu, Xin Liu and Jiani Wang

The paper aims to examine the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity of audit firms.

1167

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to examine the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity of audit firms.

Design/methodology/approach

Using hand-collected data on all Chinese audit firms’ CSR activities from 2007 to 2020, this study constructs two measures to proxy for audit firms’ CSR engagement: a dummy variable to indicate whether an auditor engages in CSR activities in year t and the frequency with which auditors conduct CSR activities in year t. The authors use ordinary least squares regression as a baseline methodology, along with the entropy balancing method and instrumental variable approach to alleviate potential endogeneity concerns.

Findings

The baseline results show that socially responsible audit firms provide higher quality audit services than their counterparts. In particular, the authors find that clients audited by socially responsible audit firms are less likely to receive an aggressively clean opinion. Moreover, the findings suggest that CSR activities related to community and employees are more relevant in improving audit quality compared with those related to other dimensions of CSR. Further analyses show that capital markets and audit clients react positively to audit-firm CSR activity. Audit firms engaging in CSR increase their audit inputs in response to risky clients, as compared with their counterparts. Finally, cross-sectional analyses show that the positive relationship is more pronounced for non-Big 4 and non-industry experts and is attenuated by within-firm geographic dispersion. In terms of client characteristics, the positive effect of audit-firm CSR is stronger when their clients face the higher financial risk or have lower CSR awareness than others. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the ethical view of audit-firm CSR engagement.

Practical implications

The study advances investors’ understanding of audit-firm CSR engagement and helps them evaluate the credibility of audited financial reports. Besides, the findings may also help guide the audit firms to conduct more CSR activities and help guide the audit clients to choose CSR audit firms.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first large-sample evidence by empirically examining the association between audit-firm CSR activity and audit service performance. Besides, this paper also explores audit-firm CSR activity from two competing perspectives, thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of this issue. Finally, this work responds to the call for more CSR research in emerging markets.

Details

Managerial Auditing Journal, vol. 38 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0268-6902

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 14 April 2023

Hanwen Chen, Siyi Liu, Daoguang Yang and Di Zhang

This study aims to investigate the role of regional environmental transparency on corporate environmental disclosure.

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to investigate the role of regional environmental transparency on corporate environmental disclosure.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses the introduction of a nationwide automated air pollution monitoring network in China as a quasi-natural experiment and employs regression analysis. Robustness checks, including parallel trend test and placebo test, are performed to test the robustness of the results.

Findings

Sharing air pollution data with the public can improve corporate environmental disclosure. Firms with poorer environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance prefer to disclose less informative information after the automated network is implemented compared with firms with better ESG performance. The relationship between information sharing and corporate environmental transparency is more pronounced when local air pollution is severer, firms face stronger investor scrutiny and firms are from heavily polluting industries. The mechanism tests suggest the automated system can draw public environmental attention and improve governments’ aspiration for environmental governance. Finally, corporate environmental disclosure can reduce stock price crash risk and cost of equity.

Practical implications

Real-time pollution data reporting is an important solution to raising public environmental awareness and then enhancing the effectiveness of pollution control.

Social implications

This study has implications for policy-making regarding environmental governance and environmental disclosure.

Originality/value

This study confirms that pollution information transparency can motivate firms to increase environmental disclosure.

Details

Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, vol. 14 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2040-8021

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 May 2024

Hanwen Chen, Yang Feng, Aiju Kou and Siyi Liu

This study aims to test the effect of individual audit quality on career advancement the audit labour market.

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to test the effect of individual audit quality on career advancement the audit labour market.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses data on auditors from two collapsed audit firms in China, namely, Ruihua and Zhengzhong Zhujiang, and tests the effect of individual audit quality on career advancement in the audit labour market.

Findings

The baseline results show that high-quality audits promote auditors’ career advancement. Our results hold after a battery of robustness tests. Further analyses support our hypothesis, indicating that client retention and audit fees are positively related to auditors’ prior audit quality. The effect of audit quality on career advancement does not hold for auditors from sanctioned branch offices or for auditors with prior culpable clients, as shared reputation damage can weaken the effect of high audit quality. Furthermore, this paper investigates whether the reputation enhancement effect of high audit quality can be strengthened by auditor experience, the title of “senior auditor” and IPO auditing experience. We also show that clients and audit firms place more weight on the quality of audits conducted by auditors in competitive markets and auditors with engagements matched with industries.

Originality/value

Together, these findings indicate the vital role of individual audit quality in auditors’ career development in the audit labour market, consistent with the reputation rationale for audit quality.

Details

Managerial Auditing Journal, vol. 39 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0268-6902

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 June 2023

Huosong Xia, Siyi Chen, Justin Z. Zhang and Yulong Liu

The rise of the mobile Internet has accumulated much text information in various online financial forums. Such information often contains the emotional attitudes of investors…

Abstract

Purpose

The rise of the mobile Internet has accumulated much text information in various online financial forums. Such information often contains the emotional attitudes of investors toward financial technology (fintech) platforms, so extracting the sentimental tendency information has great practical value for the development of fintech platforms. Based on the investor sentiment theory, the paper aims to analyze the relevant social media data and test the influence path of online news evaluation on the stock price fluctuation of fintech platforms.

Design/methodology/approach

Taking Oriental Fortune as the research object, this paper selects multiple variables such as stock bar popularity, snowball popularity, news popularity and news sentiment scores collected by UQER and combines the sentiment scores of single daily news into a daily sentiment score. Based on the period from November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020, during the emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as the background, the authors conduct the Granger causality test based on the vector autoregressive (VAR) model and analyze the relevant evaluation of Oriental Fortune through the empirical model.

Findings

The authors' results show that different online evaluations impact the rise and fall of stock prices differently, while news popularity has the most significant impact. Besides, news sentiment scores on share price fluctuation have a relatively substantial influence. These findings indicate that the authoritative news evaluation can strongly guide investors to make relevant investment behavior operations in the information dissemination process, significantly affecting stock prices.

Originality/value

The research findings of this paper have good inspiration and reference values for investors and financial regulators.

Details

International Journal of Emerging Markets, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-8809

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 July 2024

Siyi Dai, Ping Xiao and Huimin Li

Virtual clothing presentation has a visual 3D effort and allows consumers to interact. Currently, most scholars make virtual clothing presentations as a whole or focus on one…

Abstract

Purpose

Virtual clothing presentation has a visual 3D effort and allows consumers to interact. Currently, most scholars make virtual clothing presentations as a whole or focus on one element to study its impact on consumers’ purchase intentions. This study disassembles the components of virtual clothing presentation in Taobao and explores how each component (virtual clothing, virtual model, presentation space, presentation technology and system quality) affects consumers’ purchase intention, which can provide clothing companies recommendations for developing it and help improve consumers’ online shopping experience.

Design/methodology/approach

This study created the parts of a virtual clothing presentation and took advantage of Taobao’s 3D interactive module to simulate a shopping scenario. Participants experienced a 3D interactive virtual clothing presentation in which they could change clothing colors, show actual clothing sizes, try different model poses, switch presentation backgrounds and unfold clothing structure through interactive buttons. Then they were randomly assigned to view two kinds of images and videos of experiment clothing (real images and videos vs virtual ones), respectively. Hypotheses were tested using SEM and applying SmartPLS 4.

Findings

The results demonstrated that five components of virtual clothing presentation have different degrees of influence on consumers’ purchase intention through different consumer perceptions (perceived usefulness, ease of use and enjoyment). It is necessary to consider the design of the virtual clothing presentation in those five dimensions for different needs. In addition, it is feasible to replace images and animated videos of real clothing with virtual ones in Taobao.

Originality/value

Different types of virtual clothing presentations can lead to various results in terms of diverse impacts. This study disassembles and researches each component of a virtual clothing presentation. Overall, this study could provide guidance and suggestions for clothing companies to develop and design or invest in virtual clothing presentations.

Details

Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, vol. 36 no. 12
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-5855

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 5 May 2015

Li Li, Siyi Yang, Zongwei Niu, Guangming Zheng and Zhongwen Sima

This paper aims to present an experimental investigation of improving the surface corrosion resistance of sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets by electrical discharge…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to present an experimental investigation of improving the surface corrosion resistance of sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets by electrical discharge machining (EDM) in different dielectric fluids.

Design/methodology/approach

Scanning electron microscope and X-ray diffraction were used to analyze the surface morphology and chemical structure of recast layers formed by EDM using kerosene and distilled water as the dielectric fluids. Polarization scans and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were applied to investigate the post-machining corrosion resistance.

Findings

The test results indicated that the recast layer produced during EDM had amorphous characteristics, and the newly formed amorphous structure could improve the corrosion resistance of the NdFeB material. The corrosion resistance of the recast layer formed in kerosene was better than that formed in distilled water.

Originality/value

Surface corrosion modification of sintered NdFeB magnets by means of electrical discharge with an ordinary copper electrode is proposed in this paper. The layer formed by EDM exhibits different behavior to that of the interior of the bulk material and improves the anti-corrosion performance of NdFeB magnets.

Details

Anti-Corrosion Methods and Materials, vol. 62 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0003-5599

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 22 October 2024

Wei Wei, Xiaoyu Wang, Siyi Han and Ailun Xiong

This paper takes the gig workers in Chinese delivery platform as the research object and adopts a questionnaire survey to explore the complex influence of job gamification…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper takes the gig workers in Chinese delivery platform as the research object and adopts a questionnaire survey to explore the complex influence of job gamification perception on the job involvement of gig workers, via the mediating role of cognitive assessment and moderating role of overwork, in order to provide research and data support for the development of platform gamification.

Design/methodology/approach

The study conducted a three-wave online questionnaire survey to obtain 300 final samples from Chinese delivery platforms. Hypotheses were tested hierarchical regression and bootstrap methods.

Findings

Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, we observed an inverted U-shaped relationship of gig workers between job gamification perception and job involvement. The mediating role of cognitive assessment and moderating role of overwork were also considered. Both challenge and threat assessment mediate the relationship between job gamification perception and job involvement. Direct effect of job gamification perception on job involvement and indirect effect of job gamification perception on cognitive assessment are moderated by overwork.

Originality/value

In the past, the research on job gamification mostly focused on the traditional forms of employment, but this study focuses on the new forms of employment and from the perspective of individual self-perception, explores the influence of job gamification perception on the job involvement of gig workers in Chinese delivery platform and investigated the dialectical role of job gamification perception. The findings enrich the literature and theoretical research on job gamification perception and job involvement and provide new references and perspectives for management practice.

Details

Personnel Review, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0048-3486

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 24 June 2020

Di Xie, Hui Chen, Siyi Yin, Feisen Wang, Jingwen Chen and Sifei Ai

Laser cleaning, as a new type of cleaning technology, has the advantages of environment-friendliness, better selectivity, better controllability and higher efficiency compared to…

Abstract

Purpose

Laser cleaning, as a new type of cleaning technology, has the advantages of environment-friendliness, better selectivity, better controllability and higher efficiency compared to traditional chemical cleaning or grinding. This paper aims to use ultra-fast surface laser cleaning equipment built in laboratory to study the influence of different energy density (7.6, 11.5 and 15.3 J/cm2) on corrosion resistance of the aluminum alloy A7N01P-T4, a high-speed train body material.

Design/methodology/approach

SEM, white light interferometer, EDS and XPS were used to analyze the surface morphology, roughness, element content and oxide layer composition of aluminum alloy before and after cleaning. The corrosion resistance was studied by electrochemical experiments and exfoliation corrosion experiments.

Findings

The results showed that new oxide scale was formed on the surface after laser cleaning. The changes of surface roughness and chemical composition of oxide scale made a significant influence on corrosion behaviors. Better corrosion resistance was obtained with the energy density increased, and at the energy density of 11.5 J/cm2, aluminum alloy exhibited the best corrosion resistance.

Research limitations/implications

The paper only studies specific aluminum alloys and is not universal. Laser cleaning equipment is set up for the laboratory and has not yet been put into industrial production.

Practical implications

This paper indicated that ultra-fast laser processing was a new direction for the development of industrial equipment surface cleaning and carried out ultra-fast laser of aluminum alloy surface cleaning had certain research significance for its corrosion resistance.

Social implications

Compared with the conventional cleaning methods such as air abrasives grinding or chemical cleaning, laser cleaning has advantages of environment-friendliness, better selectivity, better controllability and higher efficiency. Laser cleaning can not only protect the environment, but also improve cleaning efficiency.

Originality/value

Changes in the surface of aluminum alloys after ultra-fast surface laser treatment were found, and the mechanism of changes in aluminum alloy corrosion properties was clarified.

Details

Anti-Corrosion Methods and Materials, vol. 67 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0003-5599

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 25 November 2020

Carl Déry

This paper aims to explore various tensions related to the diffusion and reception of the New Qing History (NQH) in China, and more specifically, it aims at underlying a recurrent…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to explore various tensions related to the diffusion and reception of the New Qing History (NQH) in China, and more specifically, it aims at underlying a recurrent tension within the core of this debate, between a Global and a Nationalist historical narrative.

Design/methodology/approach

The author’s focus is to analyze various texts published in China between 2006 and 2018.

Findings

The author argues that the intensity of the current debate is partly related on the one hand, to the fact that NQH undermines various aspects of China’s Nationalist teleology and territorial claims and, on the other hand, to the basic difficulty of accepting the coexistence of various historical representations that are risking to weaken contemporary’s justifications of its rising schemes.

Originality/value

The text presents an original reading of some important issues raised by the NQH debate.

Details

Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, vol. 16 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1871-2673

Keywords

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