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  1. Can CSR Disclosure Protect Firm Reputation During Financial Restatements?Lu Zhang, Yuan George Shan & Millicent Chang - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 173 (1):157-184.
    We investigate the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility disclosure in protecting corporate reputation following financial restatements. As expected under legitimacy theory, firms can signal their legitimacy via nonfinancial disclosure after the negative effects of financial restatements. Our results show that restating firms make substantial improvements to overall CSR disclosure quality by changing their standalone reports to a more conservative tone, increasing readability and report length, even though they strategically disclose less forward-looking and sustainability-related content. Such improvements are more pronounced in (...)
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  • Busy Auditors, Ethical Behavior, and Discretionary Accruals Quality in Malaysia.Karen M. Y. Lai, Andriyawan Sasmita, Ferdinand A. Gul, Yee Boon Foo & Marion Hutchinson - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 150 (4):1187-1198.
    The required professional and ethical pronouncements of accountants mean that auditors need to be competent and exercise due care and skill in the performance of their audits. In this study, we examine what happens when auditors take on more clients than they should, thus raising doubts about their ability to maintain competence and audit quality. Using 2803 observations of Malaysian companies from 2010 to 2013, we find that auditors with multiple clients are associated with lower earnings quality, proxied by total (...)
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  • The Great Escape: The Unaddressed Ethical Issue of Investor Responsibility for Corporate Malfeasance.Curtis L. Wesley Ii & Hermann Achidi Ndofor - 2013 - Business Ethics Quarterly 23 (3):443-475.
    ABSTRACT:Corporate governance scholarship focuses on executive malfeasance, specifically its antecedents and consequences. Academic efforts primarily focus on prevention while practitioners are often left to hold firms and executives (including directors) accountable through a variety of sanctions. Even so, executive malfeasance still occurs even in the face of the vast resources used to monitor, control, and penalize firms and executives. In this paper, we posit equity markets do not adequately penalize firms for inaccurate earnings reports. Using a sample of 129 firms (...)
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  • Influence of Economic Reward and Punishment on Unethical Behavior.A. N. M. Waheeduzzaman & Elwin Myers - 2010 - Business and Professional Ethics Journal 29 (1-4):155-174.
    The study seeks to determine the influence of economic reward on unethical behavior with the help of a Reward Punishment Model. The model postulates that ethical or unethical behavior depends on the relationship among three factors: economic reward or benefit that a businessperson receives from the unethical practice, the severity of punishment the society imposes for such wrong-doing, and the probability of receiving the punishment. A short survey, which contained a hypothetical ethical situation, was administered to 251 respondents. The findings (...)
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  • How Implicit Ethics Institutionalization Affects Ethical Selling Intention: The Case of Taiwan’s Life Insurance Salespeople.Lu-Ming Tseng - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 158 (3):727-742.
    This study examines the mediating role of felt accountability and cost–benefit consideration in the relationship between implicit ethics institutionalization and ethical selling intention. The research hypotheses are developed and tested with data collected using a scenario‐based questionnaire. The research design proposes two types of ethical dilemmas. In the first dilemma, the insurance salespeople are told that the dishonest selling behavior will lead to a profitable outcome. In the second dilemma, the insurance salespeople are informed that the honest selling behavior will (...)
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  • Management Attempts to Avoid Accounting Disclosure Oversight: The Effects of Trust and Knowledge on Corporate Directors’ Governance Ability.Anna M. Rose & Jacob M. Rose - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 83 (2):193-205.
    Management has the opportunity to promote self-serving accounting practices, such as earnings management, when management can effectively avoid oversight by the audit committee. This article investigates the effects of financial knowledge and dispositional trust on the ability of audit committee members to recognize management attempts to avoid full disclosure to the board and potentially deceive board members. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment with 40 experienced audit committee member participants indicate that: Audit committee members with less financial knowledge are (...)
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  • Management attempts to avoid accounting disclosure oversight: The effects of trust and knowledge on corporate directors' governance ability. [REVIEW]Anna M. Rose & Jacob M. Rose - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 83 (2):193 - 205.
    Management has the opportunity to promote self-serving accounting practices, such as earnings management, when management can effectively avoid oversight by the audit committee. This article investigates the effects of financial knowledge and dispositional trust on the ability of audit committee members to recognize management attempts to avoid full disclosure to the board and potentially deceive board members. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment with 40 experienced audit committee member participants indicate that: (1) Audit committee members with less financial knowledge (...)
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  • Students' Perceptions of Academic and Business Dishonesty: Australian Evidence. [REVIEW]Monir Zaman Mir - 2010 - Journal of Academic Ethics 8 (1):67-84.
    Publicly available information indicates that the collapse of the high-profile corporations during the recent past were due to the unethical actions of a number of major players, including high level managers in those corporations. These examples of the ethical misdeeds of corporate actors have influenced accounting professional bodies and academic institutions around the globe to revisit the issue of ethical training of business and accounting students—the corporate managers of tomorrow. However, little is known about the ethical perceptions of business and (...)
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  • Andersen and the Market for Lemons in Audit Reports.Steven E. Kaplan, Pamela B. Roush & Linda Thorne - 2007 - Journal of Business Ethics 70 (4):363-373.
    Previous accounting ethics research berates auditors for ethical lapses that contribute to the failure of Andersen (e.g., Duska, R.: 2005, Journal of Business Ethics 57, 17–29; Staubus, G.: 2005, Journal of Business Ethics 57, 5–15; however, some of the blame must also fall on regulatory and professional bodies that exist to mitigate auditors’ ethical lapses. In this paper, we consider the ethical and economic context that existed and facilitated Andersen’s failure. Our analysis is grounded in Akerlof’s (1970, Quarterly Journal of (...)
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  • Information Asymmetries in Private Equity: Reporting Frequency, Endowments, and Governance.Sofia Johan & Minjie Zhang - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 174 (1):199-220.
    Using PitchBook’s private equity database of 4548 PE funds from 42 countries for the 2000 to 2012 period, we find that higher reporting frequency is associated with lower information asymmetry in performance reports from general partners to limited partners. We also find that endowments are systematically associated with less reported unrealized returns as a percentage of total returns generated from GPs. Moreover, endowments receive more performance reports from their PE funds, implying more stringent governance. These findings persist after controlling for (...)
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  • Busy Auditors, Ethical Behavior, and Discretionary Accruals Quality in Malaysia.Marion Hutchinson, Yee Boon Foo, Ferdinand A. Gul, Andriyawan Sasmita & Karen M. Y. Lai - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 150 (4):1187-1198.
    The required professional and ethical pronouncements of accountants mean that auditors need to be competent and exercise due care and skill in the performance of their audits. In this study, we examine what happens when auditors take on more clients than they should, thus raising doubts about their ability to maintain competence and audit quality. Using 2803 observations of Malaysian companies from 2010 to 2013, we find that auditors with multiple clients are associated with lower earnings quality, proxied by total (...)
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  • The Association between Disclosure, Distress, and Failure.Lori Holder-Webb & Jaffrey R. Cohen - 2007 - Journal of Business Ethics 75 (3):301-314.
    The quality of corporate disclosures has drawn increasing levels of criticism from Congress and the SEC. A subject of particularly intense scrutiny and action is the Management’s Discussion and Analysis (MD&A). This narrative, intended to provide an inside perspective on the reported results of the firm, is particularly important when attempting to evaluate the investment prospects of the marginal or poorly performing firm. However, managers may restrict the information content of the disclosure, raising potential concerns about ethical behavior. In this (...)
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  • A Survey of Governance Disclosures Among U.S. Firms.Lori Holder-Webb, Jeffrey Cohen, Leda Nath & David Wood - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 83 (3):543-563.
    Recent years have featured a spate of regulatory action pertaining to the development and/or disclosure of corporate governance structures in response to financial scandals resulting in part from governance failures. During the same period, corporate governance activists and institutional investors increasingly have called for increased voluntary governance disclosure. Despite this attention, there have been relatively few comprehensive studies of governance disclosure practices and response to the regulation. In this study, we examine a sample of 50 U.S. firms and their public (...)
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  • Does Industry Regulation Matter? New Evidence on Audit Committees and Earnings Management.Lerong He & Rong Yang - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 123 (4):573-589.
    This paper investigates the moderating role of industry regulation on the effectiveness of audit committees in restricting earnings management. Using comprehensive panel data of S&P 1500 firms between 2003 and 2007, we find that the proportion of CEO directors on an audit committee is positively associated with earnings management in unregulated industries, while this association is significantly weaker in regulated industries. Further, the proportion of financial experts on an audit committee is negatively associated with earnings management. Our results also indicate (...)
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  • Corporate Governance and the Responsibility of the Board of Directors for Strategic Financial Reporting.James C. Gaa - 2009 - Journal of Business Ethics 90 (S2):179 - 197.
    One of the fundamental principles of good corporate governance is transparency, i.e., the disclosure of private information to external stakeholders, so that they may make judgments and decisions relating to the corporation. Equally important, but less discussed, is the competing value that corporations need to protect legitimate secrets. Corporations thus need a communication strategy for dealing with external stakeholders which addresses the conflict between disclosure and secrecy. This article focuses on an important element of that communication strategy in the context (...)
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  • Financial Statement Frauds and Auditor Sanctions: An Analysis of Enforcement Actions in China.Michael Firth, Phyllis L. L. Mo & Raymond M. K. Wong - 2005 - Journal of Business Ethics 62 (4):367-381.
    The rising tide of corporate scandals and audit failures has shocked the public, and the integrity of auditors is being increasingly questioned. It is crucial for auditors and regulators to understand the main causes of audit failure and devise preventive measures accordingly. This study analyzes enforcement actions issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission against auditors in respect of fraudulent financial reporting committed by listed companies in China. We find that auditors are more likely to be sanctioned by the regulators (...)
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  • Does Religion Mitigate Earnings Management? Evidence from China.Xingqiang Du, Wei Jian, Shaojuan Lai, Yingjie Du & Hongmei Pei - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 131 (3):699-749.
    Using a sample of 11,357 firm-year observations from the Chinese stock market for the period of 2001–2011, we investigate whether and how religion can mitigate earnings management. Specifically, based on geographic-proximity-based religion variables, we provide strong and robust evidence to show that religion is significantly negatively associated with the extent of earnings management, suggesting that religion can serve as a set of social norms to mitigate corporate unethical behavior such as earnings management. Our findings also reveal that the negative association (...)
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  • Sociological Structures and Accounting Misbehavior: An Institutional Anomie Theory Explanation of Restatements in Family Firms.Eugenio D’Amico, Felice Matozza & Elisabetta Mafrolla - 2023 - Business and Society 62 (2):434-469.
    This article studies the underinvestigated but fascinating issue of the sociological determinants of accounting misbehavior while focusing on an allegedly illicit accounting practice (i.e., restatement) in family- vs. nonfamily-controlled corporations. Under the framework of institutional anomie theory, we examined whether sociological structures (i.e., legal forces and cultural values) influence accounting errors inducing restatements. By applying a multivariate regression analysis to a sample of restating firms listed in 23 countries during the 2006 to 2014 period, we found that legal forces and (...)
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  • Executive Compensation and Corporate Fraud in China.Martin J. Conyon & Lerong He - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 134 (4):669-691.
    This study investigates the relation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud in China. We document a significantly negative correlation between CEO compensation and corporate fraud using data on publicly traded firms between 2005 and 2010. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that firms penalize CEOs for fraud by lowering their pay. We also find that CEO compensation is lower in firms that commit more severe frauds. Panel data fixed effects and propensity score methods are used to demonstrate these effects. (...)
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  • The Effects of Management’s Preannouncement Strategies on Investors’ Judgments of the Trustworthiness of Management.Anna M. Cianci & S. Kaplan - 2008 - Journal of Business Ethics 79 (4):423-444.
    This paper examines the role of management's earnings preannouncements on judgments about its trustworthiness by nonprofessional investors. We predict that management's preannouncement decision and the resulting direction of the earnings surprise influence investors' ethical judgments about management's trustworthiness; these judgments, in turn, are associated with investors' other investment related judgments. We test our predictions in an experiment in which MBA students make investment-related judgments under four different preannouncement strategies. Consistent with our predictions, the results of our study show that managers' (...)
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  • Strategic Earnings Announcement Timing and Fraud Detection.Xin Cheng, Dan Palmon, Yinan Yang & Cheng Yin - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 182 (3):851-874.
    This study investigates whether firms with fraudulent financial reporting time their earnings announcements strategically and finds that fraudulent firms are more likely to disclose their earnings in the after-market hours during their fraud periods to postpone fraud detection. Cross-sectional tests show that firms with lower visibility are more likely to adopt and benefit from this timing strategy. In addition, fraudulent firms are found to time their conference calls strategically and package their earning news with forecasts to flood the market with (...)
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  • The Influence of Unrelated and Related Diversification on Fraudulent Reporting.Subrata Chakrabarty - 2015 - Journal of Business Ethics 131 (4):815-832.
    This study suggests that unrelated diversification has a positive influence on the probability of fraudulent reporting whereas related diversification has a negative influence on the probability of fraudulent reporting. The strength of the influence of these corporate level strategies is contingent on the moral character of the firm. Unrelated diversification provides opportunity for financial innovation within the firm’s internal capital market, which can result in fraudulent reporting. This is more likely when the moral character of the firm is driven by (...)
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  • Timing in Accountability and Trust Relationships.Salvador Carmona, Rafael Donoso & Philip M. J. Reckers - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 112 (3):481-495.
    In this study we examine (1) how a manager’s risk behavior is influenced by developing success (or failure) as an impending settling up deadline to report performance approaches, (2) how willingness to provide transparent accountability is negatively affected by perceived risk and eroding trust, and (3) how others interpret and respond to reduced transparency. As perceptions of high levels of risks suggest a lack of environmental control of a firm’s destiny in contemporary settings, we adopt a historical approach to examine (...)
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