讲座题目：The Effect of Ancestral Kinship Structure on Country-Level Financial Reporting Quality

主讲人：范中文，香港大学

时间：2022年12月8日(周四)下午2:30

地点：腾讯会议692 226 757

主办单位：best365网页版登录会计系

内容摘要：

Prior studies show that financial reporting quality is correlated with numerous country-level attributes. However, these attributes are highly interdependent and not much is known about the“fundamental primitives”underlying firms’reporting practices (Leuz and Wysocki 2016). This study examines the role of historical heterogeneity in the tightness of extended kinship relationships. Our historical kinship tightness measure is based on the social structures of pre-industrialization ethnic groups and has been widely used in the economics literature to explain historical roots of current variations in several country level attributes related to culture, legal institutions, and political systems. Using a sample of more than 70 countries, we show that financial reporting quality is significantly lower in countries whose population is characterized by historically tighter kinship structures. An instrumental variable approach exploiting the Western Church’s transformation of kinship system yields consistent inference. Further, the explanatory power for financial reporting quality of several previously identified country-level attributes (as well as of a latent factor capturing joint variation in previously identified country-level attributes, documented in Isidro, Nanda, and Wysocki [2020]) significantly diminishes in the presence of the kinship variable. Finally, the association between kinship tightness and accounting quality is quite persistent over our 20-year sample period, despite the fact that the period includes globalization of economic activities and harmonization of accounting standards. These results suggest that historical kinship structure has a significant and long-lasting influence on contemporary accounting practices, presumably because the effect of historical kinship tightness on culture and institutions facilitates relational transactions.

主讲人简介：

范中文，香港大学经管学院会计系助理教授。研究领域主要为财务会计，研究成果发表于《Contemporary Accounting Research》。担任《Contemporary Accounting Research》、《Journal of Accounting, Auditing, and Finance》等期刊的匿名审稿人。