In China, corporate governance is a relatively new concept and both the external environment and the internatal mechanisms for monitoring corporations differ considerably from those observed in the West. The governance of Chinese firms, on the one hand, is shaped to varying degrees by the political and economic systems, social ethos and theoretical ideas in the nation, which are vaguely labelled “Chinese characteristics”. On the other hand, it represents a mosaic of borrowed and modified governance mechanisms that are often haphazardly and partially transplanted from the established western markets (e.g., the Anglo-American model and the German model). As a result, Chinese companies and their governance have exhibited the following unique features: state dominance in ownership and control (in the forms of state shares and legal person shares, which are not tradable on the market), government-appointed board directors and top management, government-appointed supervisory board (modelled after the German two-tier system), non-executive board directors from outside of the firm (like the independent directors in the Anglo-American system). In addition, there does not exist a market for managers and the management remuneration is not determined by economic factors (such as, firm size and firm profitability).
Studies have been conducted to investigate the relation between ownership structure and corporate performance (e.g., Xu and Wang, 1999; Chen, 2001) and between board composition and performance (e.g., Tian and Lau, 2001) among Chinese listed firms. However, there has been no study that examines the relation between governance mechanisms and corporate fraud, although there have been repeat observations that corporate fraud and financial malpractices are pervasive and widespread. According to Tam (1999), corporate fraud in China has the following dire consequences. It obstructs the development of a healthy corporate management system and creates an untrustworthy setting for the long-term investors who have lost their confidence in the equity market and the listed companies. Chinese individual investors are treating the share market as a gambling house for quick profit, instead of a place for long-term investment.4 As a result, the large holdings of state shares and legal person shares, as non-tradable shares that do not help the development of a healthy market, cannot be offloaded to private investors. A large number of the remaining SOEs cannot be successfully transformed and listed on the market. Furthermore, foreign investors are still unwilling to invest in the Chinese equity market.
Important issues to be addressed include whether or not the imported models suit China’s institutional and cultural context and how well the current corporate structure and governance mechanisms work in preventing corporate fraud. This study empirically examines the relationship between a number of key governance mechanisms prevailing in Chinese firms and corporate fraud to partially address the issues. Included in the investigation are eight independent variables: state shareholding, legal person shareholding, the board of directors (BOD) shareholding, composition of BOD, the chair/CEO duality, composition of supervisory board, debt ratio and management remuneration.
The main findings of this study are that both state shares and legal person shares have a significant negative effect on corporate fraud. In other words, a higher (lower) proportion of state/legal person shares would lead to a lower (higher) likelihood of fraud. However, it is argued that the underlying incentives for state shares to exhibit this effect may differ from the incentives for legal person shares. In addition, the results show that when debt ratio increases, the likelihood of fraud also increases. The other variables do not show any significant effect on the occurrence of fraud; but a further analysis reveals that these results are likely driven by factors such as the predominance of state ownership and control and the restrictions placed on BOD and management by government. 公司治理与企业舞弊英文文献和翻译(2):http://www.751com.cn/fanyi/lunwen_245.html