The main purpose of this research is to examine the impact of board gender diversity and foreign institutional investors on the corporate social responsibility engagement of Chinese listed companies by considering a sample from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database of all non-financial firms listed on the Shanghai stock exchange and the Shenzhen stock exchange during the period from 2008–2015. The CSR is engaged by using the data from the CSMAR database at the firm level, and ranks the CSR disclosures of Chinese companies separately. The recent CSR promotion in China produced a visible increase in attracting female members on the board and members as foreign institutional investors by Chinese listed companies. The findings also showed that the greater the presence of female directors on the board, the stronger the CSR engagement would be. According to critical mass theory and team dynamics, these findings further broaden the accounts that emphasize social networks based on gender. Hence, female members on the board of directors emerged to be significant as a gender mix with extending CSR change. Therefore, our results added a new aspect to the emerging literature on CSR-engagement and gender especially in China. Due to intense political forces and networks in the Chinese listed entities, foreign institutional investors (FIIS) have less incentive to enhance CSR engagement further. Thus, the impact of foreign institutional investors on CSR engagement is as yet unknown, but we improved our knowledge about how the international aspects affect CSR in China. Furthermore, our results are robust, which concern control variables under consideration.

Although the relationship between board gender diversity and a firm’s financial performance has been investigated before, the current study provides a valuable contribution by exploring the complex phenomenon of the mediating impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance on a firm’s financial performance. The current study aims to explore whether corporate social responsibility (represented by the proxy variable of CSR reporting) mediates the relationship between boardroom gender diversity and firm performance. We use the pooled ordinary least square (OLS) regression to examine the above relationship by using data from 2008 to 2015. To control the likelihood of endogeneity we also use one-year lagged and two-stage least square (2SLS) regression models. Our results show that boardroom gender diversity is significant, positively correlated with firm performance, and CSR fully mediates the relationship between boardroom gender diversity and firm performance. In addition, four control variables (independent director, Chief executive officer (CEO power), board member meeting frequency, Big4, and leverage) have some influence on firm performance. These findings hold for a set of robustness tests. Our findings have the implication for the investors and regulators. For investors, our results show that the existence of female directors on the board can improve the firm performance. For regulators, our results advise the worldwide policy maker to give the importance to boardroom gender diversity. The paper contributes to the existing studies, by pioneering the investigations of the mediating role of CSR in the relation between boardroom gender diversity and firm performance in Chinese context.

The primary objective of this paper is to empirically examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) influences corporate tax avoidance (CTA) of Chinese listed companies. The study is based on a sample of 3481 firm-year observations from 2009 to 2015 using CSR ratings from the Rankins (RKS) corporate social responsibility ratings agency in China, and all financial data extracted from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR). The authors foundthat CSR is negatively related to the current and cash effective tax rate (proxies of corporate tax avoidance), suggesting that responsible firms are more involved in tax avoidance as compared to less responsible firms. Their findings are robust against different control variables. Additionally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper is one of the first to document an empirical association between CSR and corporate tax avoidance of Chinese listed companies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the efficiency of corporate governance characteristics in reducing earnings management among the listed firms of Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchange, China. We took abnormal working capital accruals as a proxy for earning management. In this paper, we used modified Jones Model in order to calculate discretionary accruals (DAC). The sample comprises of 1009 firms over the period of 4 years from 2002 to 2006. The study essentially shows that the corporate governance characteristics play a vital role in reducing the earning management. We found a significantly positive association between earning management and different corporate governance characteristics such as CEO duality, board meetings, females directors and concentrated ownership. We lacked evidences to find relationship between board size, director’s shareholdings and proportion of independent directors with DAC as well as between the presence of audit committee and DAC. These studies will broaden the scope of the relationship between earning management and corporate governance characteristics. Very few studies have been conducted in this area especially for the Chinese listed firms with empirical evidences given. A variety of corporate governance variables are used especially board sex ratio in this analysis.

This study tried to explain consumer’s intention formation in the context of drone food delivery services based on Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior (TPB) model. In addition, this study tried to deepen the TPB by understanding the moderating effect of the awareness of consequences. The data were collected from 406 respondents using an online survey in South Korea. The results showed that all proposed hypotheses were accepted. It was also found that the awareness of consequences plays a crucial role in the relation between perceived behavioral control and behavioral intentions. Important theoretical and managerial implications are discussed in the last part of the paper.