Editorial

Citation

Charles, V. and Banker, R.D. (2017), "Editorial", Journal of Centrum Cathedra, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCC-07-2017-018

The aim of the Journal of CENTRUM Cathedra (JCC): The Business and Economics Research Journal is to become an evergreen, favorable journal through disseminating high-quality scholarly research articles to the pool of knowledge seekers in the field of business and economics, as well as play a vital role as a medium of exchange for transmitting and simulating the frontiers of thought and enhancing business and economics research between Latin American and non-Latin American countries with its well-balanced research framework.

This is a continuation of the Special Issue on “Business Performance Management under Uncertain Environments” of the Journal of CENTRUM Cathedra (JCC): The Business and Economics Research Journal, and in this issue, we feature three excellent papers that continue to illustrate the broad scope of research on performance measurement.

Motivated by findings in experimental accounting literature that suggest that business people with accounting education are more likely to have a lower level of moral reasoning and ethical development, the paper titled “The Impact of CEOs’ Accounting Backgrounds on Earnings Management and Conservatism” by Nan Hu, Rong Huang, Xu Li and Ling Liu investigates the impact of CEOs’ accounting backgrounds on firms’ earnings management behavior and accounting conservatism. Among others, the authors find that firms whose CEOs count with accounting backgrounds display lower levels of accounting conservatism. The study makes several contributions to the existent literature on accounting and finance research, and besides being the first of its kind, it also has important policy implications for government policy makers.

Due to the major shift from volume-based to value-based payment models in the USA, dialysis facilities are faced with the need to adjust their operations so as to be successful under the end stage renal disease (ESRD) Prospective Payment System. Dialysis centers exhibit variations in practice patterns, which together with facility characteristics may potentially affect the ESRD patient outcomes. Motivated by the lack of studies on the relationship between dialysis center practice characteristics and clinical process measures, in their paper titled “Antecedents of Patient Health Outcomes in Dialysis Clinics: A National Study”, Chenzhang Bao and Indranil Bardhan examine the interdependent associations among practice patterns, clinical processes and patient outcomes in the dialysis industry using a large cross-sectional data set of 4,571 dialysis clinics in the USA. Among others, results indicate that the relationships between dialysis facility and practice characteristics and patient outcomes are partially mediated through their impact on dialysis process quality measures. Managerial implications for operators of dialysis clinics are also provided.

Finally, motivated by the small number of studies assessing the impact of audit quality on the agency aspects of a firm, in the paper titled “Impact of Audit Quality on the Components of Executive Cash Compensation”, Guy D. Fernando and Alex Thevaranjan study the impact of audit quality on executive compensation. The authors use agency theoretic arguments to predict that as audit quality increases, the ability of managers to manipulate performance measures becomes costlier. The authors find empirical evidence that audit quality is beneficial in mitigating the agency problem in firms by making executive compensation more responsive to accounting-based performance. The paper is the first of its kind to demonstrate the effects of audit quality on the determinants of executive compensation, and it contributes to our understanding of the changing effects of auditor specialization on the audit clients, while also highlighting the differences in the pre- and post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) periods.

The many academics and researchers who contributed articles and the experts within the field who reviewed the articles have made this issue of the journal possible. We thank you. We further extend our gratitude to the administrative and editorial staff of JCC: The Business and Economics Research Journal and Emerald Publishing. Special recognition goes to Professor Fernando D’Alessio, the Director General of CENTRUM Católica Graduate Business School, for his extensive support.

The articles published in this issue of the JCC: The Business and Economics Research Journal should be of considerable interest. We wish you, our readers, informative reading.