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This study aims to examine how gender diversity within the CPA partnership team impacts the firm’s profit performance.

The authors use the two-stage least squares method in analyzing the gender–diversity–performance relationship using the pooled sample obtained from the National Survey Reports on Taiwan CPA firms between 1992 and 2008.

The authors observe a non-linear relationship between gender diversity at the partner level and profit performance. The relationship curves vary according to firm size. After identifying the point of inflexion for these curves, the findings indicate that the average gender diversity is below the inflexion point for large CPA firms, but exceeds the inflexion point for medium size firms.

According to the critical mass theory, increasing gender diversity within the partnership team can have a positive influence on the value of the firm. Hence, the authors argue that for large CPA firms in Taiwan, the proportion of female partners leaves room for improvement. If the average number of female partners could be increased by 0.95 persons, the critical mass would be attained.

The study provides the empirical evidence that increasing a CPA firm’s proportion of female partners positively impacts the firm’s profit performance. The findings serve a practical value as reference source for any further studies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the political connections of firms, managerial incentives and auditor choice. Data from China were used to determine whether managers in firms with political connections are more likely to hire auditors of low quality to help them cover up earnings management and opportunistic behavior.

Cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data covering the period from 2003 to 2009 and the Top 10 auditors were used as a proxy to represent the demand for high-quality auditors. Three proxies were used to measure the political connectedness: state-owned enterprises (SOEs), politically connected CEOs and state ownership.

This paper provides empirical evidence that firms with political connections do not demand stringency in the monitoring and information roles of auditing. Moreover, politically connected firms with high managerial incentives are likely to choose non-Top 10 auditors.

This paper provides a unique focus on the role of managerial incentives in the appointment of auditors. This paper tests the managerial opportunism hypothesis in another context and results of this paper help to elucidate the effects of managerial incentives on the demand of audit quality.

This study seeks to add more insights to the debate on “whether”, “how”, and “under which condition” women representation on the board contributes to firm performance. More specifically, the current study aims to investigate if the effect of board gender diversity on firm performance is dependent on macro factors of national cultures.

The authors used the generalized method of moments regression and a data set consists of 2,550 company year observations over 10 years.

The results indicated that cultural variables interact with board diversity to influence firm performance. Having women on the board in countries with high power distance, individualist, masculine and low-uncertainty avoidance culture influences the firm performance negatively.

The findings indicate that the effects of corporate governance structure on firm performance depends on culture-specific factors, providing support for the argument that institutional norms that are governed by cultural norms affect the effectiveness of corporate governance structure.