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This paper aims to verify the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on Chinese listed firms’ earnings management and tax avoidance. Specifically, this study investigates whether government-guided CSR implementation indeed drives firms to behave in a responsible manner by constraining earnings management and tax avoidance.

The paper analyses a sample of Chinese listed companies that are confronted with the unique situation of CSR being developed at a rapid pace by government-led policy and regulation. The study further investigates whether the effect of CSR on earnings management and tax avoidance is different for state-owned and private enterprises by partitioning the sample into these two subgroups.

The findings of this study show that government-guided CSR could be effective in reducing the firms’ earnings management and tax avoidance, even though the effect is limited to state-owned enterprises.

This paper provides new evidence on the relation of CSR with earnings management and tax avoidance in the Chinese context and sheds light on the importance of differentiating between the state-owned and private enterprises when studying the corporate behaviors of Chinese firms.

This study aims to verify the circumstances under which managing the allowance for uncollectible accounts is used as a tool of earnings management.

The authors investigate whether bad debt expense, which is an income statement counterpart of allowance for uncollectible accounts, is adjusted downward when pre-managed earnings is slightly above zero earnings, prior year’s earnings or analysts’ forecasts.

The findings of this study show that firms manage bad debt expense downward to avoid losses, sustain the prior year’s earnings and meet or beat analysts’ forecasts. The authors also find that the understatement of bad debt expense to meet earnings benchmarks is pronounced for firms with high tax costs.

Standard setters and auditors can gain a better understanding in detail of the practices and methods of managing earnings via the allowance for uncollectible accounts.

This study is the first to examine earnings management via the allowance for uncollectible accounts in non-financial Korean firms. In addition, the findings provide the evidence that firms prefer to use the allowance for uncollectible accounts as a strategic tool to meet benchmarks, especially when their tax costs are high.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of financial factors on firms’ financial and tax reporting decisions. Firms often face the difficulties of accomplishing both financial and reporting goals. The extent to which reporting they put more value depends on the differential weighting of firms’ financial reporting and tax costs. The authors incorporate various financial factors as a source of cross-sectional differences in the weighing of both financial reporting and tax costs.

To examine firms’ decisions when fulfilling both the purposes of financial and tax reporting is difficult, the authors use a large set of firms in Korea, where book-tax conformity is high and aggressive tax shelters are restricted. The authors develop a new measure that can specify firms’ decision making between financial and tax reporting by considering both earnings management and tax avoidance.

The findings show that debt ratio affects firms’ financial and tax reporting decisions non-monotonically depending on the level of the debt ratio. The authors also find that firms with more long-term debt financing are more likely to be aggressive in financial reporting, while firms with higher financing deficit or better access to the capital market are more likely to be aggressive in tax reporting.

Thus, the findings provide more compelling evidence of firms’ decision making between two conflicting strategies, particularly when fulfilling both the purposes of financial and tax reporting is difficult. The authors expect that the results provide practical implications to standard setters, auditors and financial statement users who are interested in the ongoing debate over book-tax tradeoffs.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how firms’ decision making between two conflicting reporting strategies are affected by the various financial factors, which are closely linked to a firm’s financial reporting and tax costs.

This paper, in face of the increasing interconnectivity between local and global, has attempted to retrospect the critical moment of Korean society under Tae‐woo Rho (1988–93) regime, in which Korea struggled for fundamental reforms of the earlier centrally controlled state system through economic rationalization and labor flexibilization. During that juncture of Korean history, neo‐liberalization under the influence of Fordian decline was a governing theme behind the Korean economy's policy formation as well as labor agenda. This reliance of government on the neo‐liberal pillar has made an impact on the subsequent leaderships under Young Sam Kim (1993–1998) and Dae Jung Kim (1998‐present). After briefly reviewing the major aspect of Korean economy and labor problems surrounding the financial crisis of East Asia around 1998, the international influence of Fordian decline and neo‐liberalization as a Korean alternative has been discussed.

This paper aims to investigate the relation between gender diversity in employees and earnings quality. Specifically, how gender diversity among full-time and part-time employees is associated with discretionary accruals in Korea is examined.

The author analyzes the association between women ratio among full-time (part-time) employees and discretionary accruals by using 3,687 firm-years of Korean listed companies from 2010 to 2012. The regression model used in Barua et al. (2010) is adopted. The dependent variables, the absolute value of discretionary accruals, are proxied by the Modified Jones Model of Dechow et al. (1995) and the Performance Matched Model of Kothari et al. (2005).

First, a higher ratio of women among full-time workers is related to lower discretionary accruals, whereas that of part-time female employees is not related to discretionary accruals. Second, the effect of gender diversity in employees varies depending on the possibility of earnings management. Third, the results are robust with sample firm-years without female executives, thereby suggesting that the results are not driven by the existence of female executives, and robust to accounting standards and firm-year clustering.

This paper expands the understanding about the determination of discretionary accruals by demonstrating the impact of full-time female employees on earnings quality. Previous studies demonstrated that female workers are more ethical in the workplace, and the quality of accounting information disclosed by firms with female CFOs or directors, i.e. high ranking officers, is higher. It is observed that accounting information quality is higher when firms simply have more female workers, regardless of their relative position in the firm. This complements the results of previous studies and indicates gender diversity among employees is a sign of accounting information quality.

This paper explores how gender-related issues are communicated in Korean family-run conglomerates (chaebols) and the roles of women within these businesses. It also addresses to what extent the communication of chaebols about female employment and career development reflects the perception of gender representation in these organisations.

By paying attention to gendered discourse in Korean chaebols, this paper examines what is said and written about gender issues in glottographic statements (texts) and non-glottographic statements (charts and other visuals) of annual reports (ARs) published by five chaebols since 2010. The paper uses a Foucauldian framework to develop the archive of statements made within these ARs.

Although there is an increase in female-employee ratios, ARs show that number of women at the board or senior management level continue to be small. ARs tend to provide numbers related to female employment and retention in their non-glottographic statements, yet these numbers occasionally differ from and frequently are not explained by glottographic statements. The strategies used by chaebols to improve career prospects for their female staff are only vaguely described and rarely evaluated.

This paper looks beyond the existing discourse analysis on “talk and text” by also investigating claims made through graphic and linear/pictorial elements and their interplay with text. This approach opens new understandings of how gendered discourses are constructed and how they (unintentionally) fail to resolve issues and perceptions related to female employment and career development in Korea.