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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of religious entrepreneurs on bank loans and further examine the moderating effect of entrepreneurial gender.

In 2010, the Chinese national survey reported the different religious beliefs of private entrepreneurs. Using this set of survey data, the authors obtain a sample of 4,330 Chinese family firms and employ the Tobit regression approach to examine the relationship between the amount of bank loans and the religious background of entrepreneurs. In addition, the authors use the propensity score matching approach to address the endogeneity issue.

Based on the data from the 2010 national survey, the authors document that the amount of bank loans is significantly higher for Chinese family firms with religious entrepreneurs than for their counterparts. This finding suggests that religious individuals are inclined to be more ethical and honest and Chinese family firms with religious entrepreneurs transfer soft information to banks, and eventually lenders favor religious entrepreneurs with more bank loans. Moreover, the authors reveal that the amount of bank loans is significantly larger for firms with female entrepreneurs than for those without female entrepreneurs. In addition, entrepreneurial gender attenuates the positive relationship between religious entrepreneurs and bank loans.

This study is one of few studies to examine the influence of an entrepreneur’s religious belief on bank credit decisions and adds to previous studies about religious influence on corporate behavior by revealing a positive association between religious entrepreneurs and bank loans. Moreover, this study validates that female entrepreneurs exert positive effects on the amount of bank loans and attenuate the positive influence of religious entrepreneurs on bank loans.

From the sociolinguistic perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether the honorific and actual-name appellations that Chinese auditors use to address clients in audit reports connote differential financial misstatement risk. Specifically, the authors hypothesize that auditors’ use of honorifics signals their inferior social status relative to their clients, thereby leading to compromised auditor independence, lower audit quality, and higher financial misstatement risk.

The authors use a sample of manually coded appellation data from audit reports of Chinese public firms between 2003 and 2012 to conduct the research.

The authors find significantly greater financial misstatements, both in terms of likelihoods and magnitudes, for companies addressed by honorifics than for those addressed by actual names. Moreover, compared to auditors’ consistent honorific usage, discretionary honorific usage has a stronger positive association with misstatements. The authors further show that the positive association between honorific usage and client misstatement risk weakens when the audit firm is a Top 10 accounting firms in China, is an industry specialist, is formed as a partnership, or resides in a more concentrated audit market.

This study contributes to the sociolinguistics literature in accounting and provides evidence supporting the reform proposed by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board to enhance the usefulness of audit reporting.

In China, private equity placement (PEP) has become the most important equity refinancing method because most listed firms issue new stocks in this method. However, previous literature has not paid much attention to the impact of political connections on PEP. In this paper, the authors aim to focus on the effect of ultimate ownership types and political connections on approval, approval time, approval results and proceeds of PEP. Besides that the authors also explore the influence of different types and levels of political connections on PEP.

This study investigates the impact of ultimate ownership and political connections of private firms on the approval of PEPs. The authors obtain a final sample of 1,651 private placement events of Chinese-listed firms. To test the hypothesis that the authors developed in this paper, the authors use empirical models from the existing literature about political connections and corporate finance. They establish multiple linear regressions to test Hypothesis 1 and 3 and introduce a logit model to test Hypothesis 2.

First, this study documents that state-owned firms have significant advantages over private firms in approval procedure. Second, political connections seem to help private firms obtain approval of placements from China Securities Regulatory Commission. Third, political connections through government officers are not useful for firms to obtain refinance resources, whereas the connections of being members of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and People’s Congress are the two valuable types of political connections to help private firms obtain approval.

This paper has three main contributions to the previous literature. The first contribution is to provide an evidence for the relation between political connections and PEP approval procedures. The second contribution is to provide a comparison between government officer’s connection and social title’s connection. The third contribution of this paper is to reveal the influence of non-disclosed political connection on PEP approval. All the three contributions are important for understanding the relation between political connections and firm refinancial policy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how the extent of religion in a firm’s social environment affects corporate innovation and innovation efficiency from the perspectives of religion-related risk aversion and religion-based social norms.

Using a sample of 8,601 Chinese firm-year observations from 2007 to 2012, this paper examines the relationship between religion and innovation intensity, as well as innovation efficiency. A battery of checks, that is, adopting Heckman selection model, using a province-level measure of religiosity and an alternative measure of innovation intensity, and taking the stochastic frontier analysis method to capture corporate innovation efficiency, are conducted to alleviate the concern of self-selection and to guarantee the robustness of the findings of this paper.

This paper finds strong evidence that firms registered in more religious regions, that is, regions with more Buddhist monasteries within a certain radius, undertake fewer innovation activities as measured by the ratio of R&D investment over total sales income but achieve higher innovation efficiency reflected by the value-relevance of R&D investment.

This paper complements the existing literature by suggesting that religion can serve as an informal social mechanism and performs a “less is more” effect in disciplining corporate innovation activities.

Positive psychology helps us understand the knowledge required to contribute to adolescents' societal development and adjustability. Adolescence is the crucial stage to work on for a balanced personality. The present study concerned adolescents' self-strength, happiness, and help-seeking behaviour. The authors aimed to explore the relationship between adolescents' self-strength and happiness and investigate the mediational effect of adolescents' help-seeking behaviour on their self-strength and happiness.

The research design of the current quantitative study was correlational, and 809 adolescents from China and Pakistan participated in the present study. Data were personally collected from participants through self-developed scales.

We deployed Pearson correlation and simple mediation using SPSS software and found a linear, positive, strong (r = 0.654, n = 809, p = 0.000 < 0.01) and statistically significant correlation between adolescents' self-strength and happiness. The authors also found a significant indirect effect of help-seeking on adolescents' self-strength and happiness at (β = 0.373, t(907) = 7.01).

Using self-reported scales to gather information was one of the study's limitations. Adolescents may have misunderstood the notion or construct narrated in words or responded biasedly despite the bilingual scales.

This study offers social and practical implications for educators, parents, and school administrators to address the development of adolescents' personalities using a positive psychology lens.

The findings are of significant importance for teachers working in the elementary schools. They may work on adolescents' self-strength, happiness, and help-seeking to develop balanced personalities.