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Recent literature suggests that sin firms (firms in tobacco, gambling and alcohol industries) have lower institutional ownership, fewer analysts following, higher abnormal returns and higher financial reporting quality. This study aims to investigate empirically how sin firms engage in real activities manipulation (RAM) to meet earnings benchmarks in comparison to non-sin firms.

The authors examine two types of RAM, namely, Cutting discretionary expenditures including research and development (R&D), SG&A and advertising to boost earnings. Extending deep discount or lenient credit terms to boost sales and/or overproducing to decrease COGS to increase gross profit. Consistent with Roychowdhury (2006), the authors use abnormal discretionary expenditures as the proxy for expenditure reduction manipulation and abnormal production costs as the proxy for COGS manipulation.

The results for the abnormal discretionary expense model suggest that sin firms do not engage in RAM of advertising, R&D, SG&A expense to just meet earnings benchmarks. The results for the production costs model suggest that sin firms do not engage in COGS manipulation to just meet earnings benchmarks. The results are robust after controlling accrual-based earnings management (AEM). Overall, in this setting, these results suggest that managers of sin firms engage less in RAM to meet earnings benchmarks.

The findings are of interest to investors, auditors, regulators and academics with respect to financial statement analysis and earnings quality.

The purpose of this paper is to recover the waste heat of flue gas heat exchanger (FGHE) as efficiently as possible and avoid the acid dew corrosion of that.

A novel flue gas waste heat recovery system was proposed in the paper. The dynamic mathematical models of key equipment in that were established based on theory and experiment method. The proportion integration differentiation-differentiation (PID-P) cascade control method based on particle swarm optimization algorithm was used to control the outlet temperature of FGHE. The dynamic characteristics of the flue gas heat exchange system were simulated by the particle swarm optimization algorithm with different fitness functions.

The PID-P temperature controller parameters can be quickly and effectively obtained by the particle swarm optimization algorithm based on the fitness function of integral time absolute error (ITAE). The overshoot, rise time and adjusting time of the novel system are 2, 83 and 105s, respectively. Compared with the traditional two-step tuning (T-ST) method, the novel system is better in dynamic and steady-state performance. The overshoot and the adjustment time of the system are reduced by 44% and 328s, respectively. ITAE is a performance evaluation index for control system with good engineering practicability and selectivity.

The dynamic mathematical model of key equipment in the new flue gas waste heat recovery system is established and the system's control strategies and methods are explored.

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between digital transformation and corporate fraud.

This paper uses panel data of Chinese listed corporations from 2010 to 2021 and captures digital transformation from the perspectives of awareness and investment by extracting related content from annual reports. Our work investigates whether and how digital transformation influences corporate fraud and examines the moderating effects of the legal environment, media environment and privacy concerns.

Our findings show that digital transformation, captured either from awareness or actual investment, can significantly alleviate corporate fraud. Our results are robust in a set of endogeneity tests and robustness checks. Additionally, we confirm that digital transformation alleviates corporate fraud through two mechanisms: improving internal monitoring and boosting information flow. Additionally, this alleviating effect is more pronounced for corporations with fewer privacy concerns and in worse legal and media environments.

Our findings provide insights for policymakers to motivate corporations to engage in digital transformation for fraud prevention. We also offer guidelines for corporations to improve their awareness and actual investments in digital transformation and take advantage of its governance effect in preventing corporate fraud.

Overall, we highlight the governance role of digital transformation in alleviating corporate fraud and provide policy implications for regulators in emerging economies to regard digital transformation as an effective tool for fraud prevention.

Based on the social dominance theory, this study aims to theorize the moderating effect of power disparity in the impact of team knowledge variety on team creativity and further to verify team open communication as the mediating mechanism of the aforementioned interactive effect.

The multisource (team members and their team leaders) and longitudinal (separated by four months) survey data were collected from 67 research and development teams in China to test the research model. The authors used multiple regression analyses to validate all the proposed hypotheses.

Results reveal that team knowledge variety has a more positive impact on team creativity when teams have lower power disparity. Besides, team open communication is significantly and positively related to team creativity and mediates the interactive effect of team knowledge variety and team power disparity on team creativity.

This study reconciles the mixed findings in the previous study and provides new insights regarding the functionality of team knowledge variety. By identifying team power disparity as a moderator in shaping the effects of team knowledge variety, the authors extend the research that explores the moderators of the team knowledge variety–team creativity relationship, and make comprehensive consideration of the coexistence of multiple diversities within teams (i.e. knowledge variety and power disparity) and their joint effects on team creativity. Besides, this research identifies team open communication as an important underlying mechanism in transmitting the interactive effects of two different types of diversities on team creativity, thus offering new insights on how teams can perform creatively.