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This study aims to investigate whether the communication between the external auditor and the audit committee (AC) impacts audit quality.

The authors use textual analysis to develop a new auditor–AC communication metric based on public AC performance reports for the period 2013–2021 in China. The authors also use both high-dimensional fixed effects linear regression and logistic regression to examine the effect of auditor–AC communication on audit quality.

By correlating this new auditor–AC communication metric with established proxies for audit quality, as outlined by DeFond and Zhang (2014), the authors find that firms with more auditor–AC communication have higher financial reporting quality, a lower probability of material misstatements and more informative audit reports. Overall, auditor–AC communication contributes to the improvement of audit quality.

The findings offer both practical and policy-oriented implications, particularly for policymakers in search of quantifiable audit quality indicators derived from the interactions between the auditor and the AC.

The study advances the field of audit quality by introducing a novel metric for auditor–AC communication. It provides empirical evidence to support the notion that the communication between the external auditor and the AC can improve audit quality.

This study aims to examine the causal relationship between mandatory CSR disclosure and financial audit efficiency.

The authors use the unique institutional setting of China, where a subset of listed firms are mandated to disclose their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. The authors use propensity score matching and difference-in-differences approaches to compare audit efficiency in the pre- and post-mandatory CSR disclosure periods between the treatment and control groups. The regression models are estimated with robust standard errors clustered at the firm level.

This study finds that following China’s adoption of the mandatory disclosure of CSR, audit report lags decreased by 6% on average, suggesting that audit efficiency improved greatly following mandatory CSR disclosure. Moreover, this association is stronger when firms have better CSR performance, higher CSR report preparation costs, more earnings management before disclosure regulations and better internal controls and when firms belong to high-profile industries and in Big 4 (Big 10) accounting firms. Moreover, neither audit quality nor audit fees decrease when shorter audit lags occur for firms with mandatory CSR disclosures. Overall, the evidence suggests that mandatory CSR disclosure has a positive effect on audit efficiency and that the improvement of audit efficiency does not come as a consequence of reducing audit fees or deteriorating audit quality.

The results reported in this study have practical and policy implications for policymakers, accounting firms and auditors to pay more attention to CSR information.

This study provides evidence of the causal relationship between mandatory CSR disclosure regulation and audit efficiency. It enriches the research on audit service production efficiency from the perspective of nonfinancial information disclosure.

This paper aims to fabricate nickel-aluminum (Ni-Al)-based self-lubricating composite coating on aluminum (Al) alloy by mechanical milling (MM).

A new carrier transport (CT) way was designed to solve the slippage fracture of the coating due to silver (Ag) accumulation (Ag powders were cold welded with nickel [Ni] powders by MM in advance to avoid accumulation, then Al powder and samples were added to fabricate the coating).

Microstructure analysis reveals that the solid lubricant Ag exists as particles in the composite coating via CT technique, which is different from the typical morphology (strip-type) of Ag tailored by normal methods. The unique granular form of Ag can effectively avoid the gliding fracture of the coating, thus forming an efficacious lubrication film on the worn surface, which is responsible for the excellent tribological properties of the coating.

Most of the papers reported that coatings synthesized by MM mainly concentrated on hard coatings, but the fabrication of self-lubricating coatings have not yet reported.

The uniform dispersion of solid lubricant Ag can effectively solves a fatal problem that the fracture failure of coating triggered by the Ag accumulation. This experiment provides a novel method for preparation of self-lubricating coating by MM.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-01-2020-0030

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of chlorination on the structure and properties of reclaimed rubber and to discuss the feasibility of a novel method to chlorinate reclaimed rubber.

A series of chlorinated reclaimed rubber with different chlorination degrees (CD) was prepared by suspension chlorination in aqueous phase (SCAP). Their structure and performance were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, energy dispersive spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, thermogravimetric and mechanical property test.

The chemistry structure, mechanical performance and heat resistance of CRR is affected greatly by its CD.

Although in the present work only chlorination of reclaimed rubber is researched, but this method can be used to modify other recycled rubber.

SCAP is a useful method to produce CRR, and it is feasible for production of chlorinated recycled rubber in large scale. The present work provides a new strategy to fabricate new materials based on recycled rubber.

Chlorination of reclaimed rubber by SCAP is useful to convert waste rubber into new materials, and it is useful to decrease environment pollution.

SCAP method provides a new technology to chlorinate waste rubber with many merits, such as chlorination rate of RR is accelerated and the reaction can be controlled or adjusted easily. Moreover, conversion of chlorine is increased remarkably.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel framework for recommending desirable products to active customers with the consideration of not only their preferences but also the products’ quality performances and their e-retailers’ service performances under e-commerce.

A framework in support of the product recommendation is presented. Three modules are involved in the framework, i.e. data collection and preference analysis module, hybrid recommendation module and recommendation generation module. First, preferences of different types of customers are inferred through analysis of their behavioral data and then a paradigm is adopted based on cased-based reasoning to generate candidate recommendation products. Further, recommendation lists for different types of customers are obtained through measurement of the quality and service performances concerning each candidate recommendation product.

To illustrate the performance of the presented framework, a simulation study comparing the approach developed based on the framework and the traditional approach is conducted. The experiment results show that the developed approach outperformed the traditional approach in term of average rank score. This means that incorporating the consideration of product performance and customer service factors can play an important role in product recommendations.

The presented framework can overcome the defect that low conversion rate of recommended products to actually purchased ones suffered by the traditional approach. In addition, the use of the presented framework can not only help customers to obtain desirable products and save searching time but also supervise and urge e-retailers to pay more attention to the quality and service performances.

In recent years, electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) concerning travel products reflected in online review information has become an important reference for tourists to make their product purchase decisions, while for travel service providers (TSPs), monitoring and improving the e-WOM of their travel products is always an important task. Therefore, based on the online review information, how to capture e-WOM of travel products and find out specific ways to improve the e-WOM is a noteworthy research problem. The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for capturing and analyzing e-WOM toward travel products based on sentiment analysis and stochastic dominance.

Specifically, online review information of travel products is first crawled and preprocessed. Second, sentiment strengths of online review information toward travel products concerning each feature are judged. Then, the matrix of structured online review information toward travel products is formed. Further, the matrix of e-WOM comparisons between any two travel products is constructed, and e-WOM ranking concerning each travel product is determined. Finally, trade-off chart models are constructed to conduct the e-WOM improvement analyses concerning the travel products.

An empirical study based on the online review information toward six travel products crawled from the Tuniu.com website is given to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

The proposed method can not only realize the real-time e-WOM monitoring to travel products but also be useful for TSPs to improve the e-WOM of their travel products.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether and how owners’ preferences for CEO characteristics changed due to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. The authors identify three fundamental success factors needed for companies to compete in the after-crisis environment, and the authors connect five CEO characteristics to such factors.

The authors rely on a hand-collected database to build a panel data of European CEOs for the 2010-2012 period.

The empirical results indicate that after 2009, CEOs of companies that were more severely hit by the crisis are significantly different compared to those of other companies. More specifically, they have a background in science or engineering; they have international experience; and they are remunerated to a higher extent through stock options. The results of this paper also indicate that only international experience had a positive and significant impact on financial performance.

The paper contributes to the stream of literature on CEO characteristics and owners’ identity, tackling the research theme from a dynamic rather than from a static perspective.