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This synthesis covers academic research on the use of valuation, tax, information technology (IT), and forensic specialists on audit engagements. The importance and role of specialists on audit engagements have recently increased, and specialist use has garnered significant attention from regulators and academics. Given the PCAOB’s (2017b) recent proposal to revise auditing standards regarding specialists’ involvement, it is important to review the specialist literature as a whole. By integrating research across these four domains, I identify commonalities and differences related to: (1) factors associated with the use of specialists on audit engagements (including the nature, timing, and extent of use); (2) factors impacting auditors’ interactions with specialists (including specialists contracted by the auditor or management); and (3) outcomes associated with the use of specialists. This integrated analysis of the specialist literatures shows variation in the use of specialists, and various factors affecting both if and how they are involved and whether auditors use specialists internal or external to the audit firm. Additionally, research has sometimes (but not always) linked specialist involvement to higher audit quality. The commonalities and areas of variation identified are informative to audit research and practice, particularly as regulators and audit firms look to improve the quality of audits using specialists. Throughout the synthesis, I also provide a number of directions for future research.

This study aims to obtained the failure probability distributions of subsystems for industrial robot and filtrate its fault data considering the complicated influencing factors of failure rate for industrial robot and numerous epistemic uncertainties.

A fault data screening method and failure rate prediction framework are proposed to investigate industrial robot. First, the failure rate model of the industrial robot with different subsystems is established and then the surrogate model is used to fit bathtub curve of the original industrial robot to obtain the early fault time point. Furthermore, the distribution parameters of the original industrial robot are solved by maximum-likelihood function. Second, the influencing factors of the new industrial robot are quantified, and the epistemic uncertainties are refined using interval analytic hierarchy process method to obtain the correction coefficient of the failure rate.

The failure rate and mean time between failure (MTBF) of predicted new industrial robot are obtained, and the MTBF of predicted new industrial robot is improved compared with that of the original industrial robot.

Failure data of industrial robots is the basis of this prediction method, but it cannot be used for new or similar products, which is the limitation of this method. At the same time, based on the series characteristics of the industrial robot, it is not suitable for parallel or series-parallel systems.

This investigation has important guiding significance to maintenance strategy and spare parts quantity of industrial robot. In addition, this study is of great help to engineers and of great significance to increase the service life and reliability of industrial robots.

This investigation can improve MTBF and extend the service life of industrial robots; furthermore, this method can be applied to predict other mechanical products.

This method can complete the process of fitting, screening and refitting the fault data of the industrial robot, which provides a theoretic basis for reliability growth of the predicted new industrial robot. This investigation has significance to maintenance strategy and spare parts quantity of the industrial robot. Moreover, this method can also be applied to the prediction of other mechanical products.

The purpose of this paper is to apply analysis of public discourses on Ze Xiao to explore and interpret the power relationships shaping inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban China.

This study first introduces the rise of Ze Xiao as an educational phenomenon in China. It then elucidates power relationships in public school admission by analyzing continuities and changes in stakeholders’ interaction in public school admission. It concludes by discussing educational reform for equal public school admission in urban China. Data were collected from written and spoken texts about public school admission, including newspaper articles from the 1980s to the 2000s, policy documents and interviews with relevant stakeholders.

Findings demonstrate that multi-layered power relationships caused diverse inequalities in admission to public secondary education in urban China. These are represented by political and institutional privileges and an imbalance in education development during the social transition from a profit-driven approach in the 1990s to a balance-centered one after 2000. Arguably, there is a necessity to further promote a systematic reform to terminate the privileges and imbalance for an equal and balanced public secondary education in urban China post-2015.

This study attempts to make a contribution toward reconstructing the meaning of inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban areas by revealing the power relationships among stakeholders constituted through their interactions in public education during the different stages of socio-economic development in urban China.

This paper provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date (1997–2016) review of the archival empirical risk-reporting literature. The reviewed papers are classified into two principal themes: the incentives for and/or informativeness of risk reporting. Our review demonstrates areas of significant divergence in the literature specifically: mandatory versus voluntary risk reporting, manual versus automated content analysis, within-country versus cross-country variations in risk reporting, and risk reporting in financial versus non-financial firms. Our paper identifies a number of issues which require further research. In particular we draw attention to two: first, a lack of clarity and consistency around the conceptualization of risk; and second, the potential costs and benefits of standard-setters’ involvement.

This paper reviews academic literature related to the consequences that outside directors and boards may face in the wake of earnings restatements and suggests directions for future research. We examine loss of board seats; recruitment of new directors; proxy recommendations and shareholder support; pre-emptive director departures; director wealth effects; director reputation, litigation, and sanction risks; international evidence; and legal proposals for reform. The overall picture that emerges from the literature is that directors’ primary risk in the wake of earnings restatements is loss of board seats, in part through adverse proxy advisor recommendations and reduced shareholder support. Directors typically face little risk of legal liability or SEC sanctions, and some directors pre-emptively leave a problem company’s board and reduce their loss of interlocked board seats. Some legal scholars have called for director liability to be increased so as to promote more vigilant board oversight. Companies often focus on increasing the independence of the board in the wake of a restatement in an effort to repair organizational reputation. While researchers have revealed a host of important findings to date, much more can be learned about the effects of restatements on outside directors and boards.

Voluntary changes in accounting principle represent explicit and fundamental decisions by managers to exercise accounting discretion. This paper develops an organizing framework to review prior literature on voluntary changes, provides descriptive insights on contemporary changes, and identifies opportunities for future research on voluntary changes. The voluntary change literature is robust and has examined many questions using data prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). We find that contemporary voluntary changes often vary across the pre-SOX, post-SOX, and post-SFAS No. 154 periods by the materiality of their income effect, issue type, and justifications provided by managers, suggesting that manager use of voluntary changes has evolved over time. Our future research opportunities consider potential determinants of voluntary changes including strategic incentives, environmental conditions, and manager characteristics, as well as the potential direct or moderating role of corporate governance and auditors on manager use of voluntary changes. They also consider user reactions to voluntary changes. By providing insight into both extant voluntary change research and the contemporary use of voluntary changes, our study informs standards setters who grant managers the ability to exercise this form of accounting discretion, as well as researchers who plan to study accounting choice through voluntary changes.

This study aims to analyse the impact of e-paper on many existing industries including paper, publishing, book distribution, display, handheld device manufacturers and content service providers. Flexible display has been studied by many institutes, firms and market research companies. Some believe that e-paper is an exceptional application for flexible display, and the need for flexible display development for handheld devices and cloud-based e-book content is indisputable.

This study uses the Delphi technique and STEEP (Sociological, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political aspects) with a panel to analyse a business model and the opportunity for the development of e-paper in Taiwan up to the year 2020.

The study concludes that e-paper content and customised digital services are an essential part of e-paper development, while hardware and cloud data are no more than a mechanism to show, compute and store data. Thus, whether the screen of a handheld device is flexible may not be of importance. Although e-paper will affect the display industry, it will not substitute for handheld devices and traditional bookstores.

This research can be used as a reference for government, academics, industry and international investors.

The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the concept of system usage and identify determinants at the organizational level that are attributable to the extent of system usage in the post‐adoptive and compulsory milieu.

The paper intends to examine the organizational intervention on system usage extent. Unlike previous studies, this research adopts a feature‐centered approach to examine the construct of system usage extent, and proposes that organizational supports such as management support and technical support impact the individual system usage extent.

Results show that technical support from the organization, specifically technical assistance and technical consulting channels, have a positive impact on system usage extent; however, management support does not show a significant effect. A post hoc analysis is conducted in an attempt to explicate the relationships between organization interventions and the feature usage of particular systems.

The paper has the following implications. First, this study discusses system usage extent from a feature‐centered perspective and develops a method to assess the degree of system usage. Second, the scheme for evaluating system usage extent developed in our study can be used to measure the actual system usage. Lastly, an ad hoc correlation analysis was performed to provide a detailed understanding of the relationship between organizational initiatives.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with exceptional mechanical, thermal and electrical properties are considered to be ideal for reinforcing high-performance structures. The interfacial stresses between the CNTs and surrounding matrix are important phenomena which critically govern the mechanical properties of CNTs-reinforced nanocomposites. A number of methods have been proposed to investigate the stress transfer across the CNT/matrix interface, such as experimental measurement and molecular dynamics (MDs). Experimental tests are difficulty and expensive. MDs simulations, on the other hand, are computationally inefficient. The purpose of this paper is to present a reasonably simplified model. Incorporating the simplified model, the analytical expressions of the interface stresses including the shear stress and longitudinal normal stress are obtained.

The analytical model consists of two concentric cylinders, namely a single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) cylinder and a matrix cylinder, as the representative volume element (RVE). The interfacial stress analysis is performed using the shear lag model for the axisymmetric RVE. Analytical solutions for the normal stresses in the SWCNT and matrix, and the interfacial shear stress across the SWCNT/matrix interface are obtained. The proposed model has a great ability to theoretical prediction of the stress transfer between the matrix and CNTs.

In order to demonstrate the simulation capabilities of the proposed model, parametric studies are conducted to investigate the effects of the volume fraction of SWCNT and matrix modulus on the stress transfer. The axial stress in the matrix is decreasing with the increase of the volume fraction and decrease of the matrix modulus. As a result of more loads can be transferred to the SWCNT for a large volume fraction and small matrix modulus. These results show that using a large volume fraction and a small matrix modulus improves the efficiency of the stress transfer from the matrix to the CNTs.

A simple but accurate model using a simplified 2D RVE for characterizing the stress transfer in CNT-reinforced nanocomposites is presented. The predictions from the current method compare favourably with those by existing experimental, analytical and computational studies. The simple and explicit expressions of the interfacial stresses provide valuable analysis tools accessible to practical users.