上市公司的关系网络和事务所审计行为——基于公司年报文本分析的经验证据

Listed Companies' Networks and Firms' Auditing Behaviors: Evidence from Textual Analysis on Annual Report

中国上市公司普遍存在的关系型交易模式对资本市场的运行机制和信息中介的行为模式产生了重要影响。文章采用2001—2012年沪深A股全部上市公司作为研究样本,通过文本分析技术从上市公司年报中获取交易网络结构的信息,对关系网络如何影响公司的审计费用和盈余质量进行实证检验。研究结果表明,上市公司的关系网络规模越大,则审计费用越高。尤其对于公司所在省份内部的关系网络和所在行业外部的关系网络,其审计溢价效应更为明显,且发现同一地区和同一行业的关系网络对盈余质量具有正向影响。进一步的横截面分析表明,公司所处的外部信息环境的改善能够增强关系网络对审计费用和盈余质量的正向影响。文章为上市公司的关系网络如何影响事务所的审计活动提供了经验证据,补充了关系型交易模式下审计行为研究的相关文献。

China is a highly relationship-based economy.The widely-used relationshipbased transactions form the structure of the capital market and the behaviors of information intermediaries.Theoretically,the company’s networks have an impact on auditing behaviors in three ways.First,the company’s networks increase the difficulty of evaluating the company’s specific investments.Second,the members within the same network repeat certain transactions indefinitely.Third,the company’s networks also make a broader scope of its stakeholders,which may increases the externality of its transactions.However,the company’s networks also provide more information sources for the auditors,which increase the informativeness of the financial report.Thus,this paper predicts that the company’s networks would increase the audit fee and earnings quality.Empirically,this paper investigates how the company’networks affect auditing behaviors by using textual analysis on annual reports of all the Shanghai and Shenzhen A share listed companies from 2001 to 2012.We measure the networks of each company by using the number of network nodes from each company’s financial report with textual analysis.The empirical results show that the company’s networks increase the audit fee.The fee premiums are even larger for the company’s local networks and cross-industry networks.However,we don’t find any results of the network coefficient on earnings quality.In addition,further analysis shows that earnings quality is higher when the company has larger local networks and larger intraindustry networks.This finding suggests that it is difficult for auditors to understand the crossprovince and cross-industry networks of the company.Further cross-sectional analysis shows that the effects of the company’s networks on fee premium and earnings quality are larger with more transparent information environment including more open local market,larger size of auditing firms,and more analyst following.Overall,this paper provides some empirical evidence to the relational contract theory from an auditing perspective,by using the data of the company’s networks to investigate how relational contracts affect auditing behaviors.This paper also has potential implications for the network study,as it offers some new mythologies to measure the company’s networks by using textual analysis.