This paper explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and timeliness of goodwill impairment. Goodwill is the premium that is paid when a business is acquired. If the value of the business declines, goodwill impairment occurs. Deliberately delaying goodwill impairment (timeliness) is a widespread ethical issue. Based on all the mergers of Chinese listed companies during 2010–2019, we study the motivation of corporate charitable donations when facing the risk of goodwill impairment. Our results suggest that long-term (consistent) charitable donations reflect more altruist social responsibility than short-term (suddenly increased) donations. In particular, firms that make more long-term donations tend to report goodwill impairment timely, while firms making excessive short-term donations are more likely to delay goodwill impairment. Furthermore, we find that short-term donation is motivated not only to cover up the goodwill impairment delay, but also to provide insurance-like protection when delayed impairment is announced. Our results also suggest that moral licensing plays a role in inducing such opportunistic behaviors. To address the endogeneity problem, we use the number of provincial charitable funds and the number of provincial deaths due to natural disasters as instrumental variables for short-term excessive donations.

This study investigates the effect of financial technology (FinTech) development on stock price crash risk. We show that the development of FinTech can inhibit management from deliberately hiding bad news and alleviate information asymmetry, thereby reducing stock price crash risk. This effect is more pronounced among non-state-owned enterprises, firms with poor information environments and low-quality internal controls, and those in competitive industries and regions with high marketization. Overall, these findings suggest that the development of FinTech can mitigate the deliberate concealment of bad news by management and improve the timeliness of disclosure, leading to lower risks faced by investors.

This paper documents different timeliness in disseminating sanction and enforcement information (SEI) by two types of regulatory agencies in China and the different consequences that flow from them. The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) does not make timely public disclosures of SEI and, instead, leave it up to the firms to make a public announcement under their general obligation to disclose price-sensitive information. The firms therefore have considerable discretion in deciding whether and when to disclose SEI. In contrast, the stock exchanges in Shenzhen and Shanghai make SEI public promptly through the media and the exchanges’ official websites. Using Chinese SEI data during the period 1999 to 2005, we find that the CSRC approach is associated with significantly lagged corporate disclosure (compared with the timely stock exchange approach) and a significantly negative (but delayed) stock price reaction. We also show that the sanctioned firm may take advantage of the less timely CSRC approach to delay its disclosure of SEI for opportunistic reasons such as completing material transactions. We conclude that the CSRC should make immediate public announcements of SEI as these contain price-sensitive information. Furthermore, the immediate dissemination of SEI will bring the CSRC into line with the disclosure practices of China’s stock exchanges and international market regulators.

In this paper, the relationship between firm performance’s combinations and differences as well as the timeliness of actual and scheduled third-quarter report disclosures is examined by regressing on data extracted from the semi-annual and the third-quarter reports of Chinese listed companies between 2003 and 2004. After controlling for the possible impact of semi-annual report disclosures, stock exchanges, firm size, ratios of tradable A-shares and B-shares, and so on, the results indicate that managers of listed companies may have the incentive to manipulate information in the actual and scheduled third-quarter report disclosures; the rule of “releasing good news earlier than bad news” is thus not strictly complied with. This paper further indicates that a firm’s performance, its combinations and differences, have a significant impact on the timeliness of disclosures of these two reports. I therefore suggest minimising the probability of information manipulation of listed companies, boosting investor relation management to safeguard the rights of small and medium shareholders, and enhancing the timeliness of information disclosures of Chinese listed companies.