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Full-Text Articles in Business

Societal Trust And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald Lobo Dec 2018

Societal Trust And Corporate Tax Avoidance, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald Lobo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using aninternational sample of firms from 25 countries and a country-level index for societal trust, we document that societal trust is negatively associated with tax avoidance, even after controlling for other institutional determinants, such as home country legal institutions and tax system characteristics.We explore the effects of two country-level institutional characteristics—strength of lega linstitutions and capital market pressure—on the relation between societal trust and tax avoidance. We find that the relation between trust and tax avoidance is less pronounced when legal institutions in a country are stronger and is more pronounced when capital market pressure is stronger. Finally, we examine …


Transfer Of A Going Concern, Vincent Ooi Dec 2018

Transfer Of A Going Concern, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

GST transfers of a going concern—overviewThe sale of a business is in substance the sale of a number of assets bundled together. Generally, GST would be charged on the transfer of each asset according to the rules applicable to that asset, i.e. standard-rate, zero-rate or exempt.However, where a business is transferred as a going concern (a “TOGC”), the transaction may be treated as an excluded transaction under the Goods and Services Tax (Excluded Transactions) Order. If so, the trans-action would be treated as neither a supply of goods nor a supply of services and therefore outside the scope of GST. …


Unravelling Civil Conspiracy, Pey Woan Lee Nov 2018

Unravelling Civil Conspiracy, Pey Woan Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article seeks to understand civil conspiracy through the lens of its historical rationale. It identifies that purpose to be the protection of public interests as the tort was originally fashioned as an extension of criminal conspiracy to counter serious social ills. For lawful means conspiracy, this rationale is exemplified by the requirement for improper or illegitimate motive whilst “unlawful means” serves the same function in the context of unlawful means conspiracy. Counter-intuitively, understanding the tort in this way provides a means of restricting the tort and reigning in its “revolutionary” tendencies. Recognising the tort’s policy-based foundation would, it is …


Board Independence As A Panacea To Tunnelling? An Empirical Study Of Related Party Transactions In Hong Kong And Singapore, Christopher C. H. Chen, Wai Yee Wan, Wei Zhang Sep 2018

Board Independence As A Panacea To Tunnelling? An Empirical Study Of Related Party Transactions In Hong Kong And Singapore, Christopher C. H. Chen, Wai Yee Wan, Wei Zhang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In this article, we examine a general question: is the legal transplantation of corporate governance rule effective in curtailing agency costs? Entering into the 21st century, we have seen reforms of corporate governance standards in the Far East since the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, including in Hong Kong and Singapore. These reforms built on the Anglo-American model of corporate governance in the UK and US supported by broad academic literature of connecting better corporate governance with firm value and identifying the association of tunneling or wrongdoings with poor corporate governance practices. The idea is also to provide more checks-and-balances …


Zombie Board: Board Tenure And Firm Performance, Sterling Huang, Gilles Hilary Sep 2018

Zombie Board: Board Tenure And Firm Performance, Sterling Huang, Gilles Hilary

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We show that board tenure exhibits an inverted U-shaped relation with firm value and accounting performance. The quality of corporate decisions, such as M&A, financial reporting quality, and CEO compensation, also has a quadratic relation with board tenure. Our results are consistent with the interpretation that directors’ on-the-job learning improves firm value up to a threshold, at which point entrenchment dominates and firm performance suffers. To address endogeneity concerns, we use a sample of firms in which an outside director suffered a sudden death, and find that sudden deaths that move board tenure away from (toward) the empirically observed optimum …


Reading Between The Lines: Not All Csr Is Good Csr, David K. Ding, Christo Ferreira, Udomsak Wongchoti Aug 2018

Reading Between The Lines: Not All Csr Is Good Csr, David K. Ding, Christo Ferreira, Udomsak Wongchoti

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate whether corporate social responsibility (CSR), as evidenced in annual financial reports, is associated with a firm’s financial performance in New Zealand. Design/methodology/approach: A word count approach of several key CSR indicators found in the audited financial reports of NZX50 constituent firms is used. Several variables are constructed that measure the presence of CSR within the annual report such as sustainability, responsibility, social, environment, diversity, employee and community, and eight other variables within the annual report that measure the penetration of stakeholder engagement. Control variables and alternative measures of CSR are also included. Descriptive statistics …


How Does Interpersonal Justice Affect Outside Directors’ Governance Behavior? A Cross-Cultural Comparison, Esther B. Del Brio, Rosa M. Hernandez-Maestro, Toru Yoshikawa Jul 2018

How Does Interpersonal Justice Affect Outside Directors’ Governance Behavior? A Cross-Cultural Comparison, Esther B. Del Brio, Rosa M. Hernandez-Maestro, Toru Yoshikawa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business

We examine the impact of interpersonal justice among outside directors on the board and between a director and the CEO regarding the director’s monitoring and resource provision behaviors in different cultural contexts. We argue that directors from individualistic countries are more influenced by CEO interpersonal justice while directors from collectivistic countries are more affected by the board interpersonal justice. Our main effect results indicate that interpersonal justice with board members is positively related to both monitoring and resource provision by a director, while CEO interpersonal justice is related only to resource provision. Our results also show different effects on the …


Cross-Country Evidence On The Role Of Independent Media In Constraining Corporate Tax Aggressiveness, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo Jul 2018

Cross-Country Evidence On The Role Of Independent Media In Constraining Corporate Tax Aggressiveness, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim, Gerald J. Lobo

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an international sample of firms from 32 countries, we study the relation between media independence and corporate tax aggressiveness. We measure media independence by the extent of private ownership and competition in the media industry. Using an indicator variable for tax aggressiveness when the firm’s corporate tax avoidance measure is within the top quartile of each country-industry combination, we find strong evidence that media independence is associated with a lower likelihood of tax aggressiveness, after controlling for other institutional determinants, including home-country tax system characteristics. We also find that the effect of media independence is more pronounced when the …


Managing The Risks Of Corporate Fraud: The Evidence From Hong Kong And Singapore, Wai Yee Wan, Christopher C. H. Chen, Chongwu Xia, Say Goo Jun 2018

Managing The Risks Of Corporate Fraud: The Evidence From Hong Kong And Singapore, Wai Yee Wan, Christopher C. H. Chen, Chongwu Xia, Say Goo

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since the Asian financialcrisis of 1997, Hong Kong and Singapore have implemented reforms that promote independenceand monitoring competency of the boards of directors of their listed companies.However, with the advent of the financial crisis of 2007/2008, a wave of fraudcases prompts the question as to the effectiveness of these reforms. Analysing asample of 62 listed companies which are found to have committed fraud between2007 and 2014, and comparing against a matched sample of no-fraud companies, wefind that the fraud companies tend to either combine the roles of chairman andchief executive officer (or they are close family members) and have fewer …


Keeping Investors Onboard: A Corporate Social Responsibility Crisis Response Framework, Clarence Goh Apr 2018

Keeping Investors Onboard: A Corporate Social Responsibility Crisis Response Framework, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

There is evidence to suggest that managers use CSR reporting as a means to manage their firms’ CSR reputations. In this study, I jointly examine CSR reputation and CSR crisis response in the context of CSR crises, and how they can influence investor judgments and decision making. In particular, in the context of CSR crises, I build on situational crisis communication theory to develop a CSR crisis response framework which managers can use to examine and understand how specific types of CSR crises can influence their firm’s CSR reputations, which can in turn influence investor judgments and decision making. Following …


Heads Will Roll! Routes To Effective Trust Repair In The Aftermath Of A Ceo Transgression, Donald L. Ferrin, Cecily D. Cooper, Kurt T. Dirks, Peter H. Kim Jan 2018

Heads Will Roll! Routes To Effective Trust Repair In The Aftermath Of A Ceo Transgression, Donald L. Ferrin, Cecily D. Cooper, Kurt T. Dirks, Peter H. Kim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

CEO transgressions are a common storyline in today's business press. Such incidents result in the need to repair trust for both the CEO and the organisation that the CEO leads. Existing empirical research on trust repair has focused primarily on interpersonal trust, resulting in a body of knowledge that provides many insights to the errant CEO but few insights for those who aim to repair trust in the organisation. Since organisations also need to regain the trust of stakeholders after a CEO transgression, research on organisational trust repair is clearly warranted. Organisations have options for trust repair that are not …


Is Corporate Social Responsibility An Agency Problem?, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog Jan 2018

Is Corporate Social Responsibility An Agency Problem?, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This chapter examines whether CSR investments occur mostly in firms with severe agency problems, which suggests that CSR is an agency issue. We demonstrate that this is not the case: CSR investments and performance are higher when dividends are high, leverage is high, cash flows and cash holdings are low, and when there is a high managerial pay-for-performance sensitivity. All these variables combined represent managerial discipline in terms of corporate investing. We also document that better legal protection of shareholder rights is positively related to CSR performance. This implies that when shareholders are more powerful relative to the management, the …


When Corporate Social Responsibility Motivates Employee Citizenship Behavior: The Sensitizing Role Of Task Significance, Madeline Ong, David M. Mayer, P. Tost Leigh, Ned Wellman Jan 2018

When Corporate Social Responsibility Motivates Employee Citizenship Behavior: The Sensitizing Role Of Task Significance, Madeline Ong, David M. Mayer, P. Tost Leigh, Ned Wellman

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Scholars have proposed that organizations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts are often positively associated with employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) and have invoked identity-based mechanisms to explain this relationship. Complementing these perspectives, we develop a CSR sensitivity framework that explains how task significance, a micro-level job characteristic, can sensitize employees to their organizations’ macro-level CSR efforts, thereby strengthening the association between CSR and OCB. Across three field studies, we find that CSR and task significance interact to predict OCB, such that an organization’s CSR is more positively associated with OCB among employees who report higher task significance than among those …