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What’s in a Surname? The Effect of Auditor-CEO Surname Sharing on Financial Misstatement

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“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”.

“Romeo and Juliet” by W. William Shakespeare.

Abstract

This study examines the influence of auditor-CEO surname sharing (ACSS) on financial misstatement and further investigates whether the above effect depends on hometown relationship and the rarity of surnames, respectively. Using hand-collected data from China, the findings show that ACSS is significantly positively related to financial misstatement, suggesting that the auditor-CEO ancestry membership elicits the collusion and increases the likelihood of financial misstatement. Moreover, ACSS based upon hometown relationship leads to significantly higher likelihood of financial misstatement, compared with ACSS without hometown relationship. Furthermore, the positive relation between ACSS and financial misstatement is more pronounced for rare surnames than for common surnames. The above findings are robust to sensitivity tests on the basis of different measures of ACSS and financial misstatement, and my conclusions are still valid after using the propensity score matching approach to address the endogeneity concerns.

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Notes

  1. Auditor–client relation refers to the cases in which former audit partners of an accounting firm serve as a client firm's senior directors or top managers. The data on auditor–client relation can be obtained by checking the resumes of senior directors or top managers, which are provided in China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database.

  2. In most Asian countries such as China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam and several European and Latin American countries, one's surname is placed before his/her given name. However, in most Western countries, one's surname is accustomed to being placed after his/her given name (Doll 1992). It is common that a person has the sole surname, but a Spaniard or Portuguese may own two or more surnames. (In rare cases, people do not have to have a surname.)

  3. In China, at least two auditors (three auditors in some cases) are required to sign their full names in the client's audited financial statements. One of them is known as the engagement (field) auditor, and the other is the review auditor.

  4. As a result, the vast majority of Chinese people in contemporary society—both men and women, before marriage and after marriage—do not change their surnames (Bai and Kung 2014).

  5. In a guanxi-based society, individual behavior is shaped by interpersonal relationship, and thus, some transactions depend on personal agreements and private information, rather than formal contracts (Li 2003). As a comparison, a rule-based society emphasizes publicly verifiable information and the contractual spirit.

  6. As a comparison, in most countries, researchers cannot obtain individual auditor-specific data such as names and other demographic features of the signing auditors or audit partners. To the best of my knowledge, data on individual auditors can be obtained only in few countries or regions such as mainland China, Chinese Taiwan, and Australia.

  7. In European countries, surnames are associated with a medieval naming movement, which aimed at coping with some situations in which several people had an identical name.

  8. According to the social identity theory, “categorization” implies that people classify themselves into a group based on some common features and "identification" means that people consider themselves to have common characteristics of a given group (Tajfel 1970).

  9. Please note that results using 70 and 80% as thresholds of the cumulative percentage are qualitatively similar to those using 75% as the threshold. In addition, please note that there are very few firm-year observations for ACSS_RARE if we adopt stricter thresholds.

  10. Sample period begins from 2006 because the data of school ties and hometown relation can be obtained from 2006.

  11. Liu et al. (2012) identify the measure of isonymy, proxied by the surname proximity across different provinces in China. Directors on corporate boards are likely to be chosen locally (Knyazeva et al. 2009, 2013), so surname proximity can embody the isonymy in an area where a client firm is located. The same can be applied to audit firms.

  12. The matching range of ± 0.01 is chosen in order to retain as many treated firm-year observations as possible, or else it will lead to lose too many treated firms as unmatchable. As a matter of fact, ± 0.01 is a generally accepted standard for the propensity score matching process (Dehejia and Wahba 2002).

  13. That is, one treated firm is deleted because it cannot be matched. If the caliper is tightened (e.g., ± 0.005), results remain qualitatively similar to those using a range of ± 0.01, although the number of the treated firms varies accordingly.

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Funding

I highly appreciate constructive comments and informative guidance from Prof. Steven Dellaportas (the Section Editor) and two anonymous reviewers and many valuable suggestions from Shaojuan Lai, Quan Zeng, Hongmei Pei, Fei Hou, Junting Zhou, Hao Xiong, Jingwei Yin, Miaowei Peng, and participants of my presentations at Xiamen University and Anhui University. Prof. Xingqiang Du acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (the approval number: NSFC-71790602; NSFC-71572162), the Key Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Science in Ministry of Education (the approval number: 16JJD790032), and the Training Program of Fujian Excellent Talents in University (FETU).

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  1. Accounting Department, School of Management, Xiamen University, No. 422, Siming South Road, Xiamen, 361005, Fujian, China

    Xingqiang Du

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Du, X. What’s in a Surname? The Effect of Auditor-CEO Surname Sharing on Financial Misstatement. J Bus Ethics 158, 849–874 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3762-5

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