The Special Issue Symposium for the China Journal of Accounting Research (CJAR) was held on March 22-23, 2013 in Zhuhai, a beautiful coastal city, China. The Symposium was organized by Xiamen University. More than fifty faculties and students from Mainland China and Hong Kong attended the conference.
Professor Qiang Cheng of Singapore Management University addressed the opening ceremony. He expressed his warm welcome and sincere thanks to all participants for their continuous and tremendous support to CJAR. Following the opening ceremony, the Symposium was organized into two parts: keynote speech and paper presentation & discussion session.
Professor Suresh Radhakrishnan, from The University of Texas at Dallas delivered the keynote speech “China Accounting Research: Going Yonder and Further”. Professor Radhakrishnan introduced the mystery of Chinese development from both historical and institutional perspectives, and pointed out the direction of future academic research in China. Professor Radhakrishnan believed that China has always been considered to be a representative of the weak institutional environment, and the decades of economic growth in China is still a mystery to the outside world. Why does China, a country with weak institutional environment, have such an astonishing development? Professor Radhakrishnan suggested that a possible explanation is history. From the historical perspective, China always used the institution of centralization and regional decentralization. Under this system, the promotion tournament, as an incentive system governing Chinese local officials, is a critical source of China’s miraculous growth. Based on the mentioned above, Professor Radhakrishnan pointed out some possible directions for the future research, including the relationship between performance and promotion, the selection and the attributes of performance indicators. All participants benefited a lot from his deeply analysis to the Chinese institution and research directions in the future.
Furthermore, Professor Qiang Cheng of Singapore Management University delivered the keynote speech “Family Firm Research”. Professor Qiang Cheng introduced the features and the research achievements of family firm in United States. Professor Qiang Cheng suggested that comparing with the other big shareholders, the ownership held by the family members was more concentrated, the degree of ownership diversification was lower, the horizon of investment was longer and family members participated more actively in the management, all these features mentioned above gave the family members greater motivations and more favorite ways to affect the firms’ decision-making. Then, from the viewpoint of valuation premium, agency cost and accounting, Professor Qiang Cheng introduced the research achievements about family firm. The speech delivered by Professor Qiang Cheng gave us a clear view of research status related with family firms in United States, and let us understand the unique features of Chinese family firms, all of these promoted the study of family firms in the future.
The second part of the Symposium was paper presentation and discussion sessions. Subject to several rounds of review and careful screening, 8 papers including 3 English papers and 5 Chinese papers were finally accepted by presentations. The research topics were widely spread in the areas of accounting standards, executive compensation, IPO pricing, political consumption, audit quality, corporate governance etc. The Symposium invited highly regarded scholars to serve as discussants, including Prof. Xijia Su, Prof. Zhaoyang Gu, Prof. Xingqiang Du, Prof. Donghui Wu, and allocated enough time for the authors and discussants to present and exchange their viewpoints. After the meeting, the participants expressed that the high quality of papers and the discussion between authors and discussants is very instructive and helpful.
CJAR, focusing on publishing China-related accounting research, funded in Hong Kong by Sun Yat-sen University and City University of Hong Kong in 2008, is the first double-blind refereed journal of accounting in the English language in China. Operating in the mode of regular international academic journal, CJAR is published by Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of scientific books and reference works. Since the beginning of 2012, CJAR has been published quarterly. The co-editors of CJAR are dedicated to get CJAR included in the journal list of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) in the following three years. The annual CJAR Research Symposium serves two objectives: 1) To encourage active submissions of quality papers to CJAR; and 2) To provide an interactive platform for scholars interested in China-related accounting issues to exchange interesting research ideas and to promote worldwide recognition of high-quality theoretical and empirical research of an indigenous nature about China.
Prof. Radhakrishnan(left) and Prof. Qiang Cheng(right)
Prof. Donghui Wu(left) and Prof. Kun Wang(right)
Prof. Zhaoyang Gu(right)
Prof. Chaopeng Wu(left)
Prof. Feng Liu(left) and Prof. Qiang Cheng(right)
Prof. Xijia Su
