Hometown Ties and the Quality of Government Monitoring: Evidence from Rotation of Chinese Auditors
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · 2021 · Jian Chu、Raymond Fisman、Songtao Tan、Yongxiang Wang
中文摘要
审计是减少政府投资领域腐败的标准机制。然而，审计本身的质量可能受到审计者与被审计对象之间关系的影响。我们研究中国的省级审计长在评估其家乡的地级市政府时是否表现出更宽松的态度。在城市固定效应的设定中——共同背景的作用由审计人员的更替来识别——我们发现，老乡审计人员查出的可疑资金少38%。这一老乡效应在审计人员的整个任期内基本相似，而对于因市级主要官员离任而由省级组织部门下令开展的审计，该效应有所减弱。我们认为，我们的发现最合理的解释是对地方官员的宽容，而非出于对老乡审计人员执行更严格这一担忧的内生反应。我们还用企业层面的分析补充这些城市层面的发现：分析国有企业（SOE）通过真实活动操纵实施的盈余操纵（这是会计文献中的一种标准度量），我们发现此类操纵在老乡审计人员任内更高。
Abstract
Audits are a standard mechanism for reducing corruption in government investments. The quality of audits themselves, however, may be affected by relationships between auditor and target. We study whether provincial chief auditors in China show greater leniency in evaluating prefecture governments in their hometowns. In city-fixed-effect specifications—in which the role of shared background is identified from auditor turnover—we show that hometown auditors find 38 percent less in questionable monies. This hometown effect is similar throughout the auditor’s tenure and is diminished for audits ordered by the provincial Organization Department as a result of the departure of top city officials. We argue that our findings are most readily explained by leniency toward local officials rather than an endogenous response to concerns of better enforcement by hometown auditors. We complement these city-level findings with firm-level analyses of earnings manipulation by state-owned enterprises (SOE) via real activity manipulation (a standard measure from the accounting literature), which we show is higher under hometown auditors.