第二百一十八期财务与会计学术论坛

时间:20161125日(周五)14:30-1600

 

地点:嘉庚二号楼501教室

 

题目:Languages and Corporate Savings Behavior

 

报告人Feida Zhang, Senior Lecturer of Accounting, Murdoch University

 

主持人:Jinshuai Hu, Associate Professor of Accounting, Xiamen University

2016-11-25 1.jpg 

论文摘要:

 

Speakers of strong future time reference (FTR) languages (e.g., English) are required to grammatically distinguish between future and present events, while speakers of weak-FTR languages (e.g., Chinese) are not. We hypothesize that speaking about the future in the present tense may result in beliefs that adverse credit events as more imminent. Consistent with such a linguistic hypothesis, weak-FTR language firms are found to have higher precautionary cash holdings. We report additional supportive results from changes of the relative importance of different languages in a country's business domain, evidence from within one country with several distinct languages, and results related to changes following a severe financial crisis. Our evidence introduces a new explanation for heterogeneity in corporate savings behavior, provides insights about belief formation in firms, and adds to research on the effects of languages on economic outcomes.

 

报告人简介:

 

Frank(Feida) Zhang earned his PhD in Accounting from the Hong Kong Baptist University.  Frank has been involved in research on financial accounting information, corporate disclosure, corporate finance, corporate governance, and capital markets. His research leads to more than twenty papers published in refereed international and Chinese journals, including Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Journal of international Financial Management & Accounting, European Accounting Review, 《管理世界》,《会计研究》, and so on.  Frank presented at conferences in the U.S., Asia and Australia and won Best Paper Award from AAA annual conference, AFAANZ annual conference, and International Academic Business Conference. In addition, Frank has gotten research grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (three times), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong, and so on.

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