Hometown Ties and the Quality of Government Monitoring: Evidence from Rotation of Chinese Auditors

Jian Chu, Raymond Fisman, Songtao Tan and Yongxiang Wang

No 27032, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 Organizations 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 via real activity manipulation (a standard measure from the accounting literature), which we show is higher under hometown auditors.

JEL-codes: D73 G3 H83 M42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-cna, nep-gen, nep-tra and nep-ure
Note: CF DEV PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Jian Chu & Raymond Fisman & Songtao Tan & Yongxiang Wang, 2021. "Hometown Ties and the Quality of Government Monitoring: Evidence from Rotation of Chinese Auditors," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol 13(3), pages 176-201.

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