Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
Accounting information is the cornerstone of the effective operation and healthy development of the capital market, as well as an important window for the outside world to understand whether the management of a listed company is conscientiously fulfilling its functions and improving its financial returns. Specifically, high-quality accounting information can not only improve the pricing efficiency of the capital market, prevent financial fraud and fraud, but also assist regulatory authorities in better managing the capital market; It can also reduce information asymmetry between listed companies and the outside world, help companies gain recognition from investors and creditors, and provide them with more key resources. Therefore, accounting information disclosure quality (AIDQ) is crucial for the capital market and the future development of enterprises (Biddle et al., 2009; Liu & Wang, 2021). However, in recent years, there have been frequent incidents of accounting information fraud in Chinese listed companies. For example, in 2019, Kangdexin and Kangmei Pharmaceutical used fictitious sales business and inflated profits to embellish their financial situation and operating results, ultimately leading to a “explosion” and causing hundreds of thousands of investors to lose their money; In 2020, Evergrande used leverage manipulation to hide its debts and further defrauded loans from banks and other credit institutions, with a total accumulated amount of up to RMB 2 trillion, triggering shocks and panic in the capital market. Therefore, how to promote the disclosure of high-quality accounting information by listed companies has become a key issue that academics and practitioners have to face. It is worth noting that it is meaningless to solely study accounting numbers and accounting systems without considering human behavior (Wu, 2021). Even in the context of the widespread application of emerging digital technologies such as digital systems and artificial intelligence in the financial field, the element of “human” is still one of the important factors that cannot be ignored when considering the effectiveness of accounting information (Binh et al., 2022; Fülöp et al., 2022, 2023). The reason is that accounting information, as a business language, always comes into being with the commercial activities of human beings.
Managers are the leading suppliers of various business affairs information of listed companies, in the process of transforming economic business into accounting information and then generating financial reports for external disclosure, managers hold the key information discretion, and their behavioral decisions will affect the AIDQ of listed companies (Blankespoor et al., 2023; Driouchi et al., 2022; Jouber, 2022; Magerakis & Habib, 2022; Wu et al., 2022). Based on the rational man assumption, traditional economic theory considers managers to be homogeneous. However, with the rise of behavioral finance, more and more scholars have found that there are obvious individual differences among managers (Tran, 2022; D. Wang et al., 2021), and the elements of their heterogeneous characteristics will not only the possible representation and orientation of dealing with personal and family affairs, but also play a leading role in organizational decision-making (Ben-David et al., 2013; Hambrick & Mason, 1984). Previous research focused on analyzing external heterogeneity characteristics such as age and education level, concluded that with changes in external demographic characteristics, managerial behavior decisions will correspondingly change, thereby affecting corporate performance. However, no matter what kind of extrinsic characteristics, they all ultimately come down to the analysis around managers’ intrinsic heterogeneity (Zhang et al., 2019). As an important inherent heterogeneity characteristic of managers, managerial ability has persistent and stable characteristics. It is the psychological condition for managers to successfully and effectively complete enterprise decision-making and planning, organization, leadership, control, and innovation activities, ensure orderly and stable operation of enterprises, and create value for enterprises (Chaigneau & Sahuguet, 2023; Pae, 2021; Tsai et al., 2022; Welch & Yoon, 2023). It is also an key guarantee for firms to implement financial activities that meet the needs of development strategies. Regarding this, some scholars have pointed out that managerial ability can have a significant impact on corporate performance (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), cost stickiness (Zhang et al., 2019), earnings management (Demerjian et al., 2013), stock price crashes (Zhou and Zhang, 2019), etc. However, unfortunately, these studies have not further analyzed whether and how managerial ability can affect AIDQ, and there is a huge theoretical gap, which is seriously inconsistent with the important role that managers play in the process of accounting information disclosure. Especially with the increasing complexity of corporate financial and accounting activities, managerial ability has become an important human capital strategic resource. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the path to improve AIDQ from the perspective of managerial ability, in order to more accurately guide listed companies to fully disclose.
Internal control emphasizes the deep embedding of systems and the automatic cultivation of habits, which runs through many matters such as personnel promotion and budget execution in enterprises, and its core idea is checks and balances and supervision (Chan et al., 2021; Frazer, 2020; Khurana & Kyung, 2021; J. Liu et al., 2022), which is an important institutional design for enterprises to standardize many economic business processing processes such as cash expenditures, and impairment provision, reasonably ensure AIDQ (Doyle et al., 2007). As the main designer and implementer of the internal control system, the managers’ willingness to construct and implement internal control is closely related to the effectiveness of internal control (Liu et al., 2021), so can managerial ability promote the improvement of internal control effectiveness? One viewpoint is that the stronger the managerial ability, the phenomenon of managers is above the internal control system will occur, established rules can not play the expected specific effect, unable to incorporate managers into the behavioral framework stipulated by the system, resulting in internal control becoming meaningless (Zheng & Zheng, 2013); while another viewpoint is that managers with strong ability will promote the construction of the internal control system, so as to clarify the behavioral boundaries and responsibility scope of various governance subjects and improve the effectiveness of internal control (Xu, 2017). The reason for this disagreement is mainly because of the lack of the necessary institutional environmental conditions for control. We argue that with the regulators’ mandatory promotion of internal control system construction and the gradual incorporation of the implementation effectiveness of the internal control system into the performance appraisal system of executives, managers will prudently consider the current supervisory environment and cater for the policy requirements to promote the construction of the internal control system (Chen & Ma, 2021; Gong et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2021). In this regard, we introduce the mediation effect test procedure to analyze the role of internal control effectiveness in the process of managerial ability to influence accounting information disclosure, with a view to revealing the micro-influence path of managerial ability to influence accounting information disclosure.
Meanwhile, as an important part of the governance system of listed companies, different equity structure plays different governance roles and profoundly affects the monitoring and restraining mechanism of enterprises (Shao, 2015; Tian et al., 2021). State owned enterprises, based on established institutional arrangements, face problems such as multiple agents, administrative management, single promotion, and owner vacancy. It is difficult to clearly define the rights and responsibilities of the subjects, and often make decisions in groups or layer by layer (Lin et al., 2024; Ye et al., 2021). This not only leads to missed business opportunities and delays in effective investment timelines, but also makes it difficult to trace the fault responsibility of decision-makers, which may increase the opportunistic behavior of managers and damage accounting information disclosure. The pledge of controlling shareholder equity means that the controlling shareholder puts some or all of their equity in the capital market risk. Once the company experiences negative news such as financial fraud, its stock price will accelerate the decline, which may lead to the forced sale and liquidation of the pledged stocks. At this time, the controlling shareholder may suffer the biggest loss and is unable to intervene in this crazy selling behavior. As a result, it no longer has control over the listed company (Gu & Bian, 2021). Therefore, under the pressure of external capital markets, controlling shareholders who pledge their stocks may increase their supervision of managers, strictly review accounting information, and avoid low-quality accounting information affecting their own stock prices. The concentration of equity reflects the degree of control of major shareholders over the company. A higher concentration of equity can play a supervisory role in managers, suppress their self-interest behavior (Hu et al., 2023), and compress the space for managers to manipulate accounting information. Based on the principal-agent relationship, managers often focus on short-term benefits in order to maintain their positions and compensation, and deliberately adjust profits, which can easily increase the first type of agency costs and reduce AIDQ. A higher concentration of equity can concentrate the supervisory power on managers, preventing the weakening of supervision on managers due to the dispersion of equity. In view of this, we examine the possible impact of equity structure characteristics on managers’ accounting disclosure behavior from three aspects: the nature of property rights, controlling shareholders’ equity pledge, and equity concentration, in order to clarify the governance effects played by different equity structure characteristics.
Distinguishing from existing studies, our paper’s incremental contributions include: Firstly, most existing literature focuses on the role of external characteristics of managers in corporate behavior decision-making. This study focuses on analyzing the internal psychological conditions of managers, directly entering into the analysis of their abilities, and further exploring the impact of this internal psychological condition on AIDQ. This extends the economic consequences of managerial ability and expands the human factors influencing AIDQ. Secondly, by testing the mediation effect regression model, the specific role of internal control effectiveness in the relationship between managerial ability and AIDQ was clarified, and the mechanism and transmission path of the impact of human factors of managerial ability on institutional accounting information disclosure were clearly depicted. Thirdly, incorporating the characteristics of equity structure such as property rights, controlling shareholders’ equity pledge, and equity concentration into the overall analysis framework, and exploring in depth the impact of these differences in equity structure on the relationship between managerial ability and AIDQ, providing micro level empirical evidence to improve the effectiveness of corporate governance based on equity structure design, strengthen the positive role of managerial ability, alleviate the first type of agency contradiction, and promote the improvement of AIDQ.
The rest of this paper are: Section 2 introduces literature review and research hypotheses. Section 3 introduces the research design, including sample selection and data sources, variable definitions, and model construction. Section 4 conducted empirical results analysis, including descriptive statistical analysis and regression analysis. Section 5 mainly introduces the heterogeneity analysis of equity structure characteristics and robustness test. Section 6 is the conclusion of the paper, including the main research conclusions, implications, management recommendations, shortcomings, and general directions for further improvement in the future.
Literature Review and Research Hypotheses
Literature Review
Accounting information disclosure can strengthen communication between listed companies, investors, regulatory authorities, and other stakeholders. It is a prerequisite for the sound and orderly development of the capital market, and an important basis for evaluating the investment value and future prospects of listed companies. It has received strong attention from all sectors of society. At present, many scholars have conducted extensive research on the economic consequences of accounting information disclosure, and found that high-quality accounting information disclosure can reduce the cost of capital use at the micro level of enterprises (Lambert et al., 2007), increase investment in main business (Amiran et al., 2022), expand enterprise scale and accelerate enterprise growth (Iatridis, 2008). In the capital market, effective accounting information disclosure can provide investors with more incremental and useful information, improve the scientificity of investment decisions (Cascino et al., 2021). At the same time, high-quality accounting information disclosure is conducive to enhancing the synergy between financial information and stock prices (Arya et al., 2017), further reducing the synchronicity of listed company stock prices, reducing the probability of stock price crashes (Du et al., 2016), and helping regulatory authorities better manage capital market risks. Overall, high-quality accounting information disclosure can enable different stakeholders to understand the company’s situation in depth, expand the information gain effect, have a positive impact on the development of enterprises, and also help promote the effective operation of the capital market. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a special study on how to improve AIDQ to better serve the healthy development of listed companies and capital market.
In addition, from the perspective of the pre influencing factors of AIDQ, existing research explores the influencing factors from both internal and external perspectives. In terms of external factors of enterprises, they mainly focus on economic development (Kang & Hoong Pang, 2005), institutional reform (Khanagha et al., 2011), accounting compliance regulation (Al-Akra et al., 2010), etc. Specifically, the higher the level of economic development and marketization, the stricter the supervision of listed companies, which will promote the disclosure of higher quality accounting information by listed companies. In terms of internal factors of enterprises, the main focus is on corporate governance models (Yang et al., 2023), subjective willingness of information disclosure subjects (Alfaraih & Alanezi, 2011), and customer concentration (Ren et al., 2023). These studies have found that an open and shared corporate governance model and strong willingness to disclose information can improve AIDQ for listed companies, but higher customer concentration is not conducive to promoting sufficient information disclosure by enterprises. According to the relevant literature above, it can be seen that there is a broad consensus on the importance of AIDQ (Amiran et al., 2022; Arya et al., 2017; Cascino et al., 2021; Du et al., 2016; Iatridis, 2008; Lambert et al., 2007), that high-quality accounting information disclosure can not only promote enterprise development, but also promote the healthy growth of the capital market. However, how to improve AIDQ is still in the exploratory stage. Although some scholars have explored the pre influencing factors of improving AIDQ, they mainly focus on the construction of external regulatory systems and the design of internal corporate governance mechanisms (Al-Akra et al., 2010; Khanagha et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2023), ignoring the necessary role of the decision-making and executing entities of information disclosure in listed companies - managers, especially managerial ability is a prerequisite for managers to handle complex economic transactions, and it should not be ignored.
Meanwhile, looking at the existing research on the economic consequences of managerial ability, most scholars mainly focus on enterprise performance (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), cost stickiness (Zhang et al., 2019), income smoothing (Baik et al., 2020), earnings management (Demerjian et al., 2013), stock price collapse (Zhou and Zhang, 2019), and other aspects. They believe that managerial ability can improve business efficiency, control operating costs, and thereby improve enterprise performance. At the same time, managerial ability can also incorporate more forward-looking information about cash flows into current earnings (Baik et al., 2020), reduce the degree of earnings management, further communicate with the outside world, and reduce stock collapse risk. Undoubtedly, these findings provide useful theoretical support for a deeper understanding of the economic impact of managerial ability at the enterprise level. However, unfortunately, few scholars have paid attention to the potential benefits that managerial ability may bring to AIDQ, which is seriously inconsistent with the important role of managerial ability in the process of accounting information disclosure. There is an urgent need for theoretical enrichment and filling.
Research Hypotheses
According to the upper echelon theory, heterogeneity conditions such as age, education level, and tenure, represented by external demographic background characteristics of managers, are closely related to corporate strategic decision-making and operational performance (Hambrick & Mason, 1984). As age, education level, and tenure change, the psychological conditions of managers will exhibit a cumulative effect, gradually increasing relevant experience and changing their original cognition and views. The internal cognition and values of managers are the prerequisite basic elements for judging business opportunities and handling economic business. Managers will consciously or unconsciously project their personal wishes and psychological preferences to the top-level development strategy choices of the enterprise, thereby differentiating the investment and financing behavior and business performance of the enterprise. It can be seen that regardless of the external characteristics, they ultimately rely on the analysis of the internal psychological factors of managers (Zhang et al., 2019). Especially as a necessary economic activity of enterprises, accounting information disclosure is not only influenced by objective factors such as organizational level, but also by human factors of managers (Brockman et al., 2019; García-Sánchez et al., 2020; Howard et al., 2021). In the changing market environment, managerial ability, as a prerequisite for managers to complete complex economic management activities, plays a key role in professional activities such as accounting estimation judgment, accounting policy selection, and economic business processing (Andreou et al., 2017; Bonsall et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2015; Kiss et al., 2020; Koester et al., 2017; Pham & Tran, 2020).
On the one hand, managerial ability has a “governance effect” on AIDQ. According to the behavioral consistency theory, due to the influence of long-term internal psychological conditions, an individual’s personality has stability, and their cognition, emotions, consciousness, and behavior are adapted to each other, often with high coordination and stability. It is generally not easy to change without being violently impacted by external events. Therefore, the behavior and personality traits exhibited by individuals in different situations are consistent (Epstein, 1979). For example, the accumulated experience and lessons from financial crises can form strong psychological inertia, shape individual beliefs and cognition, and lead to cautious reactions and judgments in many situations. Specifically for managers, those with strong ability will have corresponding positive behavior patterns, which can promote the disclosure of high-quality accounting information, and use this as a starting point to engage in substantive communication and positive interaction with stakeholders who are concerned about the development of the enterprise, reducing the degree of information asymmetry with the outside world. Firstly, managers with strong ability have higher professional competence and can effectively integrate resources (Fernando et al., 2020; Gul et al., 2018; Lin et al., 2021; Yung & Nguyen, 2020), handle complex economic transactions, and generate high-quality accounting information. While managers with low ability have limited competence to deal with complex information (Zhang et al., 2019), they do not have comparative advantages in information collection, processing and interpretation, and they cannot accurately predict enterprise risks and take effective measures to cope with them, which will increase the likelihood of enterprise bankruptcy (Leverty & Grace, 2012). Secondly, managers with strong ability have low job switching costs, weaker incentives to commit fraud, and a smaller possibility of financial manipulation. Wang et al. (2020) point out that management value creation is lower in the low-capability case, and job promotion pressure makes it possible for management to have motives to hide bad news or anticipation management. Similarly, Wang et al. (2017) found that managers with strong ability would have less financial fraud, and Demerjian et al. (2013) found that the more competent the manager, the higher the quality of the firm’s surplus would be, which could effectively reduce information asymmetry. Finally, managers with strong ability are more capable of learning (He et al., 2016) and can correct their cognitive deficiencies in a timely manner. With the continuous emergence of the new economy, managers with strong ability are more adept at coping with such changes, can actively learn new accounting standards, improve their own risk control ability, and disclose accounting information in a timely manner in accordance with regulations.
On the other hand, managerial ability has a “reputation effect” on AIDQ. Based on reputation theory, reputation, as the overall evaluation of an individual’s quality, ability, and behavior by the public or peers, is generally classified as an informal institutional governance element. It acts on individuals through word-of-mouth, reflecting the basic views and attitudes of the industry toward individuals, and can gain public trust and recognition based on this. At the same time, the reputation mechanism will compensate for the shortcomings of institutional evaluation and supervision. Specifically, a good reputation will win social recognition for managers, increase their popularity, and lead to considerable competitive salaries and more employment opportunities (Fisher & Heinkel, 2008; Gomes, 2000; Johnson et al., 1993). At the same time, the reputation mechanism also punishes managers for improper behaviors and negatively affects their job promotion and salary compensation. Therefore, the reputation mechanism will form intangible constraints and incentives for managers, guiding managers to focus on long-term goals and reduce financial fraud. Baik et al. (2011) found that the market will have a greater response to the financial reports issued by capable managers, so capable managers will take the financial report as an effective way to signal their own capabilities, and will treat the issuance of financial reports prudently. That is to say, managers with strong ability pay more attention to reputation as an “intangible asset” and have strong incentives to signal their competence, and tend to disclose high-quality accounting information in a timely manner to the outside world, so as to send positive signals to prove their talent and value in the company. Especially in terms of personal behavior, managers with strong ability will be more caring of their own “feathers” abide by the code of professional ethics, and be more cautious in accounting treatment of economic transactions, thereby reducing self interested behaviors such as accounting manipulation and performance whitewash. They will disclose accounting information in accordance with regulations, minimizing the negative impact on their reputation, and further strengthening external recognition. Accordingly, we propose the following hypothesis:
With the regulatory authorities mandatory requirements for listed companies to promote the construction of internal control and increase punishment for financial fraud and deliberate violations of listed companies, how to weigh the pressure of shareholders, the market, regulation and other parties to achieve due diligence and exemption, and maintain the healthy and stable development of the company has become an important topic that managers have to face. A sound and effective internal control system is advantageous to clarifying the boundaries of the positions, powers, responsibilities, and interests of managers of listed companies, which can provide a reasonable guarantee for the lawful and compliant operation of enterprises and the disclosure of high-quality accounting information. According to management improvement hypothesis, managerial ability plays a significant role in the cultivation of corporate competitive potential and the growth of national economy (Aghion et al., 2001). Managers with strong ability are more concerned about the construction of internal control system, and their subjective initiative factor plays a key role in it (Liu et al., 2021), which can effectively improve the effectiveness of internal control, and make individual responsibility clearer. Further, good internal control can regulate business and financial processing procedures, effective checks and balances and supervision of the whole process of enterprise management, compression of financial fraud space, reduce the possibility of financial fraud, and ensure that accounting information is fully disclosed with the participation of all responsible parties.
In the process of internal control design, managers with strong ability are more efficient in prediction and integration, and their decision-making is more forward-looking and realistic (He & Liu, 2015). They can comprehensively consider potential risk factors and enhance the understanding of the institutional environment among all employees of the enterprise through systematic institutional design. Xu (2017) believes that managers with strong ability have more comprehensive cognition and clearer judgment on internal control embedded in the daily business activities within the enterprise, and can establish internal control systems according to corporate specific situation to enhance the level of internal control. Shen and Guo (2017) believe that excellent managers look at the long term and make long-term plans to promote the two-way substantive integration of internal control and company business. Therefore, managers with strong ability are able to ensure AIDQ in the dimension of ex-ante prevention through the forward-looking design of internal control.
In the process of internal control implementation, managers with strong ability can promote the implementation of internal control system, strengthen business risk assessment, ensure the legal compliance of business and financial processing, prevent accounting errors and financial fraud, and adjust the internal control dynamically according to the actual situation, timely communicate with the outside world in order to reduce information asymmetry (Chen & Sang, 2021). He and Liu (2015) pointed out that managers with strong ability will form effective internal controls to ensure the implementation and execution of established internal control systems, control enterprise risks, and further reduce audit costs. Therefore, managers with strong ability can ensure AIDQ through the effective implementation of internal control and the dimension of in-process supervision.
In the process of internal control modification, managers with strong ability are more likely to identify process system deficiencies, fully assess changes in internal and external environmental risk (Shen & Guo, 2017), and make timely modifications and corrections to the internal control system, so as to make it fit with corporate actual business, and to avoid the situation of internal control idling and operational failure. Therefore, managers with strong ability are able to ensure AIDQ in the post-feedback dimension through the identification and correction of internal control deficiencies. In summary, we argue that in the process of managerial ability to influence AIDQ, internal control effectiveness plays an mediating effect, that is, the stronger the ability of managers, the more they will pay attention to the construction of internal control, improve the effectiveness of internal control, and then standardize the business and financial procedures to improve AIDQ. Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis:
To further present the theoretical framework and conceptual model of this study clearly, we have drawn a theoretical framework diagram of this study based on theoretical analysis of hypotheses, as shown in Figure 1.
Theoretical framework.
Research Design
Sample Selection and Data Sources
We use second-hand data for analysis, and select the A-share listed companies on the ShenZhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) from 2015 to 2022 as the research sample and process them as follows: excluding the financial industry, listed companies with abnormal and missing financial data, excluding listed companies that are ST or *ST in the observation period, excluding companies listed for less than 1 year, and performing the extreme value of variables that are greater than 99% and less than 1% quartile Winsorize shrinking treatment. The raw data required to calculate managerial ability comes from financial statements, financial indicator analysis, industry statistics, investment, and financing related data modules in the CSMAR and RESSET databases. The raw rating of AIDQ comes from the evaluation results of listed company information disclosure published on the official website of SZSE. The acquisition path is “information disclosure - regulatory information disclosure - information disclosure evaluation,” and the internal control effectiveness data comes from the internal control index of Chinese listed companies published by DIBO Company. The raw data required to calculate a series of other control variables mainly comes from the financial statement module, governance structure module, and financial indicator analysis module in the CSMAR database, and is then calculated using Excel 2016 and Stata 16.0.
The reason for obtaining relevant data from CSMAR database and RESSET database is that CSMAR database is the first economic and financial database independently developed by ShenZhen Xishima Company based on China’s reality and advanced database architecture concepts such as CRSP. Starting from the needs of academic research, this database covers 19 major series such as company research and money market research, and has rich data reserves. It has been widely used in the study of China’s economy and management issues. RESSET database is currently one of the most stable and convenient research databases in China, providing support for empirical research, model testing, and other data platforms. The database ranks among the top in terms of evaluation indicators and standards in terms of data content, data quality, etc. in China, providing strong data support for financial and economic research.
Definition of Variables
(1) Explanatory variable: managerial ability, drawing inspiration from Demerjian et al. (2013), Zhang and Jiang (2015), and Zhang et al. (2019), we define managerial ability as the ability of managers to effectively utilize existing company resources to create output under other predetermined conditions. Although some scholars have used methods such as media attention (Garvey & Milbourn, 2003), historical rate of return (Fee & Hadlock, 2003), and total compensation (Terviö, 2008) to measure managerial ability, these measurement methods all have significant noise. For example, media attention tends to favor negative news mining reports on individuals, and its focus is not always on the achievements of managers in business management. The stock market return rate is not only influenced by the performance of micro companies, but also to a large extent by macroeconomic factors. Using total compensation to measure managerial ability does not take into account differences in specific factors such as company size and industry background. According to Demerjian et al. (2013) and Zhang et al. (2019), operational efficiency of enterprises comes from two aspects. On the one hand, it brings non-human efficiency due to inherent organizational characteristics such as enterprise size, and on the other hand, it brings human efficiency to managers. Managers with higher ability will bring greater efficiency improvement to the enterprise. Based on this approach, Demerjian et al. (2013), Zhang and Jiang (2015), and Zhang et al. (2019) used a two-stage model combining DEA and Tobit model to measure managerial ability. The first stage is mainly based on the idea of optimal input-output, using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method and DEAP 2.1 analysis software to calculate the maximum operational efficiency of the enterprise; In the second stage, the maximum operational efficiency will be distinguished between organizational characteristics and managerial factors, and the Tobit model will be used to regress and calculate managerial ability using Stata 16.0 statistical software. The specific method is as follows:
Stage 1: The maximum operational efficiency value is calculated using DEA. The DEA method is mainly used to compare the relationship between multiple inputs and outputs of Decision Making Units (DMUs), determine the efficiency values between them, identify relative effective and ineffective units, conduct comparative analysis, and propose improvement methods for ineffective units in an attempt to maximize the efficiency of DMUs. Specifically for enterprises, it refers to the maximum operating income that can be obtained while maintaining the same short-term resource consumption.
Input variables include: main business cost (Cost), net non current assets (PA), sum of sales and administrative expenses (SGA), research and development expenses (RD), and net goodwill (GW). The specific meanings of these indicators are as follows: Cost is the number of products sold annually multiplied by the production cost per unit product, PA is net non current assets, which is equal to the sum of net fixed assets, construction in progress, fixed asset clean-up, engineering materials, long-term deferred expenses, and net intangible assets. SGA is the annual company sales expenses plus administrative expenses, RD is all expenses directly related to research and development activities, and GW is the book value of the adjusted long-term equity investment in the consolidated statements minus the fair value of the identifiable net assets of the subsidiary at the end of the period multiplied by the shareholding ratio, and the above indicators together measure the company’s investment. The output variable is Sales (Sales), which is equal to the sales quantity of each product multiplied by the sales unit price. The algorithm is shown in model (1).
Stage 2: The Tobit model is used to isolate and calculate the firm’s managerial ability. The efficiency value calculated in the first stage is between 0 and 1, which not only covers the role of enterprise characteristic factors, but also includes the influence of manager factors. Therefore, the Tobit model is used to separate the contribution of managers, that is, managerial ability.
We selected enterprise characteristic factors such as Size (Size), market share (Ms), free cash flow (Fcf), Age (Age), diversification (Div), degree of internationalization (Fci). At the same time, year (Year) was used to reflect the annual fixed effect, and Tobit model was used for regression to separate the residual e, which is the managerial ability (Ma). If the residual e is large, it indicates that the managerial ability is relatively high. The specific meanings of these indicators are as follows: Size is the natural logarithm of the company’s total assets, Ms is the sales revenue of the enterprise divided by the total sales revenue of the entire industry, Fcf represents the dummy variable of whether the company has positive cash flow, Age is the natural logarithm of the company’s years of listing, Div is the number of industries the company operates across industries, and Fci is the dummy variable of overseas operating subsidiaries. Year is a dummy variable for the company year. The algorithm is shown in model (2).
(2) Explained variable: accounting information disclosure quality, drawing on the practice of Chen and Tang (2012), Xu and Liang (2021), using the results of SZSE disclosure evaluation for the assignment of the grade A (excellent), B (good), C (qualified) and D (unqualified) were assigned the value of 4, 3, 2, and 1, respectively, in turn. The ShenZhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) is a national securities trading venue approved by the Chinese government and supervised and managed by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Every year, SZSE organizes professional institutions and dedicated personnel to assess and rate the accounting information disclosed by listed companies from the dimensions of authenticity, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, fairness, and legality and compliance. The evaluated accounting information can effectively and comprehensively reflect AIDQ of the listed company.
(3) Mediating variable: internal control effectiveness, drawing on the research of Xu (2017) and Hu (2018), and adopting the DIBO internal control index on a thousand-point scale to measure internal control effectiveness. The internal control evaluation system developed by DIBo Company is the first quantitative evaluation system for internal control and risk management capabilities in China. It mainly focuses on the five major objectives of legal compliance, asset safety, reliable report, operational efficiency and effect, and strategic realization of listed companies. The preparation of internal control index has been recognized by many official departments such as the Ministry of Finance of China, and has been widely used in scientific research, enterprise management, investment practice, and other fields.
(4) Control variables. Referring to research designs by Zhang and Jiang (2015), and He et al. (2016), company size (Size), debt level (Lev), cash holdings (Cash), corporate growth (Growth), board size (Board), Tobin Q value (Tobin Q), years of establishment (Age), occupation of funds (Occupy), year (Year), and industry (Ind) are selected as the control variables, and the specific algorithm is shown in Table 1.
Variable Definitions.
Model Construction
Referring to the mediation effect testing procedure of Baron and Kenny (1986), we construct the following regression models (3), (4), and (5) based on the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method to validate the hypotheses.
Model (3) mainly examines the relationship between the explanatory variable and the explained variable, verifies the impact of managerial ability on AIDQ, and is also the first step of testing the mediation effect procedure, if the coefficient of managerial ability is significant, then it passes the first step of testing. Model (4) examines the relationship between the explanatory variable and the mediating variable, verifies the impact of managerial ability on internal control effectiveness, which is the second step of the mediation effect procedure, and if the coefficient of managerial ability is significant, it passes the second step of the test. Model (5) examines the relationship between the explanatory variable, the mediating variable, and the explained variable, verifies the role of internal control effectiveness in the relationship between managerial ability on AIDQ, is the third step of the mediation effect procedure, if the coefficient of internal control effectiveness is significant, then through the third step of the test, indicating that the mediation effect of internal control effectiveness is significant.
Empirical Analysis
Descriptive Statistics
Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of the variables, and after numerical processing, the mean value of managerial ability is −0.035, the maximum value is 0.560, the minimum value is −0.529, and the standard deviation is 0.178, indicating that the individual differences in managerial ability are large, and the overall level is not high. The mean value of AIDQ is 3.034, which is good overall, but still has significant room for improvement. The mean value of internal control effectiveness is 0.623, which is not very high, and the extreme deviation and standard deviation are large, indicating that there are large differences in internal control effectiveness, and the overall level needs to be improved. Therefore, overall, the managerial ability of Chinese listed companies are not strong, and there is also great room for improvement in the effectiveness of internal control and AIDQ. The reason for this is that the Chinese capital market is still in the stage of “emerging+transition,” and the legal and market environment is not yet mature. The design of corporate governance mechanisms and daily business management activities cannot be separated from the influence of managers, a human element. In a series of financial decisions such as accounting information disclosure, managers still play an important role. Therefore, analyzing accounting information disclosure issues from the perspective of manager capabilities has strong practical significance. The descriptive statistics of other variables are basically consistent with the existing literature and will not be repeated here.
Descriptive Statistics of Variables.
Furthermore, a preliminary analysis of the economic effects of managerial ability was conducted using a grouped descriptive statistical method to more directly observe the impact of high and low managerial ability on internal control effectiveness and AIDQ. Specifically, we divided the sample into high and low managerial ability groups based on the median of managerial ability, and conducted descriptive statistics and difference tests for grouping. The results are shown in Table 3. In terms of internal control effectiveness, the high managerial ability group is 0.012 higher than the low managerial ability group, and the inter group mean
Group Descriptive Statistics.
indicate significant at the 1% level.
Analysis of Regression Results
Column (1) of Table 4 shows the regression results of model (3), the coefficient of managerial ability is 0.250, which is significant and positive at 1% level, indicating that the stronger the managerial ability, the higher AIDQ, that is, competent managers can contribute to the enhancement of AIDQ, which verifies the hypothesis, H1. The stronger the ability of managers, the higher their overall quality. When facing difficult and complex business environments, they can fully leverage their governance and reputation effects, strengthen control over AIDQ, and better cope with uncertain external environments. Meanwhile, the coefficient of managerial ability in Column (1) is significant, which also shows that it passes the mediation effect of the first step test. Column (2) of Table 4 shows the regression results of model (4), the coefficient of managerial ability is 0.076, which is significantly positive at 1% level, indicating that the stronger managerial ability can enhance the effectiveness of internal control, that is, the stronger managerial ability can contribute to the construction of internal control and improve the effectiveness of internal control, which also indicates that the second step of the mediation effect test has been passed. Column (3) of Table 4 is the regression result of model (5), in which the coefficient of managerial ability is 0.116, which is significantly positive at 1% level, and the coefficient of internal control effectiveness is 1.727, which is significantly positively correlated at 1% level, and it passes the third step of the mediation effect test, indicates that the effectiveness of internal control plays a part of the mediation effect between the managerial ability and AIDQ, and it can be proved that the promotion effect of managerial ability on AIDQ, is mainly realized by improving the effectiveness of internal control. This can be reasoned according to the logical chain of “stronger managerial ability - improved internal control effectiveness - improved AIDQ,” which reveals the micro-influence path of managerial ability affecting AIDQ.
Benchmark Regression and Mediating Effect Test Regression Results.
and ** indicate significant at the 1% and 5%, levels, respectively, with t-values in parentheses.
Discussion
This research result is an effective supplement to the upper echelon theory proposed by Hambrick and Mason (1984). Although Hambrick and Mason (1984) pointed out that managers play an important role in enterprise decision-making and operation, they mainly analyze the external characteristics of managers. It is well known that external characteristics such as age and gender ultimately affect the internal psychological changes of managers. If we only focus on analyzing the heterogeneity of external characteristics of managers, it is obviously insufficient and cannot deeply reveal the micro level behavioral decisions of managers when dealing with complex economic transactions. Based on their research, this study directly discusses the important internal psychological condition of managerial ability, effectively extending the research scope of upper echelon theory, expanding its theoretical connotation and application scope. In addition, this study is also a further extension of Lambert et al. (2007), Amiran et al. (2022), Cascino et al. (2021), and Du et al. (2016). Although these scholars have found that high-AIDQ can bring many positive impacts to enterprises, they are inconsistent on how to improve AIDQ, and cannot propose feasible solutions and reliable paths to improve AIDQ. This study found that managers can improve AIDQ by improving the effectiveness of internal controls, which not only echoes the previous research but also makes up for the shortcomings of these literature.
At the same time, based on the research of Khanagha et al. (2011), Yang et al. (2023), Baik et al. (2020), and Zhou and Zhang (2019), this study further enriches the pre influencing factors of AIDQ and the economic consequences of managerial ability, and clarifies the internal mechanism and specific intermediary pathways of how managerial ability affects AIDQ. Even though scholars such as Khanagha et al. (2011), Yang et al. (2023), Baik et al. (2020), and Zhou and Zhang (2019) have extensively explored the pre impact factors of AIDQ and the economic consequences of managerial ability, they have overlooked the specific role that managers play in it, and have not included internal control elements in their analytical framework, failing to effectively reveal the important role of human factors in accounting information disclosure, resulting in a great theoretical “black box” of how managerial ability affects AIDQ. We comprehensively examine the “governance effect” and “reputation effect” of managerial ability, and incorporate internal control elements into the unified analysis framework. Through the mediation effect test model, we can analyze this problem well, and obtain research results that have not been discovered by previous researchers. This greatly enriches the theoretical research on the relationship between managerial ability, internal control effectiveness, and AIDQ. At the same time, this conclusion can also provide empirical reference for enterprises and regulatory authorities to formulate management policies.
Further Research and Robustness Test
Further Research
(1) The nature of property rights as the largest institutional environment of listed companies, different property rights present different governance characteristics, which have an important impact on financial decision-making mechanism. Compared with non-state-owned firms, state-owned firms lack effective supervision and incentive mechanisms due to the constraints of the established institutional arrangements (Shao, 2015), resulting in longer principal-agent chains and more prominent administrative management phenomena, which is not conducive to managers with higher ability to give full play to their human resource advantages in order to promote the disclosure of accounting information. Therefore, we argue that managerial ability promotes AIDQ more significantly in non-state-owned firms.
(2) Controlling shareholders’ equity pledges bring profound impact on their respective units, and an important point is to put the pledged equity in the market risk and external concerns, internal, and external stakeholders will pay more attention to its accounting disclosure, which inadvertently increases the supervision of listed companies. On the one hand, the pledging controlling shareholders in order to suppress share price volatility, let external personnel know the specific situation of the company, so that the market can be priced correctly, to avoid the transfer of control due to the decline in share price, will strengthen the supervision of managers, prompting managers to disclose information of high quality (Tian et al., 2021). On the other hand, controlling shareholders’ equity pledges cause many external stakeholders’ concerns, such as creditors and pledges to protect the principal and interest security of the lent funds, will increase the attention to the profitability and cash flow of listed companies. In this series of internal and external concerns, will produce intangible supervision of listed companies, which leads to the company’s tendency to reduce violations, and strengthen the reliability of information disclosure to reduce internal and external information asymmetry (Lv, 2017; Huang et al., 2021). Therefore, we argue that managerial ability promotes AIDQ more significantly in controlling shareholders’ equity pledge firms.
(3) Although the agency behavior of managers is subject to the collective supervision of all shareholders, if the distribution of shareholdings is relatively dispersed, many small and medium-sized shareholders hold the mentality of “free-riding,” and it is difficult to form a synergy, so the supervision effect on managers is not very effective (Li & Lei, 2021). Equity concentration reflects the degree of control of large shareholders over the company, and large shareholders with more equity means that they have a greater share of the interests of the firm, and a stronger incentive to maximize the value of the firm so as to increase their own investment returns. This also means that higher equity concentration can play an effective monitoring role on managers, inhibit managers’ self-interested behavior, correct their managerial defensive tendencies, make managers converge with shareholders’ objectives, focus on long-term development of the firm, and disclose accounting information in a compliant and truthful manner, thus further reducing the first type of agency costs (Liu & Wang, 2021). Therefore, we argue that managerial ability promotes AIDQ more obviously in high equity concentration firms.
For the above three conjectures for further research, we adopt the method of regression on sample grouping based on the construction of model (3) for verification. When the controlling shareholder of the sample firm is a state-owned firm is set as the state-owned group, otherwise it is set as the non-state-owned group; when the controlling shareholder of the sample firm has equity pledge at the end of the year is set as the equity pledge group, otherwise it is set as the non-equity pledge group; the sum of the shareholding ratio of the top five shareholders is used to reflect the equity concentration, and when the equity concentration of the sample firm is larger than the median value of the industry sample is set as the high equity concentration group, otherwise it is set as the low equity concentration group. The results of group regression are shown in Table 5.
Equity Structure Characteristics Subgroup Regression Results.
, **, and * indicate significant at the 1%, 5%, and 10% levels, respectively, with t-values in parentheses.
Columns (1) and (2) in Table 5 report the regression results of managerial ability on AIDQ for the state-owned and non-state-owned groups, respectively. Among them, the coefficient of state-owned group is significantly positive at the level of 5%, and the coefficient of non-state-owned group is significantly positive at the level of 1%, and the coefficient of non-state-owned group is greater than that of state-owned group (0.255 > 0.146), which suggests that managerial ability promotes AIDQ more significantly in non-state-owned firms. Columns (3) and (4) in Table 5 report the regression results of managerial ability on AIDQ for the existence of controlling shareholders’ equity pledge group and the non-existence of controlling shareholders’ existence of equity pledge group, respectively, and the coefficients of managerial ability in both groups are significantly positive at 1% level, but the coefficient of the existence of controlling shareholders’ equity pledge group is larger than that of the non-existence of controlling shareholders’ equity pledge group (0.303 > 0.181), which indicates that existence of controlling shareholders’ equity pledge firms, managerial ability contributes more significantly to AIDQ. Columns (5) and (6) in Table 5 report the regression results of managerial ability on AIDQ for the high and low equity concentration groups, respectively. The coefficient of the high equity concentration group is significantly positive at the 1% level, and the coefficient of the low equity concentration group is significantly positive at the 5% level. At the same time, the coefficient of the high equity concentration group is greater than that of the low equity concentration group (0.189 > 0.108), which suggests that, in the firms with high equity concentration, managerial ability promotes AIDQ more significantly. Combining the results of the above subgroup regressions, it indicates that the nature of non-state-owned property rights, controlling shareholders’ equity pledge, and high equity concentration can positively regulate the promotion effect of managerial ability on accounting information disclosure.
Robustness Test
(1) Take dummy variable treatment. Drawing on the practice of Chen and Tang (2012), the accounting disclosure quality level to take dummy variable processing, the rating of A (excellent) assigned to 1, the other 0, the variable sign is set to Id1, and the regression test in the model again, the regression results are shown in Table 6. Among them, all the managerial ability coefficients are significantly positive, and the internal control effectiveness coefficient in column (3) is also significantly positive, which verifies the conjecture of hypothesis H1 and H2, indicating that managerial ability mainly improves AIDQ through internal control effectiveness. This conclusion is more reliable.
(2) Reducing managerial ability noise. Regarding the calculation of managerial ability, some scholars point out that there is noise interference in measuring managerial ability with regression residuals due to the fact that the Tobit model in the second stage cannot cover all the factors affecting operational efficiency at the enterprise level (He et al., 2016). To reduce noise interference, drawing on the practice of He et al. (2016), the residual value e of the second-stage Tobit model is divided into ten ability levels from large to small, and the managerial ability after noise reduction is constructed from 10-1 assignment. The variable symbol is set to Ma10, which is verified again in the constructed model. The regression results are shown in Table 7. Among them, as with the previous robustness test results, all managerial ability coefficients are significantly positive, and the internal control effectiveness coefficient in Column (3) is also significantly positive, which once again verifies the hypothesis of H1 and H2, indicating that our theoretical analysis is consistent with the empirical results, and the conclusion has a considerable degree of credibility.
(3) Bootstrap method test. In order to strengthen the reliability of the conclusion, we apply the bias-corrected nonparametric percentile Bootstrap method with higher test effectiveness than the stepwise regression test to test the mediation effect of internal control effectiveness again. Bootstrap method determines whether the mediation effect is significant mainly through the judgment of the confidence interval, if the confidence interval contains 0, then it indicates that it is not significant, if the confidence interval does not contain 0, then it indicates that it is significant. The test results are shown in Table 8.
Dummy Variable Treatment Regression Results.
and ** indicate significant at the 1% and 5% levels, respectively, with t-values in parentheses.
Reducing Managerial Ability Noise Regression Results.
indicates significant at the 1% level, with t-values in parentheses.
Bootstrap Test Results for Mediation Effect.
In Table 8, the upper and lower bound intervals for the total effect (Total) of [0.086, 0.181] did not contain 0 at the 95% confidence interval, indicating a significant total effect (Effect = 0.134). The upper and lower bound intervals for the Direct effect (Direct) were [0.045, 0.136] not containing 0, indicating a significant direct effect. The upper and lower interval of mediation effect (Indirect) is [0.027, 0.060] does not contain 0, indicating that the mediation effect is verified (Effect = 0.043). Therefore, it can be shown that the internal control effectiveness plays a partial mediating effect in relationship of managerial ability on AIDQ, and this conclusion is consistent with the conclusions obtained by the stepwise test method, which proves once again that the hypothesis H2 is valid.
(4) Fixed effects model. In order to reduce the endogeneity problem caused by factors that do not change over time and are unobservable, we use the firm’s individual time-point fixed effects model to conduct the regression test again, and the test results are shown in Table 9. Among them, the coefficients of managerial ability and internal control effectiveness are all significantly positive, indicating that managerial ability can play an active role in improving AIDQ by strengthening internal control effectiveness. This conclusion does not conflict with our previous findings, which means that our research conclusion is robust.
(5) Eliminate the impact of COVID-19. In 2020, the COVID-19 broke out, and many governments around the world carried out relatively strict control measures to restrict the random flow of personnel; At the same time, the spread of the virus also causes illness among personnel, and many commercial activities cannot be carried out normally, which may have an uncertain impact on the relationship between managerial ability and AIDQ, affecting the robustness of conclusions. To eliminate the interference of COVID-19, we used the sample companies that had no epidemic in 2015 to 2019 to conduct regression validation again. Table 10 shows the regression results excluding sample companies from 2020 to 2022. Among them, the coefficients of managerial ability and internal control effectiveness are all significantly positive. This finding is not fundamentally different from the results of the previous four robustness tests, and the conclusion is established.
(6) Lag regression. To reduce the potential lag effect of managerial ability on economic business processing, we lagged explanatory variable (Ma) and mediating variable (Ic) by one period (L.Ma and L.Ic), and included them in model (3), (4), and (5) for re regression. The regression results are shown in Table 11. Similarly, the coefficients of managerial ability and internal control effectiveness are also significantly positive, and our previous conclusions have not changed substantially.
Fixed Effects Model Test Regression Results.
indicates significant at the 1% level, with t-values in parentheses.
Excluding COVID-19 Impact Test Regression Results.
, **, and * indicate significant at the 1%, 5%, and 10% levels, respectively, with t-values in parentheses.
Lagged Regression Test Results.
indicates significant at the 1% level, with t-values in parentheses.
Conclusion
We analyze the impact of managerial ability on corporate AIDQ from the aspects of “governance effect” and “reputation effect,” and introduces the mediation effect test procedure to explore the role of internal control effectiveness, and further groups samples to study the possible effects of the difference in nature of ownership, pledge of controlling shareholders’ equity, and equity concentration on the relationship between the two. The results show that: the stronger the managerial ability, the higher AIDQ. Internal control effectiveness plays a partial mediating effect in the relationship between managerial ability on AIDQ. Further research finds that the promotion effect of managerial ability on AIDQ is more obvious in non-state-owned enterprises, enterprises with controlling shareholders’ equity pledge, and enterprises with high equity concentration. The conclusion of this study explores the positive role of managerial ability in accounting information disclosure, which helps to reveal the internal mechanism “black box” and logical path of how highly capable managers promote the improvement of AIDQ in listed companies by strengthening internal control. This provides incremental assistance for further theoretical research on the relationship between managerial ability, internal control effectiveness, and AIDQ.
The theoretical implications of this study mainly include, on the one hand, effectively extending the economic consequences of managerial ability and expanding the pre influencing factors of AIDQ, enriching the theoretical achievements of intrinsic heterogeneity characteristics of managers in the field of information disclosure; On the other hand, based on research by Hambrick and Mason (1984), Zhang et al. (2019), Demerjian et al. (2013), Zhou and Zhang (2019), and others, we have taken another step forward and filled the theoretical gap in improving AIDQ through internal control mechanisms. This not only effectively deepens the upper echelon theory, but also provides strong theoretical support for improving AIDQ based on manager ability.
This study also has rich practical implications. The research results can help the board of directors recognize the important role of managerial ability in company financial activities, and provide operational guidance for listed companies to improve AIDQ from the perspective of managerial ability as human capital. At the same time, this study can also provide policy insights for capital market regulators, guiding them to focus on building a professional manager market, improving the ability of listed company managers, and promoting their disclosure of high-quality accounting information, thus promoting the healthy development of the capital market.
In this regard, the management recommendations include: firstly, listed companies should strengthen the ability building of managers, establish normalized and standardized training and exercise systems, and improve the comprehensive professional competence of managers, so that they can effectively respond to various complex economic transactions and disclose accounting information with high quality in accordance with policy and regulatory requirements. For example, as a well-known new energy equipment manufacturing enterprise in China, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) continuously improves the comprehensive abilities of managers by setting up regular management training, including professional skills, leadership training, management skills, and general skills, thereby establishing a solid talent pool at all levels, supporting the rapid growth of the company’s business and the achievement of strategic goals. At the same time, highly capable managers further ensure the high-quality disclosure of accounting information. From 2019 to 2022, CATL achieved the highest level of “A” in accounting information disclosure, which indirectly reflects the importance of strengthening manager ability through training and other means to improve AIDQ. Secondly, listed companies must attach importance to the design of institutional internal control mechanisms, incorporate the improvement of internal control effectiveness into the performance evaluation scope of managers, form a good internal control environment of mutual checks and balances between different governance entities, thereby reducing the space for self-interest behavior of managers, and strengthening the institutional guarantee of legal and compliant disclosure of accounting information. For example, the American high-tech company Apple regards comprehensive control as the lifeline for survival, has a smooth, simple, and clear organizational structure, and focuses on the assessment of managers both in the present and the future. The company’s internal governance is orderly and the system is strict, and the employee turnover rate is very low. Managers can implement internal control requirements and fully disclose information, so its quality rating of accounting information disclosure every year ranks among the top of listed companies in the United States. Thirdly, listed companies can use equity structure design to optimize corporate governance, reasonably increase equity concentration and carry out equity pledge financing, and leverage the supervisory role of major shareholders over managers. Especially state-owned enterprises should establish a sound modern corporate governance mechanism, standardize accounting information disclosure procedures, promote the ability of managers, thereby improving management efficiency, providing high-quality accounting information to the outside world, reducing information asymmetry, and promoting the healthy development of the capital market. For example, China Unicom has effectively optimized its equity structure by introducing private capital such as Tencent and signing a strategic cooperation framework agreement with it, promoting the deep integration of heterogeneous capital between state-owned and private shareholders, thereby improving the level of corporate governance, strengthening supervision and balance of managers, and greatly ensuring the high-quality disclosure of accounting information.
There may still be some limitations in this study, which can be further explored in the future. Firstly, we mainly focus on the context of China, an emerging market economy, to study the impact of managerial ability on accounting information disclosure. However, we lack examination of other developed countries and regions. Therefore, in the future, we can use data from other developed economies to verify and increase the universality of research conclusions. Secondly, although we use a series of robustness testing methods such as fixed effects models to validate the conclusions, there are still some shortcomings, such as the fixed effects method not fully considering the mutual influence between individuals, which needs to be overcome in future research.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
Funding
ORCID iD
