Research On Accounting Rent-seeking Behavior Of Listed Companies And The Countermeasures

From the middle of last century, Rent-seeking theory has been one of the most challenging areas of Western economics. This kind of activity, using resources through a political process to access privileges and harming the others'interests rather than their own receipts, has become one of the most concerned economics research topics. Economy-seeking has always been a phenomenon of inefficiency in allocating Socio-economic resources. With the existence of power vacuum and so called"Public domain"in the socialist market economy,"rent"from the power, luring the main socio-economic to grab it by consuming all kinds of resources, harming the interests of others at the same time and creating a non-equity community wealth transfer.Accounting, as a means of allocating Socio-economic resources, could lead to non-productive transfer of social wealth, and with its operational features of directing economic consequences, different accounting information is often bring different effects on the company, while China's accounting standard aimed at better resource-allocation has enacted through the political process, in which it is difficult to achieve absolute fairness. Thus the one can obtain"public rent"in the process of allocating social-economic resources as long as he or she can impose favorable influence to accounting rules. As a result some stakeholders will be harmed and some will be benefited. Such accounting practices reflect the rent-seeking thinking of modern economics. With the development of accounting policy's market-oriented reform, the government has gradually reduced direct intervention to economy and effort to develop market mainstay, incremental economic benefits of enterprises and individual stakeholders has related to its ability to innovate gradually. At the same time, inherent flaws in a high degree of unified accounting system has gradually exposed, and the government has gradually come to realize the drawbacks of the original accounting system in advancing process of economic system reforming. In this process of changing the accounting system, listed companies, especially state-owned holding company to use the loopholes in the accounting rules for different purposes, and to seek the government's concession of special accounting policies, and this process is the"rent-seeking"to regulatory agencies, the "lobbyists" to accounting rule-making process and the"Self-defense" to use of accounting rules. The key reasons of much attention is paid to Accounting rent-seeking, is that it could cause non-productive transfer of social wealth, and resulted in the dissipation of Socio-economic resources in the transfer process, then harmed other stockholders'interests except the company managers, which led to the optimization of social welfare and distortions of resource allocating.With the further development of accounting rent-seeking theory, more and more attention is paid to rent-seeking behaviors of Economic entities. There is a delay of economic restructuring, Because China's securities market is just in the transformation period from mature market to emerging market. So, although listed companies which is one of the main Participants in securities market have played a key role in promoting the development of securities market: enhancing our economic strength and raising China's integrated development level, in the short term , it can not get the requirements in allocation of resources of mature markets,intervention of government to securities market that is"visible hand"is still maintained a certain role, both lacking of control to listed companies and chasing profits of listed companies all cause the more and more"rent-seeking"behaviors. The listed companies could get a certain income from rent-seeking behaviors in the short term, but from a long-term perspective, such unregulated behaviors will hinder the healthy development of the securities market, and even cause some bad social atmosphere, such as unfair competitive environment, information distortion because of spreading of false information etcTherefore, the paper has discussed listed companies'accounting rent-seeking behavior in our country on the basis of domestic and overseas researches, analyzed origin and development of rent-seeking theory, tried to give the concept and fundamental meaning of accounting rent-seeking, identified the reasons of basic characteristics and behaviors of listed company in our country, finally systematically summarized listed companies'present situation and behavior forms in our country. On the foundation, the paper has discussed the way to deal with accounting rent-seeking behaviors of listed companies from nine perspectives, that is clarifying property rights and reducing control, improving corporate governance and preventing rent-seeking, strengthening market supervising and punishing rent-seeking, strengthening civil compensation mechanism, standardize accounting principles and avoiding rent-seeking, enhancing efficiency of capital market, developing forensic accounting, creating new entity and technology to expose financial reporting frauds, enhancing governmental supervisor sector's standard requirements to listed companies, strengthening sense education and exterminating rent-seeking behaviors, in order to restrain listed companies'accounting rent-seeking behaviors, defend fair and just investment environment of securities market, promote optimization of allocation of market resources exterminating waste of social resources, and provide some references for health development of listed companies in our country and stabile progress of socialism economic construction.The paper tries to use prescriptive research to spread out discussion, use deductive method to construct basic theory of accounting rent-seeking behaviors, adopt descriptive method to sum up main types of accounting rent-seeking behaviors according to realistic situation. In the process of research, this paper mainly adopts qualitative analysis method combining with some cases, follow the thinking of"raise problems—analyze problems—solve problems"to theoretically analyze and practically test accounting rent-seeking behaviors of listed companies in our country. Because domestic research of accounting rent-seeking started lately, there are some difficulties to gather related materials and obtain practical cases, so this paper may lack enough empirical tests. At the same time, owing to lots of reasons of accounting rent-seeking and lacking recognition, the research may result in over positive and partial results, and the research is not enough.This paper includes six chapters:Chapter one is introduction. It mainly discussed research background, significance, train of thought, method, creation and shortcomings, structure of this paper, and so on.Chapter two analyzes theoretical basis of accounting rent-seeking. It mainly elaborates origin, rise and development of rent-seeking theory, and also discussed concept and fundamental meaning of accounting rent-seeking.Chapter three mainly analyzes listed companies'accounting rent-seeking behavior in our country. It mainly elaborates basic characteristics, main behavior forms of domestic listed companies, and related reasons.Chapter four introduces listed company's cases of accounting rent-seeking and goes further to explain and analyze listed companies'accounting rent-seeking behaviors in our country now.Chapter five puts forward the ways to deal with accounting rent-seeking behavior of listed companies. It raises specific suggestions aimed at characteristics and ways of listed companies'accounting rent-seeking behavior in our country, which is on guard against accounting rent-seeking behavior.Chapter six is the summary of this paper.The contributions of this paper are:(1)This paper which bases itself upon the fact of listed companies, discusses and analyzes accounting rent-seeking behavior in our country. As an accountant in a listed company, I combine my working experiences with listed companies'cases of accounting rent-seeking to analyze characteristics, methods, and specific suggestions of listed companies'accounting rent-seeking behaviors.(2)There are multi-perspective reasons of accounting rent-seeking behavior, and we can summarize them from different aspects, but few scholars make comprehensive and detailed analysis. Therefore, on the basis of large quantity of present references, this paper summarizes advantages of all scholars, and analyzes the reasons of accounting rent-seeking behaviors from internal and external aspects.