Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure And Audit Fees

Golden age for the development of Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR)in China is the ten years from 2006 to 2016,during which Chinese enterprise developed gradually from "explain the issue" to "solve the problem",the fulfillment and disclosure of social responsibility has become an important mean for enterprise to improve reputation and competitiveness,and to achieve sustainable development.As the main platform and carrier for the communication of enterprise with stakeholders,Chinese Corporate Social Responsibility report has released rapid growth in quantity.Regulatory authorities also pay more attention to the social responsibility information disclosure,promulgating a series of relevant normative documents.CSR information disclosure is facing the coexistence of mandatory and voluntary.Based on this background,the dissertation uses the method of archival research and unfolds the research of the relationship between CSR information disclosure and audit fees following the logical framework of "literature review—theoretical analysis and research hypothesis—empirical test—conclusions".In this paper,I choose the A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2009 to 2015 as the research samples,through paired sample test and multiple regression analysis,the following four conclusions are drawn:(1)Compared to the company who do not disclose CSR report,the company who voluntarily disclose CSR report pays higher audit fees.(2)Controlling other conditions unchanged,the higher the circumstantial level of social responsibility information disclosure,the higher the audit fees in financial statements.(3)Compared to the disclosure of CSR reports according to regulatory requirements,voluntary disclosure weakens the marginal impact which CSR information disclosure level of detail exerts on audit fees.(4)Compared to the CSR report without third party certification,CSR report through third party certification strengthens the marginal impact which CSR information disclosure level of detail exerts on audit fees.There are six parts in the thesis:The first part is the introduction.This part mainly introduces the background,significance,overall framework,methods,innovation and limitations of this paper.The second part is the literature review.In this part,I sort out and review the relevant literature of social responsibility information disclosure and audit fees,to find the limitations of previous research and the possible contribution of this paper.The third part is the theoretical analysis and research hypothesis.Under the background of the institution and status of listed companies’ social responsibility information disclosure,based on the signal transmission theory and audit cost theory,I build the framework of the relationship of corporate social responsibility information disclosure and the financial statements audit fees,proposed the four hypotheses in this part.The fourth part is the research design.It introduces the sample selection and data source,the selection and definition of variables,and the establishment of the core models.The fifth part is the empirical test.In this part,the paired samples are tested to verify the H1,then the hypothesis of H2,H3,H4 are tested by multiple regression analysis.Then,in the robustness test,the robustness of the conclusions in this paper is tested by changing the measurement method of the level of social responsibility information disclosure and Heckman(1979)two—stage regression.The sixth part is the conclusion and prospect of the study.In this part,the conclusions of this paper are drawn,suggestions for regulators,auditors and enterprise management are put forward on the base of the conclusions,and the future research directions are pointed out.The innovation of this paper is as follows:(1)In the matter of theoretical analysis,the theoretical framework and research ideas constructed in this paper to expound the relationship between social responsibility information disclosure and audit fees are different from previous research.I considered separately from the client and the auditor’s view,based on the signal transmission theory and audit cost theory,analyse the demand for high quality audit caused by the information disclosure of corporate social responsibility and auditor’s consideration of other information and the corresponding auditing cost relating to financial statements.(2)In the matter of research design,this paper adopts a more comprehensive and reliable index as the proxy of social responsibility information disclosure,choosing RKS score index made by the third party rating agencies as indicator of corporate social responsibility information disclosure and replacing it with social responsibility information disclosure index in CSMAR database for robustness test to test the impact of CSR information disclosure level on audit fees by the numbers.