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Either shareholders or related parties typically serve as the directors and supervisors of listed companies in Taiwan. Consequently, the managerial and supervisory functions of certain companies have failed to meet shareholder expectation, and there have been numerous cases where managers have embezzled company assets and inflated company earnings. Therefore, we contend that strong corporate governance should be established, and the supervision system should be improved. First, we discuss the relationship between establishing an audit committee and information transparency and that between audit committee establishment and earnings quality. Subsequently, we describe results obtained by employing simultaneous equation models to examine the interactions among audit committee establishment, information transparency, and earnings quality for companies in the Taiwan electronics industry in 2011. Our empirical results show that establishing an audit committee correlates positively with both information transparency and earnings quality. The simultaneous equation models result show that interactive and positive effects exist among audit committee establishment, information transparency, and earnings quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine whether the financial reporting quality of firms that access capital markets through reverse mergers differs from that of firms that rely on the traditional and more onerous IPO process. Using a broad sample of reverse merger firms and a propensity-score matched sample of IPOs, I find that reverse merger firms exhibit lower earnings quality as measured by several earnings attributes established in prior literature: accrual quality, earnings persistence, earnings predictability, cash persistence, cash predictability, earnings smoothness, timeliness, and value relevance. I document similar results for firms with low levels of institutional ownership. Differences in earnings quality, however, are attenuated for reverse merger firms with higher levels of institutional ownership. Given recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions against Chinese reverse merger firms, I also use a difference-in-differences technique and find that the lower financial reporting of reverse merger firms is actually driven by the non-Chinese reverse merger firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]