Theme：Does Information Technology Reduce Corporate Misconduct?

Speaker：Prof. Jonas Heese(HBS)

Host：Prof.CHEN LEI (Associate Dean of School of Accounting, SWUFE)

Time：9:00-10:30a.m., November 22, 2022,

Place：ZOOM Meeting  ID: 886 5276 7172

Sponsor：School of Accounting, SWUFE

Introduction of the speaker：

Jonas Heese is the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Accounting & Management Unit. He teaches the Business Analysis and Valuation course in the MBA elective curriculum. He has also taught first-year MBAs in Financial Reporting and Control. His research focuses on corporate misconduct, with a special focus on the role of regulators, whistleblowers, the media, and organizations’ compliance systems to prevent such misconduct. He has published intensively in top-tier journals in finance, accounting and management such as JFE, JAE, JAR, TAR, MS, AMJ, CAR and RAST.

Abstract：

This study examines whether information technology reduces corporate misconduct. Specifically, we study the effects of staggered facility-level rollouts of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on facility-level misconduct across a large sample of U.S. firms. Our results indicate that ERP adoption reduces facility-level violations by 1.1% and penalties by 14.1%. These effects are more pronounced for firms that incorporate advanced data analytics and tools into their ERP systems and are concentrated in firms that hire employees with ERP skills and weak integrity culture. To strengthen identification, we utilize industry-level actual and predicted IT budgets as instrumental variables and generate similar inferences. Overall, our results suggest that information technology plays a significant role in enhancing internal firm monitoring and improving regulatory compliance.