会议论文摘要：
Measurement difficulties arising from relationship-based business dealings can cause accounting opacity. We test this hypothesis by exploiting a natural experiment. Using a sample of firms networked with forty-two Chinese high-level bureaucrats exposed to corruption scandals during 1996-2006, we examine the pattern of firms’ earnings informativeness around the exogenous break of the political networks due to corruption enforcement. We conjecture that the costs and benefits of political relationship unmeasurable by accounting systems diminish accounting earnings’ ability to track firms’ economic performance, and the break of the political relationship upon the corruption enforcement reduces the measurement noise and improves earnings informativeness. We find that the earnings informativeness of the networked firms indeed significantly increases against their matching firms after the public exposure of the scandals. A host of robustness tests fail to find that the improved earnings informativeness is primarily
