Yongtao Hong

A worldwide study of the impacts of information technology on healthcare costs

Due to skyrocketing healthcare costs, many hope for information technology to bring cost savings. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 earmarked

EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND SHORT SELLING AROUND EARNINGS ANNOUNCEMENTS

19 billion for healthcare IT, focusing on electronic health records. Other countries have also invested significantly in IT to reduce healthcare spending. IT’s impact on healthcare spending is thus of great interest to global healthcare policy makers. This paper examines how internet and personal computer use affect country-level healthcare spending for private and public healthcare organisations in 148 countries. We discovered significant differences in the impact of internet and personal computer use on healthcare cost savings in private vs. public healthcare settings. We examine the reasons for these differences and contrast them between developing vs. developed countries. We also find that the relationship between healthcare spending and IT is conditional on country-level institutional features, such as investor protections and corruption; and ...

The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Earnings Management: An Exploratory Study

In this paper, we examine the impact of earnings management on the behavior of short sellers around the time of earnings announcements. Our major finding is that activity-based earnings management (real earnings management) is a type of accounting information short sellers exploit. In addition, we find that the interaction between real earnings management and information asymmetry in the market also contributes to the decision process of short sellers. Short sellers target firms with high levels of real earnings management, particularly when information asymmetry concerning the firm is most severe. We also find weak evidence that short sellers trading on announcement day have some information advantage that most likely stems from processing public information rather than accessing private information. Our findings have implications to the capital market participants. If short sellers take a long position in low earnings management firms and a short position in high earnings management firms, they may earn positive abnormal returns.