November 14, 2025, CUFE Business School successfully held the 31st session of 2025 Excellent Academic Forum in Conference Room 615 of the Main Teaching Building at the Xueyuan South Road Campus. Associate Professor Liu Boluo from the School of Accountancy at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics was invited as the keynote speaker for this forum. More than ten participants attended the academic event, including faculty members, doctoral students, master’s students from CUFE Business School, as well as scholars from other universities.
The lecture was chaired by Associate Professor Dou Chao of CUFE Business School. At the beginning of the event, Associate Professor Dou introduced Associate Professor Liu’s academic background to the audience. Associate Professor Liu Boluo currently serves as Associate Professor and Master’s Supervisor at the School of Accountancy, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His main research areas include accounting information disclosure and auditing, and his research has been published in leading international journals and top-tier publications such as The Accounting Review, Journal of International Business Studies, and China Economic Review.
The topic of Associate Professor Liu’s lecture was “Credit Information Sharing and the Voluntary Use of Audits by Private Firms.” Based on large-scale firm-level data from 55 countries, he empirically examined the impact of Public Credit Registries (PCRs) on private firms’ voluntary engagement of external audits. The study finds that the establishment of public credit registries significantly increases private firms’ demand for audit services. The core mechanism lies in the fact that auditing helps firms more fully leverage the benefits of information sharing generated by public credit registries, enabling them to obtain external financing at lower costs and under more favorable conditions. The research adopts the introduction of public credit registries as an exogenous shock identification strategy, providing rigorous causal inference evidence. Professor Liu’s research reveals the interaction between an important institutional feature of financial markets (public credit registries) and firms’ voluntary financial reporting behavior, offering a new perspective for understanding how credit infrastructure incentivizes the production of high-quality accounting information.
Following the lecture, participating faculty members and students engaged in in-depth discussions around the lecture topic, including the theoretical mechanisms linking public credit registries and audit demand, identification strategies in cross-country data, the impact of China’s credit system development on firms’ auditing behavior, and related policy implications. The discussion further promoted the exchange of academic ideas.
As an important platform for CUFE Business School to fulfill its mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, the “Excellent Academic Forum” is committed to focusing on cutting-edge issues in the field of business administration and Chinese enterprise management practice. It gathers global wisdom and innovative perspectives to provide theoretical support and practical paths for promoting the sustainable development of Chinese society and economy.
