This paper investigates the effects of stock pledge by controlling shareholder on corporate's future innovation productivity and the mechanism through which stock pledge affects innovation. We find that both the existence of stock pledge by controlling shareholder and the percentage of shares pledged by controlling shareholder are significantly negatively related to firms' future innovation outputs and quality, and these baseline results are robust to a variety of tests on sample selections, model specifications, and variable definitions. We further adopt several methodologies to address endogeneity concerns and establish a causal relationship between stock pledge by controlling shareholder and innovation. We then provide evidence to show that the impediment effect of stock pledge by controlling shareholder on innovation is possibly due to controlling shareholder's fear of losing corporate control in case of innovation failure. Finally, we find that although stock pledge is a possible channel to relieve a firm's financial constraint, it does not encourage the firm to invest more in innovation.

In a globalized audit environment, regulators and researchers have expressed concerns about inconsistent audit quality across nations, with a particular emphasis on Chinese audit quality. Prior research suggests Chinese audit quality may be lower than U.S. audit quality due to a weaker institutional environment (e.g., lower litigation and inspection risk) or cultural value differences (e.g., greater deference to authority). In this study, we propose that lower Chinese audit quality could also be due to Chinese auditors' different cognitive processing styles (i.e., cultural mindsets). We find U.S. auditors are more likely to engage in an analytic mindset approach, focusing on a subset of disconfirming information, whereas Chinese auditors are more likely to take a holistic mindset approach, focusing on a balanced set of confirming and disconfirming information. As a result, Chinese auditors make less skeptical judgments compared to U.S. auditors. We then propose an intervention in which we explicitly instruct auditors to consider using both a holistic and an analytic mindset approach when evaluating evidence. We find this intervention minimizes differences between Chinese and U.S. auditors' judgments by shifting Chinese auditors' attention more towards disconfirming evidence, improving their professional skepticism, while not causing U.S. auditors to become less skeptical. Our study contributes to the auditing literature by identifying cultural mindset differences as a causal mechanism underlying lower professional skepticism levels among Chinese auditors compared to U.S. auditors and providing standard setters and firms with a potential solution that can be adapted to improve Chinese auditors' professional skepticism and reduce cross‐national auditor judgment differences.