Personal Networks, Board Structures and Corporate Fraud in Japan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

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Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

If romaji is used to explain the Japanese version of the Company with Audit and Supervisory Committee, then it is advisable to include kanji, if the journal permits, before the romanised version of pronunciation. This should be applied to all subsequent similar cases in the manuscript.

It is not clear why data and previous studies are in the same section. They should be separated because these two discussions are intertwined and challenging to follow, especially for data discussions.

The authors aggressively use footnotes, but it is sometimes puzzling. In Table 1, it is not clear what “/“ means because it is usually used to divide two variables. However, for some variables in the table it may separate two terms. The values are given as 1 or 0, indicating a dummy variable, but „/“ is just puzzling. Then, in the footnote, it is implied that dmt is not just 1 or 0, but even 2 or 3. How many „1, others 0“ in the table are 2 or 3?

Table 3, i.e., the correlation matrix should have p-values or asterisks, included.

 

The limitations and future studies should be included in the concluding remarks. Some limitations, such as partial observability, were included in the discussion section, and then future research was expected to be focused on resolving this and other biases, but this section seems rather incomplete. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Good motivation of the topic

Interesting contribution for the Japanese case that contrasts previous findings from other countries. The results highlight the relevance of culture.

For further research, other connections could be studied, as well.

Minor amendments are necessary:

p.5, footnote 21: delete last two sentences (“The timings … media (public)”) as they are redundant with the main text (see lines 154-157).

p.8, table: unclear definition of dmc, please improve

Formal details

p.3, line 65: format of footnote 11 is wrong. Same for footnotes 12 and 13 in lines 68 and 71

p.3, footnote 14: “ordinarily” à “ordinary”

p.4, line 97 “results show” à “our results show”

p.5, footnote 20: delete “but”

p.14, line 348: Eliminate double point.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English language is fine, few points detected (see comments above)

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Good

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Good