---
title: "Tunneling through related-party transactions"
description: "Related-party transactions appear on 23 recent papers and tunneling on 17, almost all in finance journals and mostly about Chinese business groups. As rules on these transactions tighten and disclosure moves to machine-readable formats, can tunneling be detected at scale, and did the rules reduce it?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/related-party-transactions-and-tunneling
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/related-party-transactions-and-tunneling.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "Tunneling through related-party transactions: Related-party transactions appear on 23 recent papers and tunneling on 17, almost all in finance journals and mostly about Chinese business groups."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["accounting", "finance", "governance"]
keywords: ["related-party transactions", "tunneling"]
---

# Tunneling through related-party transactions

Related-party transactions appear on 23 recent papers and tunneling on 17, almost all in finance journals and mostly about Chinese business groups. As rules on these transactions tighten and disclosure moves to machine-readable formats, can tunneling be detected at scale, and did the rules reduce it?

## What prompted this

Since October 2025, 41 papers carry a related-party or tunneling keyword (27 in finance journals, 6 in economics, 4 in accounting): "related-party transactions" on 23 and "tunneling" on 17. Most study a single country, and few use the transaction-level disclosures that listed firms now file.

## Questions

- Can anomalous related-party transactions (prices far from market, timing before earnings announcements) be detected automatically from disclosures, and do the flagged firms later face enforcement?
- Did stricter approval rules for related-party transactions in China and India reduce their volume, or move them into unreported forms?
- Do minority shareholders price the expected tunneling into group-affiliated firms?

## Data that could help

Transaction-level related-party disclosures (CSMAR for China, stock exchange filings elsewhere), enforcement records and stock returns.

## Next step

Build a detector for abnormal related-party prices from Chinese listed firms' transaction disclosures and check whether flagged firms are later sanctioned.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| related-party transactions | 1 | #2881 | 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 3, 0, 3, 1, 1, 0, 0, 3, 1, 4, 6, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 4, 2, 2, 0, 1, 2, 1, 4, 1, 1, 3, 1 | 58 |
| tunneling | 0 | – | 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 3, 2, 1, 3, 1, 3, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 0 | 43 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Tunneling through related-party transactions. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/related-party-transactions-and-tunneling

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-related-party-transactions-and-tunneling,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Tunneling through related-party transactions},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/related-party-transactions-and-tunneling}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).