The International Journal of Accounting最新文献

Focusing on the unique setting of two segmented stock markets in China and using a sample of Chinese listed firms issuing both A-shares and B-shares during the period of 2007–2014, this study examines the influence of corporate environmental information disclosure on foreign share discount, and further investigates the moderating effect of globalizing the board. The findings show that environmental information disclosure is significantly negatively related to foreign share discount, suggesting that environmental information disclosure provides valuable and incremental information to mitigate information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors, and thus reduces foreign share discount. Moreover, globalizing the board reinforces the negative relation between environmental information disclosure and foreign share discount. These findings are robust to alternative measures of environmental information disclosure and foreign share discount, and further, these conclusions are still valid after controlling for the endogeneity problem.

This study examines the association between financial expert CEOs and earnings management (EM) around initial public offerings. We identify financial expert CEOs as those having past experience in either banking or investment firms, large auditing firms, or finance-related roles. We find strong evidence that newly listed firms with financial expert CEOs are less likely to engage in either accrual-based or real EM in the offering year than those with non-financial expert CEOs. In particular, our results are robust after controlling for the potential selection issue that occurs due to non-random matching of CEOs to firms. In addition, we employ alternative measures of financial expertise, including past experience in a CFO position, financial experience variety, and professional qualifications. We document that CEOs who used to work as CFOs and those who gained varied financial experience are less likely to manage earnings through both accruals and real activities. Moreover, CEOs who have a professional qualification in finance and/or accounting are also associated with lower accrual-based EM.

In this study, we examine the association between tournament incentives and financial restatements in China. Prior research documents that tournament incentives have a positive impact on firm performance. However, an alternative view suggests that tournament incentives can also have detrimental effects on firm performance. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies for the years 2008–2015, we find that tournament incentives, in the form of large pay disparities, reduce the occurrence of both core and non-core financial restatements. This negative association is more pronounced for SOEs as compared to non-SOEs. We further document that the negative association between tournament incentives and financial restatements is related to CEO turnover, and is stronger if the successor CEO is recruited from within the organization. This research contributes to a better understanding of tournament incentives, as a corporate governance mechanism, in constraining the occurrence of financial restatements in a unique institutional setting where state ownership is pronounced.

Based on a sample of approximately 6500 credit ratings and 137,000 loan contracts, this paper analyzes the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on the Brazilian credit market. We find that the IFRS adoption effects were limited to firms displaying improved accounting information quality at the time of transition, lending support to the notion that economic benefits do not necessarily flow from the publication of financial reports in IFRS but, rather, depend on how earnestly firms adopt the recommended disclosure practices.