Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance最新文献

This study aims to examine the impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on financial reporting quality in Saudi Arabia, with a specific focus on the mediating role of effective audit committees (ACs) and the specific characteristics of ACs that have a negative correlation with earnings management (EM) practices. The research collected financial data from 92 listed firms spanning the period from 2012 to 2020 encompassing both the years  before and after the IFRS adoption in 2017. The study used regression and rigorous mediation analysis based on the Baron and Kenny (1986) approach to investigate the relationship between IFRS adoption, ACs, and EM. The findings indicate that IFRS adoption has a negative and significant impact on EM practices. Additionally, the study found that AC expertise is positively influenced by the IFRS adoption, while the AC size has a positive correlation with EM levels. The study further revealed that AC expertise has a negative correlation with EM levels and fully mediates the relationship between IFRS adoption and EM. The research's findings carry significant practical implications for a range of stakeholders. Regulators and policymakers in Saudi Arabia should consider the positive impact of IFRS adoption on financial reporting transparency and accountability when evaluating their regulatory framework. Firms can strengthen their corporate governance practices by focusing on the recruitment and training of AC members with robust financial and accounting backgrounds. This emphasis on AC quality, rather than size, is crucial to mitigating EM practices and enhancing the effectiveness of IFRS implementation. Lastly, investors and analysts can utilize these findings to assess the reliability of financial statements and identify firms with robust governance structures. Furthermore, the study contributes to the discourse on financial reporting and governance dynamics in emerging markets, offering insights for future research and policy discussions.

This study aims to extend research on the effect of PCAOB inspections on audit firm behavior by examining generally accepted auditing standards (GAAS) and generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) type PCAOB inspection deficiencies, separately, to reveal the differential effects on audit fees in subsequent years. We empirically examine the audit fees of 98,393 client firm-year observations for auditors who received a PCAOB inspection report during 2004–2021 via multivariate regression analyses. We find that GAAS (GAAP) deficiencies are associated with higher (lower) audit fees in the years following the reported deficiency. Our results suggest that the PCAOB inspection process modifies audit firm behavior when GAAS deficiencies are reported leading to the firm charging higher audit fees to defray the costs of addressing the deficiencies, but due to the severity of GAAP deficiencies that are identified, audit firms are willing to negotiate lower fees to retain the client. Our results are primarily driven by annually inspected audit firms. These results suggest that auditors respond to GAAS and GAAP PCAOB inspection deficiencies differently. The results of our study are useful to regulators and policymakers, such as the SEC and the PCAOB, in understanding how auditors respond to PCAOB inspection deficiencies and their due diligence to correct those deficiencies. PCAOB inspections are intended to evaluate compliance with accounting and auditing standards to improve audit quality and our study helps to extend the research to date which has not yet clearly demonstrated whether or not this has been accomplished.

Given the ever-increasing occurrence of corporate restructuring, the relevance of accounting information related to restructuring became more important in financial reporting. We first examine how restructuring cost affects stock returns and find firms with significant restructuring costs have worse stock performance compared with firms without significant restructuring costs. We then establish prediction model to predict the incurrence of future restructuring cost. The performance of the prediction model achieves an AUC (the area under curve) of .84 on the training data and an AUC of .77 when using out-of-sample validation.

The purpose of our study is to examine the financial reporting complexity of listed firms in Indonesia and the association between the financial reporting complexity and the accounting expertise of boards (Board of Directors/BOD and Board of Commissioners/BOC) and audit committee members. We use samples of listed firms in Indonesia over the period from 2013 to 2019. We find that financial reporting complexity is negatively associated with the accounting expertise of the BOD, BOC, and audit committee. These results indicate that companies do not try to engage in higher accounting expertise to mitigate the unfavourable impact of financial reporting complexity and that companies tend to use the financial reporting complexity to obfuscate the financial reporting. The novelty of our study is developing an aggregate measure of the financial reporting complexity that has not been used in extant studies. We also have not found any previous studies examining this issue in emerging countries, including Indonesia. The previous study has examined similar issues in the USA, where the USA is a developed country with a high level of investor protection. The varying levels of investor protection may affect the results.

Utilizing a sample of 1258 reverse stock splits from 1988 to 2019, we contrast earnings management by firms that initiate reverse splits for diverse reasons. Literature suggests that the incentives for reverse splits vary based on firms' stock price ranges. As such, we use the pre-split and target-price ranges to separate the sample into three groups. We find a stark difference in discretionary accruals across these groups. While previous studies have treated earnings management and reverse splits as substitutes, we hypothesize that firms at risk of delisting may employ these two mechanisms as complements. Consistent with the hypothesis, we document a strong positive association between reverse splits and post-split discretionary accruals for firms with pre-split prices below $1. This relationship, however, is non-existent among the remaining two groups. Our findings have two important implications for investors: (i) firms with different motives behind reverse splits exhibit different earnings management behavior and (ii) firms that are likely facing exchange delisting use discretionary accruals in complement with reverse stock splits.

We examine how a CEO's family life affects their corporate decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether a CEO's spouse's professional status affects the CEO's risk-taking behavior. Using a sample of S&P 500 firms from the 2010 to 2012 period, we find evidence that CEOs with spouses who are professionals, defined as working spouses, spouses holding graduate degrees, or spouses graduated from Ivy League schools, tend to adopt riskier corporate policies. Our evidence suggests that firms led by CEOs with professional spouses exhibit higher accounting return volatility, make more aggressive financial reporting decisions, and invest more in risky assets. We do not find a significant association between professional spouses and firms’ market return volatility. Our results are consistent with the indirect channel theory, which suggests that CEOs with professional spouses might be inclined to undertake higher risks, potentially stemming from heightened conflicts between family and work commitments or improved wealth diversification attributed to their spouses' professional standing.

The purpose of this study is to present a comprehensive literature review on Implied Volatility (IV) and its significance for investment decisions. The study employs a combination of bibliometric information, qualitative synthesis, and citation analysis to provide an overview of the current research on IV. Additionally, the study maps the research field by identifying leading journals, authors, research centers, and publications. The findings of the study highlight the importance of IV both theoretically and practically, and the fragmented nature of existing knowledge. The comprehensive literature review conducted in this study contributes to the existing body of knowledge on IV. The research limitations of the study are due to the use of a single database for data extraction, which may have resulted in missing some relevant articles. It is suggested that future studies may use multiple databases to improve the comprehensiveness of the literature review.

We aim to provide an unambiguous explanation for the positive influence of the geographic distance between a firm's home and host country on divestment decisions of Japanese multinational firms’ outbound merger and acquisition (M&A). Our analysis of 868 acquisitions made by 496 firms in 45 countries and regions from 2005 to 2015 highlights the importance of drawing a clear distinction among various foreign divestment motives before inferring the impact of geographic distances rashly, especially whether it is failure-driven or global business strategy-driven. We further find that its impact hinges on parent firm- and deal-level attributes, that is, geographic distance is less salient for large firms, young firms, and foreign operations under a complete control mode; however, the opposite was the case for firms with a high debt burden.

We study whether heterogeneity in pay-performance sensitivities (PPS) across top management team (TMT) members influences audit fees. Evidence from current literature reveals that the heterogeneity in PPS among TMT affects TMT managers’ motivation to coordinate their activities to manipulate earnings. Since the quality of earnings lowers auditors’ financial reporting risk, we posit that audit fees will be lower when dispersion in the PPS among TMT is high. We demonstrate that audit fees are negatively linked with dispersion in PPS among TMT members. This finding is robust to numerous sensitivity testing. Overall, our findings suggest that firms benefit from the heterogeneity in PPS among TMT members in the form of lower audit fees.

We examine the effects of political risk at the firm level on the integrity of financial reports between 2009 and 2019 using a data from U.S. firms. We provide evidence that, as evaluated by quarterly earnings conference call transcripts of companies with analysts that focus on political risk or uncertainty, political risk at the firm level is inversely related to the quality of accounting information. This effect is more likely to happen to firms with a higher agency problem, faster growth, and greater reliance on outside finance. The results persist after controlling macroeconomic variables. Our findings are also robust to alternative financial reporting quality criteria and endogeneity tests, and are economically significant.