Journal of Applied Accounting Research最新文献

Purpose

The accuracy of budgeting is important to fulfilling its various roles. The aim of this study is to examine perceptions of budgeting accuracy in UK universities and to identify and understand the factors that influence them.

Design/methodology/approach

A mixed methods research design comprising a questionnaire survey (84 responses, = 51.5%) and 42 semi-structured, qualitative interviews is employed.

Findings

The findings reveal that universities tend to be conservative in their budgeting, although previous financial difficulties, the attitude of the governing body and the need to convince lenders that finances are being managed competently might lead to a greater emphasis on a “realistic” rather than cautious budget. Stepwise multiple regression identified four significantly negative influences on perceived budgeting accuracy: the difficulty of forecasting student numbers; difficulties associated with allowing unspent balances to be carried forward; taking a relatively long time to prepare the budget; and the institution’s level of financial surplus. The interviews are drawn upon to both explain and elaborate on the statistical findings. Forecasting student numbers and associated fee income emerges as a particularly challenging and complex issue.

Research limitations/implications

Our regression analysis is cross-sectional and therefore based on correlations. Furthermore, the research could be developed by investigating the views of other parties as well as repeating the study in both the UK and overseas.

Practical implications

Implications for university management follow from the four factors identified as significant influences upon budget accuracy. These include involving the finance department in estimating student numbers, removing or controlling the carry forward of unspent funds, and reducing the length of the budget cycle.

Originality/value

The first study to examine the factors that influence the perceived accuracy of universities’ budgeting, this paper also advances understanding of budgeting accuracy more generally.

Purpose

This study investigates the influence of corporate culture on financial reporting transparency within Iranian firms.

Design/methodology/approach

Leveraging a dataset of 1,480 firm-year observations from the Tehran Stock Exchange spanning from 2013 to 2022, the study employs text mining to quantify linguistic features of corporate culture and transparency, specifically readability and tone, within annual financial statements and Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) reports.

Findings

Our results confirm a positive and significant relationship between corporate culture and financial reporting transparency. The distinct dimensions of corporate culture — Creativity, Competition, Control, and Collaboration — each uniquely enhance financial transparency. Robustness tests including firm fixed-effects, entropy balancing, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) validate the profound influence of corporate culture on transparency. Additionally, our analysis shows that corporate culture significantly affects the disclosure of business, operational, and financial risks, with varying impacts across risk categories. Cross-sectional analysis further reveals how the impact of corporate culture on transparency varies significantly across different industries and firm sizes.

Research limitations/implications

The study’s scope, while focused on Iran, opens avenues for comparative research in different cultural and regulatory environments. Its reliance on text mining could be complemented by qualitative methods to capture more nuanced linguistic subtleties.

Practical implications

Findings underscore the strategic importance of cultivating a transparent corporate culture for enhancing financial reporting practices and stakeholder trust, particularly in emerging economies with similar dynamics to Iran.

Originality/value

This research is pioneering in its quantitative analysis of the textual features of corporate culture and its impact on transparency within Iranian corporate reports, integrating foundational theoretical perspectives with empirical evidence.

Purpose

Recent accounting literature claims that private firms’ heterogeneity influences the quality of earnings. Along with certain drivers of heterogeneity, private firms get involved in specific programs aimed at fostering their access to capital, competencies and networks (CCN programs). Such programs can enhance private firms’ exposure to stakeholders that demand higher reporting quality, affecting their financial reporting choices. Therefore, this study investigated whether membership in CCN programs affects private firms’ earnings quality.

Design/methodology/approach

Focusing on the ELITE program, an international platform that since 2012 aims to support the growth of the most promising SMEs, and employing different econometric specifications facing endogeneity concerns, this paper carries out a quantitative empirical analysis to test the effect of CCN programs on private firms’ earnings quality.

Findings

Employing different earnings quality measures, empirical evidence reveals that firms belonging to CCN programs experienced an improvement in their earnings quality.

Research limitations/implications

Even though endogeneity concerns have been addressed, we are nevertheless aware that they might, at least partially, have affected our results.

Practical implications

Although the contributions of the study are mostly academic, the empirical evidence obtained also carries practical implications. CCN programs not only act, as one might assume, as catalysts for economic and dimensional growth but also contribute to better earnings quality, mitigating the information asymmetries between firms and their stakeholders.

Originality/value

By adding new evidence to the literature concerning the impact of private firms’ heterogeneity on earnings quality, this is the first study to analyze the impact of specific programs aimed at supporting the affiliated SMEs to foster their access to capital, competencies and networks.

Purpose

The study aims to investigate the impact of board gender diversity (BGD) on firm performance (FP) by testing two hypotheses – the existence of a positive relationship between BGD and FP, and the moderating role of a critical mass of female directors on FP. The study also explores whether the association varies across different industries.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collect data using Bloomberg and CMIE Prowess, from the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) 500 index for the period 2008–2018 and employ a robust statistical methodology (Dynamic Panel Data Model).

Findings

A critical mass of female directors positively moderates and strengthens the relationship between BGD and FP. The study fails to find evidence of a direct association between BGD and FP. The study also finds evidence of industry effects.

Research limitations/implications

Though we use a very robust statistical methodology, any modifications in the methodology or choice of a different methodology are likely to change the results. Moreover, some of the findings are statistically significant at the 10% level.

Practical implications

The findings of our study hold particular significance for emerging economies like India where regulatory initiatives aim to enhance gender diversity within boardrooms.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the critical mass literature by examining the association between a critical mass of female directors as a moderating variable of BGD and FP. Further, the study also identifies those industries which show a positive association between FP and BGD.

Purpose

This study analyses how different forms of online accountability – hierarchical/individualising, hierarchical/calculative and socialising accountability – influence online financing success of non-profit organisations (NPOs).

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on 797 NPOs’ projects listed on three international crowdfunding platforms providing space for NPOs to present, account for and fund social projects.

Findings

Results show that accountability forms developed online play significantly different roles in NPOs’ financing. While online hierarchical/individualising and socialising accountability enhance NPO funding, hierarchical/calculative accountability reduces financing success.

Research limitations/implications

The empirical analysis is limited to the specific research context. However, the research provides theoretical and practical insights for the accounting literature.

Practical implications

The paper recommends that NPOs invest more in explaining their past and future activities rather than reporting on pure financial performances, as this may lead to stakeholders’ perception of mission drift and reduce financing success.

Originality/value

This research enhances the understanding of online accountability and its significance in securing financial resources for NPOs by highlighting the necessity of examining various accountability forms individually, as they may serve distinct functions in the financial sustenance of NPOs.

Purpose

This study aims to examine the extent to which information asymmetry affects investment efficiency and whether the presence of blockholders moderate this relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

We employ the data of firms listed on the Malaysian stock exchange for the period 2010–2018, to compose our sample. Our final sample includes the 100 largest non-financial firms based on market capitalization. Collectively, these 100 companies contribute 84.2% to the total market capitalization (MYR 1,730bn) which is representative of the whole market. The ordinary least squares regressions were used as the main estimation technique. The system generalized method of moments, two-stage least squares and propensity score matching were also used, to address potential endogeneity concerns.

Findings

We document a positively significant association of information asymmetry with investment inefficiency. These results imply that information asymmetry reduces investment efficiency and enhances sub-optimal investments. We also document that blockholders negatively moderate the relationship of information asymmetry with investment inefficiency. Further analyses show that investment inefficiency is higher in low-growth firms than in high-growth firms because of higher information asymmetry.

Research limitations/implications

We focus on Malaysia, which is a predominantly common-law Anglo-Saxon country. Graff (2008) documented that the investors are treated differently across legal systems and there are differences between the continental European and Anglo-Saxon countries. La Porta et al. (1999) documented that investors tend to have more legal protection in Anglo-Saxon countries. Therefore, our results may not be generalized to countries with different legal systems.

Practical implications

An important implication of our findings is that stakeholders may encourage the presence of blockholders and give them a voice to weaken the positive relationship between information asymmetry and investment inefficiency.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the contingency literature by investigating the moderating effect of an important governance mechanism, i.e. the presence of blockholders on information asymmetry-investment efficiency nexus. Despite being important, this moderating effect has been largely overlooked in the literature. Our study contributes by providing an understanding of how blockholders can influence investment decisions, offering insights for academics, investors and policymakers focused on improving the efficacy of investment decisions and governance structure.

Purpose

This study examines the patterns of international diversity in collaborative research published in highly ranked accounting journals.

Design/methodology/approach

We examine four types of collaborations: regional, inter-regional, European national and European international. The empirical study is based on 4,033 articles published in 13 journals between 2010 and 2019. Social network analyses were carried out for the inter-regional and the European international collaborations.

Findings

The broad analysis of the regional and inter-regional collaborations reveals not only significant differences between the non-North American journals and the North American but also important dissimilarities among the non-North American journals. The analysis of the European collaborations reveals significant differences between the journals where the UK institutions play a significant role in leading a network of European researchers and the journals where the Dutch and/or German institutions also play a significant role in another network as European leaders in terms of research.

Research limitations/implications

Although it reveals the patterns of internationalization of the highly ranked accounting journals, and offers some insights regarding why such patterns exist, it does not assess co-authorship networks with regard to the authors' orientation in terms of methods and research topics. We acknowledge that the networks amongst authors should also be influenced by the specific PhD-granting institutions. However, we let the data speak to these points, showing how journals differ in publication patterns. Not all highly ranked journals in accounting have the same networks and patterns of co-authorship. Another limitation pertains to the limited aspect of diversity it focuses on, that of geographical diversity. Furthermore, our analyses do not speak directly to the nationalities of the authors, but to the country in which the publication was granted at the time of the paper's publication.

Practical implications

Our findings show that the patterns of international diversity in all the types of collaborations under examination in the highly ranked accounting journals vary across different groups of journals. The “North-American or North-American inspired journals” (Guthrie et al., 2019, p. 12) have the highest level of geographical concentration and the North American universities/institutions contribute with the majority of the papers. The “non-North American journals” – the leading journals for critical, interpretive and interdisciplinary approaches (Hussain et al., 2020) and those which are more acceptive of these latter approaches – have a lower level of geographic concentration of the papers and there is a broader set of regions and countries involved, including No

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of chief executive officer (CEO) overconfidence on earnings quality and the moderating role of ownership structure as a crucial corporate governance device.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper uses the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation method to test our models on a sample of 335 French companies between 2009 and 2020, i.e. 4,020 observations.

Findings

The results show that CEO overconfidence negatively affects earnings quality. This result supports the predictions of behavioral finance theory and suggests that CEO overconfidence is a behavioral bias that affects the quality of earnings. The authors also examined the effect of different types of ownership structures on this relationship. The results show the significant role of controlling shareholders, owner-managers, families and institutional investors in mitigating the negative effect of CEO overconfidence on earnings quality.

Research limitations/implications

This paper has some limitations. First, other types of ownership structures could have been analyzed such as state ownership. Second, we ignored the role of the board of directors as an important governance mechanism in controlling overconfident CEOs’ actions.

Practical implications

Companies should be aware of the potential risks associated with CEO overconfidence, which can compromise the faithful representation of earnings. This highlights the importance of effective monitoring and internal controls to detect and prevent such practices, which involve the role of ownership structure.

Originality/value

This paper addresses the effect of CEO overconfidence on earnings quality and provides new evidence on the role of different ownership structure types in shaping this relationship. Additionally, this paper sheds new light on how overconfident CEOs may behave in challenging times.