Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting最新文献

We study the motivations behind and consequences of firms disclosing carbon information. Specifically, we explain the bidirectional relationship between carbon disclosure and carbon performance and examine whether carbon disclosure is used as a legitimizing tool or a governance tool. We analyze carbon emissions and disclosure data from 2012 to 2015 for a sample of S&P 500 companies. After addressing issues of endogeneity, our findings support legitimacy theory and suggest that firms tend to greenwash carbon information and use carbon disclosure as a legitimizing tool. In particular, managers strategically select particular types of carbon information to disclose to the public. Our findings also indicate that firms in low-carbon sectors tend to use disclosure as a governance tool rather than a legitimizing tool, suggesting that firms in high carbon intensity sectors are likely to face serious legitimacy anxiety, and have stronger reasons to manage their green image. Implications of our empirical evidence for managers, investors, and policymakers are explored.

We examine how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may signal their quality and growth orientation to the market and the effect on the cost of bond funding, which is often high for unlisted firms and SMEs mainly because of their information opacity and higher riskiness. The paper contributes to the growing European debate on market innovations aimed at facilitating funding for smaller and nonlisted firms, breaking from the prior main focus on the cost for large and listed companies of accessing liquid bond markets. We analyze 220 mini-bonds listed in Italy between 2013 and 2017 to examine determinants of yield spreads. Our explanatory variables are size, age, and tangible assets—all indicators of the firm's information opacity—together with the issuer's growth opportunities, rating availability, and the presence of a guarantee. The findings suggest that tangible assets can ease the asymmetric information and associated monitoring costs for investors, thus reducing the bond yield spread. More significantly, the yield spread depends on the type of investment project financed: risky growth projects are associated with a higher cost of funding than other types of projects. Under such circumstances, the rating represents an informative instrument for the market in assessing issuers' growth orientation.

Financial crises and economic downturns provide a unique opportunity to investigate the behavior of investors and financial instruments and shed light in the market's anticipation of future economic growth. In view of the current crisis, we examine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the European green bond market. Using daily data from Thomson Reuter's Refinitiv, we conducted event studies on corporate credit spread changes over the period from January 1 to December 31, 2020. Our results reveal that green bonds' credit spreads increased significantly after the start of the coronavirus outbreak. However, as the fear of the pandemic eased in response to positive news about the vaccines, green bonds' credit spreads fell below conventional bonds. Overall, green bonds showed a higher risk exposure and lower resilience to distress while profiting during an upside. Our paper provides the first evidence about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the announcement of vaccines' effectiveness on the European corporate green bond market. Our results suggest several key points that are relevant to both investors and issuers under the unprecedented conditions created by the pandemic.

Corporate social responsibility is the balance between a firm's economic outcomes and environmental protection. However, investors face increasing difficulties in selecting assets with suitable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies because companies may “greenwash” their activities by, for example, make misleading ESG disclosures. Here, we investigate the determinants that lead to companies engaging in ESG greenwashing. By analyzing international large-cap companies across 47 countries and territories, we create a peer-relative greenwashing score to measure the magnitude of ESG greenwashing by companies. First, we measure and evaluate the greenwashing by analyzing ESG disclosures and creating peer-relative performance scores that consider the level of disclosure and the real ESG performance. Second, we show that companies' greenwashing decisions are motivated by financial constraints and thus the financial environment is a determinant of greenwashing behavior. Third, we describe how intermediation can alleviate financial constraints and decrease greenwashing behavior. Moreover, highly leveraged companies may have increased financial pressure and thus may enhance their greenwashing behavior. Our findings are robust according to several different measurements of financial constraint indicators.

This paper examines the relationship between environmental violations and the cost of corporate bonds, and further analyzes whether refinancing constraints, the lending restrictions on penalized firms, are an important channel through which environmental violations affect the cost of corporate debt financing in China. Using the manually collected environmental violation events from 2008 to 2020, we find that the bond cost of firms violating environmental regulations increases significantly after being penalized. The finding is robust to potential sample selection bias and endogeneity problems. Furthermore, we find that the effect of environmental violations on the cost of corporate bonds is more profound in short-term debt-dependent firms and can be alleviated by the internal financing dependence. These results confirm that the refinancing risk arising from China's green loan policy on pollution-intensive firms plays a key role in the relation between environmental violations and the cost of capital in the firms. In the context of the growing concerns of global society about climate change, our findings have great implications for pollution-intensive firms, bond investors, and regulatory authorities in emerging economies to manage the increasing environmental risk.

This study investigates the effect of the green lending propensity of banks on profitability and risk. Using a sample of 217 green facilities financing syndication worldwide, we create a variable of green lending approach measuring the weight of green loans on total credit exposure of the lead bank and investigate the effect of the green propensity so as the structure of syndication on bank accounting performance. We find two relevant findings. First, a higher propensity to green lending is associated with lower profitability, more moderate default risk, and lower credit risk than banks with a less green investment approach. Second, more collateralization and duration of green lending increase bank performance, while the larger syndicate size reduces profitability and risk. Overall, our study suggests that banks are prone to invest in green projects, but the risks may offset profitability requiring public support to empower the role of the banking sector in boosting ecological transition.

Integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into credit risk assessment is the new frontier for credit risk management as regulators and investors increasingly require banks to channel loans to “sustainable” borrowers and ultimately foster sustainable growth. Our findings show that higher ESG awareness is strongly associated with better creditworthiness (proxied by the Altman Z-score). We apply a two-step methodology to 3331 companies from various industries and geographies in the 2000–2016 period which reveals that high ESG awareness scores are strongly and very significantly associated with a reduction in firm credit risk. We check the robustness by using the Probability of Default as a dependent variable and an instrumental variable constructed with a factor analysis. Our results support the appropriateness of the introduction of ESG awareness parameters in the creditworthiness assessment of borrowers.

The sovereign green bond market has been growing rapidly worldwide since its debut in 2016. The study investigates the empirical response of the stock and credit default swap (CDS) market to green bond issuance by 10 EU countries during the period 2016–2021. We document that the issuance of a green bond is regarded by the investors as reflecting as value-enhancing and risk-reducing behavior by EU countries. The issuance of sovereign green bond provides a strong signal of the country's involvement to a low-carbon economy by increasing the social and reputational benefits. This effect is even more evident during the pandemic crisis. The reaction of stock and CDS market is driven by several factors such as bond and country characteristics. Overall, our findings suggest that the sovereign issuance of green bonds acts as mitigation mechanism for country risk.

This study reviews literature examining digital transformation in the external audit setting. Our review will inform the standard-setting initiatives of the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) related to the use of technology in auditing. We identified 36 articles on digital transformation in the external audit published between 2000 and 2021 across 20 journals ranked A*, A, B, and C on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) 2021 Journal Quality List. We also identified 18 advanced working papers. These articles cover conceptual frameworks and archival, experimental, interviews, case studies, and survey research methods. Fifty percent of the published articles appear in A* or A journals, of which nine were published in one of the premier six accounting research journals (i.e., A*) since 2020. This trend is a promising sign that there appears to be increasing interest in publishing digital transformation-related research in these general interest journals. We use the Bonner judgment and decision-making framework, coupled with the four primary data analytic tools, to organize and evaluate the literature. This study examines descriptive and diagnostic analytics; more complex techniques, such as predictive and prescriptive, are not as prevalent. Further, existing research insufficiently addresses how data analytic tools impact auditor judgment and decision-making, providing multiple future inquiry lines.

This paper investigates how equity analysts influence firms' green innovation across different financial markets. Using a unique data set consisting of more than 6000 listed firms across 56 different countries, we find that corporate green innovation is positively associated with the number of equity analysts following the firm. We attribute this result to the informational role of analysts, which encourages managers to invest more in eco-innovation. However, when we divide the full sample into two subsamples based on whether covered firms are incorporated in market-oriented or bank-oriented countries, we find that the association between firm's green innovation and analyst coverage becomes negative in the case of market-oriented financial systems. We argue that potential explanations for this result rely on the differences occurring among market-oriented and bank-oriented systems in terms of listed companies' ownership structure and the prevalence of arm's length transaction banking rather than long-term lender–borrower relationships.