Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting最新文献

We study whether and how pay disparities between chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) affect corporate policies. Consistent with the tournament theory, we find a positive association between the CEO–CFO pay disparity and aggressiveness in corporate financial and investment policies. Specifically, a firm with a large CEO–CFO pay disparity tends to have an aggressive capital structure and tilt toward high-risk investments. Furthermore, we test the impact of the CEO–CFO pay disparity on firm value and show that the pay disparity is positively associated with firm value. Overall, we conclude that CEO–CFO pay disparities provide CFOs with tournament incentives to not only adopt aggressive corporate policies but also select better investment projects. Our research highlights the career-enhancing and value-creating effects of CEO–CFO pay disparities as well as the important role of CFOs’ incentives on the treasurer side of their duties.

This paper investigated the impact of religiosity on accrual and real earnings management. Unlike most previous studies which consider this issue in a multi-religious setting, we use a mono-religious setting, specifically Poland where the Roman Catholic Church holds a dominant position. Thus, we are able to study the impact of religiosity on earnings management ignoring the impact of different religious denominations magnified by cultural factors. Our study focuses on the impact the Catholic religion has on earnings management. A novelty of this study is our proxy for religiosity. We use the communicantes ratio applicable only to Catholic and Orthodox denominations. This study contributes to the literature by providing a broader picture of the impact of religiosity on earnings management. Based on a sample of Polish companies, we find that Catholicism positively (negatively) influences the level of accrual (real) earnings management. We carefully examine the issue of differences between religiosity and personal faith and highlight the problems related to selecting a proxy for religiosity. The results indicate that a firm's preferred earnings management strategy depends heavily on the values shared by the national community. The majority of previous studies find that religiosity has a negative (positive) impact on accrual (real) earnings management. We provide empirical evidence that this is not always the case. There exists a setting in which the impact of religiosity is opposite, and the mechanisms through which religiosity influences earnings management are much more complicated than what was previously assumed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze empirically the behavior of expected loan loss provisions during the economic cycle. The provisioning rules under IFRS 9 require the creation of reserves to cover expected credit losses, were anticipated to act countercyclically, and thus replaced the rules under IAS 39, which are widely presumed to have a procyclical impact. Observing the dynamics of the economic cycle during the economic downturn resulting from the COVID restrictions, a panel regression was performed to test the hypothesis that loan loss provisioning rules under IFRS 9 have a procyclical impact. The hypothesis was not rejected on the basis of a sample of the member countries of the European Union for the period of 1Q 2015 – 3Q 2020. Since the conclusions about procyclicality of loan loss provisions under IFRS 9 might be sensitive to the choice of models applied by the banks or to the assumptions applied to forward-looking information used in the models, there are certain areas that supervisory and regulatory authorities might look into to increase the quality of ECL models and their predictive power and help to eliminate potential triggers of procyclicality.

The Directive 2014/95/EU represents one of the main innovations introduced by the European Commission to encourage large companies to disclose their contribution to sustainable development. Since its introduction, the Directive 2014/95/EU has put into motion an intense debate about its effectiveness. Academics and policymakers agreed on the need to rethink mandatory non-financial reporting to enhance the contribution to the 2030 Agenda. In fact, despite a quantitative increase in the overall number of non-financial reports published yearly in Europe, only a limited number of companies explicitly disclose information about their contribution to the SDGs. In this sense, the disclosure of information about SDGs is driven by factors related to institutional and organizational dynamics. Building on a sample of 873 Public Interest Entities, an empirical analysis was conducted to fill the theoretical gap about the enabling role covered by cultural factors on SDG reporting. The analysis revealed that companies operating in institutional contexts characterized by long-term orientation and an adequate degree of balance between indulgence and restraints are more oriented to disclose their contributions to the SDGs. Our insights underlined the need to consider cultural dimensions in policymaking and standard-setting to encourage large companies to voluntarily disclose their contribution to 2030 Agenda.

This paper investigates the ability of female presence to affect value relevance. Focusing on a sample of 487 entities listed in 18 European countries over the period 2009–2017, it uses a price model to assess the ability of female presence to affect the value relevance of earnings and book value disclosed in the consolidated annual reports of the firms analyzed. Findings offer evidence that female presence on corporate boards increases the value relevance of accounting amounts, providing insights that board composition affects investors’ judgments. Taking into account that in the literature scholars have shown that female presence is associated with market prices, this paper provides a contribution, showing its ability to affect the value relevance of earnings and book value of equity. The research findings suggest that not only the quality of accounting standards but also other factors such as female presence on the corporate board of directors affect accounting practices and, in turn, the quality of financial reporting and value relevance. Its findings offer an additional support to the European Union Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 according to which an increase in women's participation in the labor market has a strong, positive impact on the whole economy.

This paper analyzes the influence of large bank shareholders on the terms of bank loans for a sample of 12,045 loans to 3,290 borrowers from 45 countries over the period 2004–2013. We investigate the effects of bank control over bank loan terms during the global financial crisis, regardless of whether the bank shareholder is a lender or not. In line with a monitoring effect, the results suggest that firms with bank shareholders that are non-lenders borrowed at lower interest rates and longer maturities during the period of crisis. However, borrowers paid higher spreads and were offered shorter maturities when they borrowed from banks that are also shareholders. This effect is consistent with banks obtaining private benefits as large shareholders as a consequence of the informational hold-up problems affecting borrowers.

In this paper, we examine the role of external monitoring as an alternative mechanism of corporate governance pertaining to the risk and mispricing of accruals in the Brazilian market. The results provide evidence of the accruals anomaly for companies with low external monitoring and evidence that is stronger when evaluating the discretionary component of accruals. Our analysis does not support the conclusion that total and discretionary accruals represent price risk factors, which suggests that the evidence of anomaly results from mispricing. Our evidence contributes to the growing literature on accruals pricing in emerging markets, by adding elements such as the influence of external monitoring and the level of investor sophistication, hereby represented by market analysts and institutional investors. Our study provides additional evidence that the presence of these intermediary agents creates an external layer of control capable of contributing positively to the process of disclosure and pricing of financial information. Thus, the role of such intermediaries as external monitors in emerging markets can be potentially significant for correctly pricing accruals. While Brazil has its own unique institutional characteristics, our findings confirm the evidence obtained for other countries.

Prior literature has largely dealt with the effect of either corporate social responsibility (CSR) or innovation on firm financial risk. No earlier research has examined the combined effect of a firm's simultaneous pursuit of CSR and innovation on firm financial risk. This study investigates the combined effects with a view to fostering our understanding of relationships of CSR and innovation with financial risk. Using the patent application and CSR data of 2,174 Chinese listed firms over the period 2010–2016, this study finds that firms with higher levels of imitative innovation and good CSR performance exhibit higher financial risk. The results remain after a series of robustness tests including the use of an alternative measure of firm financial risk and CSR. The results indicate that firms with a higher level of imitative innovation exhibit greater financial risk; however, the risk cannot be mitigated by firms' good CSR performance. CSR performance helps firms boost the positive image of a “good citizen” and reduce firm financial risk; however, the combined effects of CSR and imitative innovation trigger higher financial risk. The results of this study support the umbrella theory of CSR that exacerbates the moral hazard for those firms that rely on imitative innovation.

This study examines the impact of profitability on the capital structure decision of US multinational and domestic corporations. The findings reveal that the relationship between multinational corporations’ (MNCs') profitability and their leverage ratios is U-shaped and nonlinear, while this nonlinear relation does not exist for domestic firms (DCs). This nonlinear relationship indicates that the effect of profitability on multinational corporations' leverage depends on the levels of their profitability. Consistent with the dominance of the pecking order theory, lower-profitability MNCs have a tax shield advantage that does not outweigh the information asymmetry costs of debt financing. Conversely, higher-profitability MNCs have a tax shield advantage that outweighs the information asymmetry costs of debt financing. The findings are robust after using two different classifications for multinational firms, including foreign tax and foreign sales; after applying an alternative methodology and during different time horizons.

This study provides empirical evidence on changes in entities’ reporting of interests in joint ventures from proportionate consolidation to the equity method following adoption of IFRS 11 and their application of the corresponding IFRS 12 disclosure requirements. The sample includes 551 firms from 26 countries affected by the adoption of IFRS 11 (1,858 financial statements). The findings indicate that many firms are not fully complying with IFRS 12 disclosure requirements and that firm-level characteristics (e.g., size, leverage, and ownership concentration) contribute more to explaining the level of (non)compliance, when compared to country-level variables (e.g., legal system and emerging versus developed countries). We also find that the level of materiality of joint ventures is positively associated with the level of compliance with IFRS 12 disclosure requirements. Our results contribute to the literature on the determinants of compliance with IFRS Standards disclosure requirements and bring important insights for the post-implementation review of IFRS 11 and IFRS 12 occurring between 2020 and 2022.