Advances in Accounting最新文献

In this study, we examine whether and how debt covenant violations are related to corporate cost management, an important business operating decision. Our findings suggest that firms significantly reduce slack operating resources after debt covenant violations. Our cross-sectional tests indicate that this reduction in cost stickiness is more pronounced when creditor monitoring is stronger, and when empire building is more severe. Our evidence adds to the literature on determinants of corporate cost management and sheds new light on how creditors influence firm behavior.

This study empirically examines the timeliness of financial reporting as an important qualitative characteristic of useful financial information within the context of United Kingdom (UK) charities. Using 8490 UK charitable companies (67,014 observations) during 2007–2018, we find that charities relying more on donation income take a shorter time to file accounts. Moreover, we observe that charities operating in more competitive donation markets are more inclined to provide timely financial disclosures. Similar to for-profit organizations, charities tend to delay their financial statements filings when reporting deficit, negative equity, low liquidity, and high leverage. In addition, our analysis shows that charities with higher accruals quality, unqualified audit opinions, and subject to audits by industry-specialized auditors publish their annual accounts earlier. Our findings have important implications for charities, donors as critical stakeholders, regulators, and scholars.

This research explores how accounting and HR employees perceive the value of managerial accounting and HR practices in their organizations. Our study was restricted to participants employed in publicly listed organizations allowing us to explore how their perceptions equate with objectively measured firm performance. In total, 186 employees completed a series of measures exploring their perceptions of managerial accounting practices and the value of using HR as a measurement tool. Further, we regressed our accounting and HR measures on financial, non-financial, and market-based aspects of corporate performance. Our findings reveal that compared to accounting employees, HR employees place a higher value on using HR metrics and diagnostic styles of managerial accounting systems. Further, internal accounting and HR systems impact firm performance and corporate information environment. Our research has practical implications for strategic policy makers within publicly listed corporations that influence accounting and HR organizational cultures.

Research shows that in practice, supervisors without any constraints to their compensation setting behavior often tend to provide lenient performance evaluations to employees. Economic theory criticizes this outcome because leniency is thought to provide lower motivation to exert effort for low and medium as well as high performers. To provide incentives for employees to exert effort, economic theory calls for a distributed compensation approach that ensures employee performance differences lead to compensation differences. This call ignores insights from psychology and specifically from social determination theory (SDT). Using a real-effort experiment, we find that lenient evaluations lead to lower performance than distributed evaluations when performance is measured precisely. However, lenient evaluations lead to higher effort and performance than distributed evaluations when employee performance is measured imprecisely. We show, using a process model, that the positive effect of leniency for imprecise performance measurement on employee performance results from higher levels of task enjoyment, consistent with SDT. Our findings suggest that organizations need to consider the leniency of compensation as well as performance measurement precision jointly to achieve optimal employee effort and performance.

Analysts' earnings forecasts exclude other comprehensive income (OCI). However, OCI affects firm value on a dollar-for-dollar basis and can enhance investors' assessments of the riskiness of firms' equity capital. Focusing on financial firms and using analysts' book value per share (BVPS) forecasts as a proxy for forward-looking information about OCI, we examine whether analysts provide information about future OCI via BVPS forecasts, whether investors respond to BVPS innovations (which should include OCI innovations), and whether such innovations are more useful to investors in financial firms with difficult-to-value financial assets. We find evidence consistent with: 1) Analysts' BVPS forecasts generally conveying at least some information about future OCI; and, 2) The market responding to whether firms miss analysts' consensus BVPS expectations (which should include OCI expectations), with stronger evidence for firms with larger holdings of difficult-to-value financial assets. The evidence supports the intuition that analysts provide at least some information about future OCI in their BVPS forecasts.