Australian Accounting Review最新文献

Readability is a key issue in the presentation of hedging risk information. We use psychological theories and experiments to analyse and examine the effects of the readability of hedging risk and hedge effectiveness information on investors’ assessment of investments. We find that when hedging risk information presentation is more readable, investors’ judgement of the attractiveness of an investment is higher when hedging effectiveness is high than when hedging effectiveness is low. However, when hedging risk presentation information is less readable, there is no significant difference in their judgement of the attractiveness of an investment between two hedging effectiveness levels. Meanwhile, we further identify the mediation effects of the readability of hedging risk information on investors’ judgement of an investment's attractiveness. The findings of our study have significant implications for improving accounting information readability and enhancing accounting information quality.

This study investigates the relationship between the risk committee (existence and effectiveness) and the quality of integrated reports of the top 200 listed companies on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). A composite ordinal proxy for the firms’ integrated reporting was constructed using data that were hand-collected from annual reports. The main result reports that the existence of a standalone risk committee is negatively and significantly associated with the quality of integrated reporting; however, integrated reporting is positively associated with firms adopting a combined risk and audit committee and risk committee effectiveness.

Concerns about the success of professional accountancy in terms of its social dimension have been expressed in the literature. This study uses data from a questionnaire survey administered to a Portuguese community sample to provide insights for a better understanding of the social dimension of professional accountancy at the macro level. It examines how lay society in accounting posits accountants along the social judgement variables of status, competition, competence and warmth and tests these variables’ influence on accountants’ social image using structural equation modelling. The results indicate that status, competition, competence and warmth are all critical factors in constructing the social image of modern accountants. Accountants are perceived as modestly warm, highly competent and a cooperative lower middle-class group. These findings confirm the profession's difficulties in enhancing accountants’ perceived social standing and reinforce the view of limited social mobility in the accountancy profession. The high level of competence identified suggests weak social power in the case of accountancy. Future research may investigate how soft skills and networking abilities in the perceived prototype of competence can promote the higher social standing of the accountancy group.

This study examines the association between dispersion in pay-performance sensitivities (PPS) among top management team (TMT) members and managerial efficiency. While prior research has focused on managerial efficiency as an innate characteristic of managers, this study explores how managerial incentive dispersion shapes managerial efficiency. Using a sample of US firms from 1993 to 2019, we find a negative relationship between TMT incentive dispersion and managerial efficiency, suggesting that higher levels of incentive dispersion can potentially affect managerial efficiency by reducing coordination and cooperation among TMT members. We employ a range of robustness tests and find consistent and robust results. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on executive compensation by providing novel insights into the implications of incentive dispersion among executives for managerial efficiency.

Auditor turnover remains a persistent concern for regulatory bodies and auditing firms. Past research on auditors’ turnover intention has explored various factors influencing auditors’ turnover intention, including job satisfaction, organisational commitment, work overload and work–life balance. However, the potential role of motivation in mitigating the adverse effects of work overload and work–life imbalance has been overlooked. Our study addresses this gap in the existing literature by revealing the crucial role of motivation and identifying differences between Big4 and Non-Big4 firms. Using questionnaire data from 301 auditors, analysed using structural equation modelling, we find that work overload is positively but indirectly related to turnover intention via work–life balance. Additionally, organisational commitment (job satisfaction) is directly (indirectly) and negatively related to turnover intention. Moreover, and considering that, due to work overload, a lack of work–life balance can be responsible for increasing auditors’ turnover intention, our study suggests that motivation can mitigate this effect. Finally, our study suggests that work–life balance can directly reduce turnover intention for Big4 firms, while for Non-Big4 firms this reduction can only occur via organisational commitment (a channel that is weaker for Big4 firms).

We examine the association between audit committee (AC) busyness and financial restatement and determine whether AC share ownership moderates this relationship. Using logit regression analysis, we test our hypotheses on a sample of 6408 firm-year observations from 2004 to 2015 for companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. The study reveals that firms with busy ACs engage more in financial restatements. We also find that AC share ownership reduces financial restatements and attenuates the association between AC busyness and financial restatement. Our results are robust to endogeneity concerns emanating from firms’ deliberate decisions to grant shares to AC members. The findings of this research have several important policy implications. For instance, shareholders can benefit from AC members’ monitoring ability by allowing for share ownership. Further, our findings suggest that principles-based corporate governance guidelines have a beneficial effect on financial reporting quality. While prior studies offer mixed evidence, our research contributes to the auditing literature by providing evidence that AC share ownership moderates the association between AC busyness and financial restatement.

Concerns remain about how companies will reconcile environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues with their core mandates. This is one reason why many organisations did not initially subscribe to sustainable investing, reporting and accounting, especially where it is not mandatory, despite growing stakeholder pressure to do so. This paper examines how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with social and commercial mandates in South Africa, where sustainability reporting is mandatory, balance ESG practices and financial sustainability to fulfil their mandates. This article proposes and evaluates propositions about SOEs adopting and reporting ESG components using a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with important SOE stakeholders to show that its sustainability accounting approach benefits policy and non-policy observers. More than half of the studied SOEs have embraced and disclosed their ESG practices, yet there appears to be no systematic way in which they balance ESG practices and financial sustainability, resulting in conflict. This paper appears to be the first SOE study on this topic. In this regard, this study offers novel insights into how sustainability practices may be incorporated into the social and commercial objectives of SOEs, which in most cases are conflicting, while still allowing SOEs to be financially sustainable and depend less on state bailouts, which is often the case, especially in Africa and in countries that face a high level of corruption. Considering the characteristics and mandates of SOEs, part of being socially responsible is utilising public resources in the form of taxpayers’ money in an efficient, effective and accountable manner. The discussion in this paper indicates that paying attention to ESG issues is part of a broader accountability mechanism expected from SOEs. Also, the choice of South Africa and of SOEs in South Africa has implications for theory and practice since SOEs in South Africa have social and commercial objectives such that they are expected to be agents of social responsibility.