Value relevance of accounting information: Evidence from an emerging market

Without making any distinction of the applicable accounting standards, this paper investigates, firstly, the value relevance of accounting information from 1999 to 2012 in different segments of the Chinese stock market. This investigation includes A-shares, prepared under Chinese Accounting Standards (CAS) for domestic firms; B-shares, prepared under either the International Accounting Standards (IAS) or International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for both domestic and overseas firms; and H-shares prepared under either the IAS or Hong Kong GAAP for Hong Kong and overseas firms. Then, the paper examines whether or not the converged IFRS with CAS, applicable from 2007 onwards, is more value relevant when compared with prior to the 2007's standards (CAS, IAS, Hong Kong GAAP for A-share, B-share, and H-share markets, respectively). Based on 34,020 firm-year observations and after controlling for industry- and year-fixed effects, the findings suggest that accounting information is value relevant with A- and B-share markets, while it is partially relevant with the H-share market. The paper finds that the converged IFRS with CAS is more value relevant in A-shares and B-shares and it is partially more value relevant with the H-share market. These findings have implications for both policymakers and investors since they provide further empirical evidence for the current policy procedure which harmonizes local GAAP with IFRS.     

Value relevance of international accounting standards harmonization: Evidence from A- and B-share markets in China

Applying both the price-levels model and the lagged-price-deflated returns model, we investigated the incremental value relevance of the reconciliation of accounts from the Chinese Accounting Standards (CAS) to the International Accounting Standards (IAS) by those Chinese listed companies that have simultaneously issued A-shares and B-shares. In addition, we examined the usefulness of accounting numbers (earnings and book values) and their value relevance to the A- and B-share markets in China. The study finds that earnings and book values of owners’ equity determined under CAS are more relevant accounting information for the purpose of determining the prices of A- and B-shares. The CAS-based earnings changes were reflected in stock returns in the B-share market, while the CAS-based earnings were closely associated with stock returns in the A-share market. However, the study found that the reconciliation of earnings and book values from CAS to IAS basis is partially value-relevant, mainly to stock prices in the B-share market, while the earnings reconciliation is generally not value-added to stock returns in either the A- or the B-share market. The study results suggest that accounting numbers based on domestic accounting standards, in contrast to IAS, are more value-relevant in the Chinese stock market at present.     

The informativeness of domestic and foreign investors’ stock trades: Evidence from the perfectly segmented Chinese market

This paper uses the perfect market segmentation setting in China's stock market to compare the information content of the stock trades of domestic and foreign investors. We study 76 firms that issue both A-shares (for domestic investors) and B-shares (for foreign investors) and compare the price discovery role of the two segmented markets in China. Before Feb 19, 2001, the A-share market led the B-share market in price discovery, as the signed volume and quote revision of the A-share market had strong predictive ability for B-share quote returns, but not vice versa. After Feb 19, 2001, because some domestic investors were allowed to invest in the B-share market, we find evidence for a reverse causality from the B-share to the A-share market. Nevertheless, the [Hasbrouck (1995). One security, many markets: determining the contributions to price discovery, Journal of Finance 50, 1175–1199.] information share analysis reveals that A-shares continue to dominate the price discovery process.     

Hedge Accounting and its Consequences on Portfolio Earnings – A Simulation Study

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the consequences of cash flow hedge accounting on portfolio earnings of firms focusing on main changes between IFRS 9 and IAS 39. For this purpose, I develop a simulation study which illustrates the quantitative effects on the accounting entries according to the currently applicable hedge accounting methods. It is especially addressed what accounting differences arise and how these distinctions may affect a firm’s earnings. Furthermore, I examine to which firms early switching becomes especially desirable or burdensome. This information is particularly useful to managers and investors. The paper shows that portfolio earnings are affected differently. In the model, IAS 39 may lead to higher or lower earnings for increasing deviations between foreign and domestic interest rates. Additionally, sensitivity to volatility changes varies among the methods. Moreover, a partly ineffective hedging relationship does not necessarily decrease earnings compared to its fully effective counterpart.     

什么决定了利润差异:会计准则还是职业判断?——来自中国A、B股市场的初步证据

我国资本市场有少量的公司同时发行A股和B股,这部分公司需要提供两套财务报表,分别遵循了国内会计准则和国际会计准则。我们以我国会计制度改革的特定时期(1998-2000)为背景,以同时发行A、B 股的公司为样本,经过研究发现,那些同时发行A、B股公司所报告的净利润差异,主要不是来自会计准则,而是来自于会计职业判断;而会计职业判断背后的经济动机在于上市公司为了达到保牌的目的。我们的研究丰富了有关会计准则与会计信息质量之间关系的研究。     

A comparison of value relevance of accounting information in different segments of the Chinese stock market

This paper investigates the difference in the value relevance between the accounting information prepared and audited under the Chinese GAAP for A-share investors and under the international accounting standards (IAS) for B-share investors in the Chinese stock market. The study reports three primary findings. First, accounting information influences the pricing process in both the A-share market and the B-share market. Second, the accounting information in the B-share market is more value relevant than that in the A-share market, as expected. Finally, the value relevance level of accounting information in the A-share market was low in earlier years, peaked in 1996, and then decreased due to changes in the disclosure environment. However, the value-relevance level of accounting information in the B-share market had no substantial changes. Using a constant sample, control variables on firm features, and measures of traders' behavior, we obtain robust results. These findings have implications for policymakers on recent moves toward replacing local GAAP with the IAS.     

国际会计准则和中国会计准则下的价值相关性比较——来自会计盈余和净资产账面值的证据

本文以中国 2 0 0 0年～ 2 0 0 2年既发行A股又发行B股的公司为样本 ,通过不同会计准则下会计信息的价值相关性研究为我国会计准则的国际化改革提供参考意见。在研究中 ,我们发现国际会计准则下的会计信息相对于我国会计准则下会计信息并没有显著更高的价值相关性 ,相反 ,我国会计准则下的会计信息的作用略强于国际会计准则下的会计信息 ,因此简单地要求从本土会计准则倒向国际会计准则的观点并没有得到有力支持。而且 ,不同准则间的会计信息差异具有价值相关性 ,在财务报告中披露不同会计准则下会计信息的差异是有必要的。对于B股市场 ,在披露国际会计准则下会计信息的同时披露本土国际会计准则下会计信息是有必要的 ;但在A股市场却没有找到很强的证据。此外 ,我们还发现会计信息在深市和沪市的作用明显不同。     

The Post-Issue Market Performance of Initial Public Offerings in China's New Stock Markets

In this paper, we investigate the post-issue market performance of initial public offerings (IPOs) in China's new stock markets. Our analysis focuses on whether and how institutional features unique to China differentially affect IPO performance. These features include the existence of dual-class shares for the same underlying firms (A-shares issued to domestic investors and B-shares issued to foreign investors) and the unusually long time lag between the offering and listing dates. Our sample consists of 277 A-share and 65 B-share IPOs that were listed on China's new stock markets during the 1992–1995 period. Our study has a number of interesting results. First, A-share IPOs are much more severely underpriced during the initial return period than B-share IPOs. Second, B-share IPOs underperform A-share IPOs (and the market) during the post-issue periods for up to three years. Third, the results of multivariate regression analyses strongly suggest that economic factors determining the post-issue performance of IPOs differ across the A-share and B-share samples.     

IAS Versus U.S. GAAP: Information Asymmetry–Based Evidence from Germany's New Market

Motivated by the debate about globally uniform accounting standards, this study investigates whether firms using U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) vis‐à‐vis international accounting standards (IAS) exhibit differences in several proxies for information asymmetry. It exploits a unique setting in which the two sets of standards are put on a level playing field. Firms trading in Germany's New Market must choose between IAS and U.S. GAAP for financial reporting, but face the same regulatory environment otherwise. Thus, institutional factors such as listing requirements, market microstructure, and standards enforcement are held constant. In this setting, differences in the bid‐ask spread and share turnover between IAS and U.S. GAAP firms are statistically insignificant and economically small. Subsequent analyses of analysts' forecast dispersion, initial public offering underpricing, and firms' standard choices corroborate these findings. Thus, at least for New Market firms, the choice between IAS and U.S. GAAP appears to be of little consequence for information asymmetry and market liquidity. These findings do not support widespread claims that U.S. GAAP produce financial statements of higher informational quality than IAS.     

Further evidence on the efficiency of the Chinese stock markets: A note

This paper examines the efficiency of the Chinese A-share and B-share markets following the deregulation of the B-share market which widened ownership to include domestic investors. Applying parametric and non-parametric variance ratio tests to the daily data of 370 shares over 1996–2005, the paper finds that A-shares are more efficient than B-shares, although the efficiency of both markets has improved following the regulatory change. Overall, the results suggest that the Chinese stock markets are characterised by information asymmetry, although the timely access to high quality information that domestic investors enjoy has improved the efficiency of the B-share market.     

Regulation Change and Volatility Spillovers: Evidence from China's Stock Markets

This paper investigates the structural changes of volatility spillovers between Chinese A-share and B-share markets induced by a regulation change on February 19, 2001, that allowed Chinese domestic investors to trade in the B-share market. The empirical results of the study, using high-frequency intraday data collected from a sample of seventy-eight firms issuing both A-shares and B-shares and employing a bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, show that after the regulation change, the volatility in A-shares increases the volatility in B-shares, thus increasing the risk of the whole market, whereas the latter reduces the former, thus reducing the risk of the whole market. A further investigation of the determinants influencing these structural changes shows that the following factors can encourage structural changes that reduce overall market risk: government ownership, institutional ownership, firm size, B-share proportion, and market-to-book ratio. Conversely, the following factors can encourage structural changes that increase overall market risk: dual roles of chief executive officer and chairman and the joint effect of firm size and B-share proportion.     

Economic policy uncertainty,investor attention and post-earnings announcement drift

How the market incorporates information into stock price is a core issue in finance. This study focuses on the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the stock prices information efficiency of China's A-share market and underlying role of investors' attention allocation mechanism. This study analyzes the information efficiency of stock prices using the sensitivity of stock cumulative abnormal return to earnings information across different windows following earnings announcement. Based on the earnings announcement events of listed companies in China's A-share market, this study presents an empirical study of the aforementioned issues using event study and regression analysis methods. The following results are seen: (1) EPU aggravates the underreaction of stock price earnings information and the post-earnings announcement drift in the A-share market. (2) Under highly uncertain economic policies, investors show a limited attention allocation pattern of devoting increasing attention to macroeconomic policies and decreasing attention to earnings information, which leads to a decrease in the information efficiency of stock price. This study also analyzes the heterogeneity of the influence of EPU on stock price information efficiency using the institutional shareholding ratio. The results show that increasing institutional shareholding does not reduce the adverse effects of EPU on the information efficiency of stock prices. This study not only provides empirical evidence for Brunnermeier, Sockin, and Xiong (2022) and rational inattention theory, but also reveals that institutional investors show similar behavioral characteristics to retail investors in China's stock market. The results of this study have policy significance for improving the information efficiency of stock market.     

Accounting earnings response coefficient: An extension to banking shares in Asia Pacific countries

This paper reports new finding on earnings response coefficients for banking firms on how disclosures on total earnings and disaggregated fee earnings are used by investors to change share prices prior to earnings disclosures. The information relating to total earnings influences share prices significantly in all four banking sectors studied, all of which have sufficiently liberalized capital markets. Australian investors appear to use information on disaggregated non-interest fee income to revise share prices significantly: not so in other markets. The investors in Malaysia and South Korea appear to consider changes in fee income as bad news with negative price impact, anomalous to theory. The Australian investors appear to regard both total and fee incomes as equally important whereas investors in other markets either ignore or consider changes in fee income as bad news for share valuation. This study extends the literature on this topic from non-bank to banking firms.     

A Tale of Two Segmented Markets in China: The Informative Value of Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure for Foreign Investors

Focusing on the unique setting of two segmented stock markets in China and using a sample of Chinese listed firms issuing both A-shares and B-shares during the period of 2007–2014, this study examines the influence of corporate environmental information disclosure on foreign share discount, and further investigates the moderating effect of globalizing the board. The findings show that environmental information disclosure is significantly negatively related to foreign share discount, suggesting that environmental information disclosure provides valuable and incremental information to mitigate information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors, and thus reduces foreign share discount. Moreover, globalizing the board reinforces the negative relation between environmental information disclosure and foreign share discount. These findings are robust to alternative measures of environmental information disclosure and foreign share discount, and further, these conclusions are still valid after controlling for the endogeneity problem.     

International Accounting Standards and Accounting Quality

We examine whether application of International Accounting Standards (IAS) is associated with higher accounting quality. The application of IAS reflects combined effects of features of the financial reporting system, including standards, their interpretation, enforcement, and litigation. We find that firms applying IAS from 21 countries generally evidence less earnings management, more timely loss recognition, and more value relevance of accounting amounts than do matched sample firms applying non‐U.S. domestic standards. Differences in accounting quality between the two groups of firms in the period before the IAS firms adopt IAS do not account for the postadoption differences. Firms applying IAS generally evidence an improvement in accounting quality between the pre‐ and postadoption periods. Although we cannot be sure our findings are attributable to the change in the financial reporting system rather than to changes in firms' incentives and the economic environment, we include research design features to mitigate effects of both.     

Domestic Accounting Standards, International Accounting Standards, and the Predictability of Earnings

We investigate (1) whether the variation in accounting standards across national boundaries relative to International Accounting Standards (IAS) has an impact on the ability of financial analysts to forecast non-U.S. firms' earnings accurately, and (2) whether analyst forecast accuracy changes after firms adopt IAS. IAS are a set of financial reporting policies that typically require increased disclosure and restrict management's choices of measurement methods relative to the accounting standards of our sample firms' countries of domicile. We develop indexes of differences in countries' accounting disclosure and measurement policies relative to IAS, and document that greater differences in accounting standards relative to IAS are significantly and positively associated with the absolute value of analyst earnings forecast errors. Further, we show that analyst forecast accuracy improves after firms adopt IAS. More specifically, after controlling for changes in the market value of equity, changes in analyst following, and changes in the number of news reports, we find that the convergence in firms' accounting policies brought about by adopting IAS is positively associated with the reduction in analyst forecast errors.     

A corporate governance explanation of the A-B share discount in China

B-shares listed in China are traded at substantial discounts to their corresponding A-shares although they have identical rights. We offer a governance explanation and suggest that relative to domestic investors, foreign investors care more about a firm’s governance quality. Results are supportive, as the B-share price discount is higher for firms that have weaker governance characterized by 1) higher ownership concentration, 2) ineffective boards with a higher proportion of directors appointed by the parent company, 3) lower dividend payouts, and 4) higher levels of information asymmetry.     

Stock price reactions to earnings announcements: evidence from Chinese markets

We examine the stock price reactions to changes in earnings per share (EPS) in the Chinese stock markets. We find that domestic A-share investors do not correctly anticipate the changes in earnings and fail to adjust new earnngs information quickly, but international B-share investors can predict earnings changes better than A-share investors. As a result, abnormal returns (ARs) can be obtained by trading on the earnings information, but for A shares only. An explanation is that most A-share holders are individuals with short-term investment horizon while most B-share holders are large institutions that trade on more detailed and accurate financial information not immediately available to A-share holders.     

A note on price limit performance: The case of illiquid stocks

In the Chinese stock markets, there are A-shares and B-shares. Both share-types have identical cash flow rights but different ownership structures (i.e., A-shares are owned by local Chinese citizens and B-shares are owned primarily by foreigners), causing B-shares to be less liquid relative to A-shares. However, even though B-shares have much wider bid—ask spreads than A-shares, both share-types are subject to the same 10% daily price limit regulation. As such, B-shares, simply due to their wider spreads, may be more inclined than A-shares to hit price limits. Our empirical results support this contention. The findings have policy implications. First, given wide spreads for illiquid stocks, exchanges may consider using midpoint prices (between bid and ask prices) to establish price limit ranges for illiquid stocks. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, exchanges may consider using wider price limits for less liquid classes of stocks.     

The impact of IAS 39 on the risk-relevance of earnings volatility: Evidence from foreign banks cross-listed in the USA

We examine the impact of adopting International Accounting Standard 39 – Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement (IAS 39) by non-US commercial banks cross-listed in the US on earnings volatility and its risk relevance. As IAS 39 requires the recognition of unrealized fair-value gains and losses for a larger set of financial and derivative-financial instruments, and the impairment charges for loans and receivables, we expect and find that IAS 39 adoption increased earnings volatility in IFRS-adopting firms from 2005 onwards. Furthermore, both hedge accounting and the fair value option under IAS 39 are designed to reduce mixed-measurement volatility and to improve the sensitivity of firm risk measures to earnings volatility. We also find that the relationship between credit ratings (proxy for risk) and earnings volatility increases for IFRS-adopting firms after 2005. The evidence is consistent with the argument that IAS 39 increases the credit relevance of earnings volatility.