How do auditors respond to low annual report readability?

We show that increased audit effort is associated with lower annual report readability to compensate for a perceived increase in the risk of financial misstatement for United States (US) firms. In particular, we find that lower annual report readability is associated with longer audit delays and higher audit fees for Form 10-K for US auditors, suggesting that auditors spend more effort auditing clients when annual reports have lower readability. We also find that low readability increases the likelihood of auditors using more explanatory language in unqualified audit reports.     

Firms,do you know your currency risk exposure? Survey results

This paper surveys the currency risk management practices of Swiss industrial corporations. We find that industrials are unable to quantify their currency risk exposure and investigate possible reasons. One possibility is that firms do not think that they need to know because they use on-balance-sheet instruments to protect themselves before and after currency rates reach troublesome levels. This is puzzling because performing a rough estimate of at least the exposure of cash flows is not prohibitive and could be valuable. Another puzzling finding is that firms use currency derivatives to hedge/insure individual short-term transactions, without apparently trying to estimate aggregate transaction exposure.     

Why do individuals not participate in the stock market?

We use a representative survey to study economic and non-economic factors that affect stock market participation. We find that many individuals suffer from inertia in the sense that they do not want to take the time and effort to invest in stocks. Inertia also explains stock market participation in addition to earlier documented factors such as actual and perceived financial literacy, trust, and the personal equity risk premium (PERP). A high percentage of non-investors (66%) assert that they will never invest in stocks. We find that inertia affects this assertion both directly and indirectly through factors such as age and gender.     

Why do CFOs become involved in material accounting manipulations?

This paper examines why CFOs become involved in material accounting manipulations. We find that while CFOs bear substantial legal costs when involved in accounting manipulations, these CFOs have similar equity incentives to the CFOs of matched non-manipulation firms. In contrast, CEOs of manipulation firms have higher equity incentives and more power than CEOs of matched firms. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the explanation that CFOs are involved in material accounting manipulations because they succumb to pressure from CEOs, rather than because they seek immediate personal financial benefit from their equity incentives. AAER content analysis reinforces this conclusion.     

Why do countries matter so much in corporate social performance?

Why do levels of corporate social performance (CSP) differ so much across countries? We answer this question in an examination of CSP ratings of more than 2600 companies from 36 countries. We find that firm characteristics explain very little of the variations in CSP ratings. In contrast, variations in country factors such as stages of economic development, culture, and institutions account for a significant proportion of variations in CSP ratings across countries. In particular, we find that CSP ratings are high in countries with high income-per-capita, strong civil liberties and political rights, and cultures oriented toward harmony and autonomy. Furthermore, we find that home country factors explain a smaller portion of the overall variations in CSP for multinationals and cross-listed firms than for non-multinationals and pure domestic firms, respectively.     

Why do small businesses have difficulty in accessing bank financing?

This study investigates bank financing to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and evaluates whether the difficulties of SMEs in accessing bank financing during a period of financial crisis are due to a reduction in the supply of credit, or to a decrease in the demand for credit. The results show that the macroeconomic setting matters: demand effects are unlikely to drive the decline in the stock of bank loans, while the supply of credit causes SMEs difficulties in accessing bank credit. During a crisis period, in particular, an increase in the risk of lenders leads to the reduced supply of credit and credit rationing (i.e. the bank lending channel). In a post-crisis period, SMEs with increased risk and decreased profits have great difficulties in securing bank loans (i.e. the borrower balance sheet channel). Taken together, these results suggest that supply effects initially emerge through the bank-lending channel and then shift to the borrower balance sheet channel over a period of financial crisis.     

Why do foreign investors underperform domestic investors in trading activities? Evidence from Indonesia

Foreign investors generally underperform domestic investors in trading activities. This study shows that their inferior performance is attributable to non-initiated orders. Foreign investors actually perform better than domestic investors in initiated orders. In addition, their performance is also mixed when trades are classified depending on who the counterparties are. These mixed performances can be explained by neither the information disadvantage hypothesis proposed by [Dvo?ák, T., 2005. Do domestic investors have an information advantage? Evidence from Indonesia. Journal of Finance 60, 817–839.] nor the poor timing of trade hypothesis suggested by [Choe, H., Kho, B.C., Stulz, R., 2005. Do domestic investors have an edge? The trading experience of foreign investors in Korea. Review of Financial Studies 18, 795–829.]. We propose and confirm that their inferior performance is explained by their aggressive trading behavior. Three metrics we utilize to measure the aggressiveness of foreign investors’ trading provide overwhelmingly strong evidence that foreign investors are more aggressive than their domestic counterparts.     

Why do firms engage in selective hedging? Evidence from the gold mining industry

The widespread practice of managers speculating by incorporating their market views into firms’ hedging programs (“selective hedging”) remains a puzzle. Using a 10-year sample of North American gold mining firms, we find no evidence that selective hedging is more prevalent among firms that are believed to possess an information advantage. In contrast, we find strong evidence that selective hedging is more prevalent among financially constrained firms, suggesting that this practice is driven by asset substitution motives. We detect weak relationships between selective hedging and some corporate governance measures but find no evidence of a link between selective hedging and managerial compensation.     

How do independent directors view corporate social responsibility (CSR)? Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

We investigate how independent directors view corporate social responsibility (CSR). Exploiting the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act and the associated exchange listing requirements as an exogenous regulatory shock, we document that independent directors view CSR activities unfavorably. In particular, firms forced to raise board independence reduce CSR engagement significantly relative to those not required to increase board independence. Our results are consistent with the risk-mitigation view and the agency cost hypothesis where managers over-invest in CSR to mitigate their own exposure to nonsystematic risk. The over-investments in CSR are curbed in the presence of a stronger, more independent, board of directors. Several robustness checks confirm the results, including fixed-effects and random-effects regressions, dynamic panel data analysis, instrumental-variable analysis, propensity score matching, Lewbel's heteroscedastic identification, and Oster's method for coefficient stability. We also confirm the risk-mitigation hypothesis by showing that CSR activities reduce firm risk significantly. Our research design is much less vulnerable to endogeneity and is therefore likely to show a causal effect of board independence on CSR.     

Why do some Chinese technology firms avoid ChiNext and go public in the US?

Some Chinese technology firms prefer to go public on US exchanges despite the launch of ChiNext as a NASDAQ-style board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in late 2009. Conventional hypotheses based on sales internationalization and issuing costs fail to explain this preference. Instead, our findings suggest the existence of a separating equilibrium in which small but profitable firms choose ChiNext and large firms backed by foreign venture capital prefer US exchanges as their IPO location. Our findings have broader implications for entrepreneurial finance in China. Policy suggestions are offered for increasing the number of foreign VC-backed IPOs on ChiNext.     

Application of Anglo-American Principles of Consolidation to Corporate Financial Disclosure in Japan

The adoption by Japan of consolidated corporate reporting in 1977 may be viewed as an instance of the international transfer of Anglo-American practices of corporate reporting, and as a step towards international harmonization of accounting. Consolidation practices in Anglo-American nations are based on assumptions about the nature of corporate group associations. This paper examines the applicability of these assumptions to the corporate context in Japan. Personal interviews and analyses of group associations of listed Japanese corporations support three principal findings: (i) that historical and cultural determinants provide significant contrasts between corporate group associations in Japan and Anglo-American nations; (ii) that Anglo-American methods of consolidation fail to reflect adequately the nature of corporate group associations in Japan; and (iii) that the adoption of consolidation in Japan represented a response to situation-specific change stimuli rather than a general acceptance of the intrinsic merit of consolidation. The findings have implications for international accounting.     

Accounting standards and value relevance of financial statements: An international analysis

Using 17,743 firm-year observations of industrial companies in 21 countries from 1991 to 1997, this paper finds that the use of accrual accounting (versus cash accounting) negatively affects the value relevance of financial statements in countries with weak shareholder protection. This negative effect, however, does not exist in countries with strong shareholder protection. These findings are consistent with the belief that shareholder protection improves the effectiveness of accrual accounting, and suggest the importance of considering shareholder protection when formulating accounting policies related to accruals.     

Management incentives to recognise intangible assets

The paper examines whether the introduction of the international financial reporting standards (IFRS) in Australia changed management incentives to recognise intangible assets. We examine post‐IFRS changes in managerial opportunism and economic benefits associated with the recognition of intangible assets. We find evidence after IFRS of significant change in intangible asset recognition concurrent with share issues. We also find that the association between economic benefits and intangible assets changed following IFRS. Evidence is provided that the economic benefits associated with goodwill were enhanced by IFRS, whereas IIA and E&E asset information became less useful to financial report users.     

基于Logistic回归法的商业银行财务风险预警模型研究

商业银行的稳定健康直接关系到金融体系的稳定和国家经济的发展乃至国家安全。本文在对商业银行财务风险进行深入分析的基础上,通过比较＂经营稳健的商业银行＂和＂经营出现财务风险的商业银行＂在资本充足性、信用、盈利能力、流动性和发展能力五个方面存在显著性差异的指标,采用Logistic回归法构建了一个多指标综合监控的银行财务风险测度模型,以期能够有效地识别风险,通过事前控制确保商业银行的健康稳定发展,平抑经济波动,为实现国民经济的良性循环奠定基础,最终促进我国国民经济沿着良好的态势发展。     

The role of a crisis in reshaping the role of accounting

Prior to 2001, international accounting standards (IAS) were insufficiently attractive to gain the support of US regulators. The potential role of IAS in the US gained prominence during a period of extreme financial reporting instability in 2001–2002. Emerging opinion increasingly upheld principles-based rather than rules-based accounting standards in the face of the financial reporting crisis. But to promote any active shift in the US position, an institutionally legitimate infrastructure for the international accounting standards setter had to be created. As this was taking shape, the globalisation of business activities grew with inter-organizational linkages and cross-national financial inter-dependencies and flows becoming increasingly complex. Given the extensively uncertain, uneven and constantly evolving nature of global business changes, the aptness of applying judgment in assessing financial performance and position rather than relying on the application of pre-defined rules continued to achieve wider acceptance. The argument is made in the paper that international financial reporting standards are today seen to fulfil a global risk mitigating role founded on a logic that had to first gain political and institutional legitimacy and that also had to be viewed as being responsive to perceived market imperatives.