International Financial Reporting Standards and Private Firms’ Access to Bank Loans

Prior research has focused on publicly listed firms when examining the economic consequences of adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This study extends the literature by examining the ability of private firms to attract bank loans through the use of IFRS. Based on firm-level data from 25 countries, we show that private firms that voluntarily use IFRS are associated with a higher propensity to attract debt from foreign banks. We find no such association when examining their relationships with domestic banks. Supplementary analyses show that the results are mainly driven by private firms operating in countries with strong regulatory enforcement. The findings suggest that, conditional on adequate enforcement, the use of IFRS provides useful information for foreign non-relationship banks.     

Fraudulent Financial Reporting： Theory and Evidence

This paper develops a hypothesis of the four factors from the cause of fraudulent financial reporting in terms of thoughts, culture, motive, opportunity and economic trade-off. Then tests whether independent directors monitor and improve the quality of financial report on the basis of 1 170 firms in China by means of OLS regression. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis.     

How Do Financial Constraints Relate to Financial Reporting Quality? Evidence from Seasoned Equity Offerings

This paper examines how constraints on firms’ financing capacity relate to managers’ discretionary accounting choices. Three hypotheses of earnings management – the opportunism hypothesis, the rational expectations hypothesis, and the signaling hypothesis – predict that constrained firms engage in greater upward earnings management than unconstrained firms when selling equity. Using a sample of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) announced between 1983 and 2014, I find support for this prediction. The relation between financial constraints and earnings management is robust to including controls such as offer size, growth opportunities, analyst following, and chief executive officer equity holdings, as well as to using the instrumental variable approach. Investors’ reaction around and following the SEO announcement supports the rational expectations hypothesis. I find that aggressive earnings management by constrained issuers is associated with lower SEO announcement returns but is not followed by negative abnormal returns in the long run. The evidence suggests that constrained issuers’ aggressive use of income-increasing accruals is an outcome of managerial myopia caused by capital market pressure, not managerial opportunism intended to mislead investors.     

Shareholder Loans and Earnings Smoothing – Empirical Findings from German Private Firms

This paper analyzes the interplay between shareholder loans and earnings smoothing in German private corporations. Shareholders who grant loans have a dual stakeholder role, being both equity holders and creditors. Those loans could be lost, because bankruptcy law requires their subordination in the event of bankruptcy. We therefore expect shareholder loans to mitigate agency problems of debt. This reduces the need for debt covenants and earnings smoothing. Moreover, the interest payments from shareholder loans tend to lower payout volatility which also reduces the need for dividend and earnings smoothing. We expect and find that private firms with shareholder loans exhibit significantly lower levels of earnings smoothing than other private firms. We find that with a 10 percentage-point increase in the shareholder loans to total assets ratio, earnings smoothing decreases by about 10% of the mean value. We also find that this substitution effect usually occurs in case of managerial ownership and tends to be slightly weaker in the event of dispersed ownership. The results are robust for different econometric specifications, including different measures of key variables and propensity score matching. The paper suggests that financial reporting by private firms responds to the dual stakeholder role of shareholder loans.     

The Corrosive Effect of Offshore Financial Centers on Multinational Firms’ Disclosure Strategy

Abstract

This study investigates whether U.S. multinational firms with subsidiaries located in offshore financial centers (OFCs) (i.e. offshore firms) are more likely to be opaque in their voluntary disclosure relative to U.S. multinationals without such subsidiaries (non-offshore firms). We use management earnings forecasts to capture corporate voluntary disclosure. Consistent with the opportunism view, but inconsistent with the efficiency argument, our results (including robustness checks) show that offshore firms are less likely to issue earnings forecasts, disclose forecasts less frequently, exhibit a stronger tendency to withhold bad news forecasts, and release less precise forecasts than non-offshore firms. Moreover, of the three distinct dimensions of OFCs’ institutional environment, namely, low taxation, lax regulation, and secrecy policy, each plays a role in negatively shaping firms’ disclosure strategy. Thus, OFCs’ institutional features exacerbate the opacity that plagues firms seeking to avoid taxes via their OFC subsidiaries. Our results are consistent with the notion that, beyond the scope of taxes, multinational firms’ use of OFCs has a corrosive effect on market information dynamics. Hence, OFCs have a much wider impact on the U.S. economy as well as other major economies than just tax avoidance or evasion.     

Audit Quality in Practice A Critical Analysis of the Financial Reporting Council （FRC） Discussion Paper

The efforts by the Financial Reporting Council （FRC） in the United Kingdom （UK） to stimulate audit firms to improve audit quality manifest in its Discussion Paper： Promoting Audit Quality warrant further analysis. The discussion paper identified factors such as audit firm culture, the quality of people, the effectiveness of audit process, and outside factors such as management and audit committee （AC） which can affect level of audit quality in practice. Reporting upon the analysis of responses to the discussion paper, the objective of this study is to analyze views from the respondents about various issues related to audit quality. This study composes of how subject of audit quality is seen in practice, which contributes to our understanding of conditions, events, or processes that can affect audit quality in practice.     

Swiss National Bank communication and investors’ uncertainty

This paper analyzes the effects of Swiss National Bank communication on stock investors’ uncertainty. Monetary policy news is identified via changes in short- and medium-term futures prices as well as by applying methods from computational linguistics and dictionary approaches to policy statements. Surprises in policy rate changes and regarding the future path of the policy rate exhibit an asymmetric effect on stock investors’ uncertainty. Moreover, by taking into account various topics addressed in the statements, I show that investors’ uncertainty decreases due to an optimistic tone in communications about economic growth. Increased uncertainty expressed in policy statements translate into increasing stock investors’ uncertainty. The results explain how news contained in monetary policy statements reduce noise in financial markets and therefore contribute to financial stability.     

Firms and universities—do spillovers enhance firm’s performance?

This paper aims to assess if geographic proximity from universities enhances small firms’ performance, by means of knowledge spillovers. A sample of micro data is used on 390 manufacturing firms and 11 public universities in Portugal. Performance is measured by labour productivity. The estimation was made using OLS as well as Quantile Regression. Results seem to confirm that both domains of knowledge do produce distinct effects, but there is no evidence that a firm’s performance improves with the proximity to a university. Likewise, the quality of universities does not seem to influence the labour productivity of firms.

Measuring and comparing World Bank regions’ ‘ease of doing business’ opportunity sets

Journal of Productivity Analysis - This paper measures and compares the World Bank regions’ opportunity sets to promote ease of doing business for the years 2010 and 2019, as well as the time...     

Financial liberalization and firms’ capital structure adjustments evidence from Southeast Asia and South America

This paper investigates the impact of financial liberalization on the adjustment of debt ratios in 12 emerging markets using firm-level data from 1991 to 2004. The results support the central hypothesis of this paper that adjustment costs are important in explaining firms’ adjustment toward their debt ratio targets. Our results show that deviations from targets are halved within 1.09 years in South America and 1.19 years in Southeast Asia, suggesting speed of adjustment is relatively faster in South American countries than Southeast Asian countries. Furthermore, our results show that after full liberalization those countries where rule of law and creditors rights were properly enforced, firms had higher adjustment speed compared to those countries where such enforcement was not present.The estimated adjustment coefficients imply that on average firms’ adjustment speeds have increased in all South American countries over the period of financial liberalization. On the contrary, firms’ adjustment speeds did not increase in Southeast Asian countries, reflecting the uneven effect of liberalization on the firms’ financing behaviour in Asian countries. There was a significant reduction in time (in years) taken to half the gap between actual debt ratios and targets only in Pakistan and South Korea. This finding supports the idea of uncertain impact of financial liberalization programs on the domestic financial markets in those emerging markets which started opening up their market and integrating with the rest of the world latter than others. These findings have significant implications for the sequence of banking sector liberalization in the emerging markets.     

Impact of International Financial Reporting Standards （IFRS） Adoption on Key Financial Ratios＂ The Case of the Czech Republic

This contribution analyzes the impact of new International Financial Reporting Standards （IFRS） reporting rules on financial ratios prepared in the Czech companies. Using a sample of 16 Czech firms, we attempt to measure the scope and size of the differences in the selected set of financial ratios as calculated with data reported according to the traditional Czech accounting standards （CAS） and under the IFRS provisions. Our study discovers that there are important differences resulting from the two reporting formats. Our research comes to a conclusion that translation of Czech statements to IFRS may cause changes in the values of financial indicators without relationship to the real change in the firms＇ value, performance, and stability. Even though the findings were not statistically significant, the indicative results of our measurements disclosed an important fact that the transition to IFRS could cause deterioration of key indicators and thereby could impact on the overall rating of companies. One needs to be cautious with generalization due to the small sample size.     

1995 Financial and Taxation System Reform

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