Accounting Discretion in Goodwill Impairments: UK Evidence

This study examines managers’ use of discretion in determining goodwill impairment losses following the mandatory adoption of IFRS 3 “Business Combinations,” and whether this discretion reflects opportunistic reporting by managers or the provision of their private information. Although IFRS 3 was issued to improve the accounting treatment for goodwill and provide users with more useful and value‐relevant information regarding the underlying economic value of goodwill, it has been criticized on the grounds of the managerial discretion inherent in impairment testing. Therefore, ex‐ante, it is unclear how the impairment‐only approach has affected the reporting of goodwill impairment losses. After controlling for economic factors, empirical results reveal that managers are exercising discretion in the reporting of goodwill impairments following the adoption of IFRS 3. Specifically, goodwill impairments are more likely to be associated with recent CEO changes, income smoothing and “big bath” reporting behaviors. However, the results also indicate that goodwill impairments are strongly associated with effective governance mechanisms suggesting that managers are more likely to be exercising their accounting discretion to convey their private information about the underlying performance of the firm rather than acting opportunistically. These inferences are robust to various modeling specifications and variable definitions, suggesting that IFRS 3 has provided managers with a framework to reliably convey their private information about future cash flows consistent with the IASB's objectives in developing the impairment standard.     

地区经济差异、企业组织变迁与环境会计信息披露——来自中国沪市污染行业2009年度的经验数据

经济发展程度的差异造成了欧美等发达国家与发展中国家环境会计信息披露水平的显著差异。我国东、中、西部各地区由于种种原因经济发展极不均衡,这是否会导致地区性环境会计信息披露水平的不同?企业组织理论在现代管理学中具有重要的地位,那么与环境保护相关的企业组织结构变迁与环境会计信息披露之间是否存在必然的联系?从企业外部宏观经济发展水平和企业内部微观组织变迁的视角来考察我国沪市隶属于污染行业的上市公司环境会计信息披露的现状、动机和影响因素,研究结论表明加强政府管制和促进企业内部组织制度的变迁有利于提高企业环境会计信息披露水平。     

关键审计事项披露与企业会计稳健性——基于准自然实验和文本分析的证据

关键审计事项披露对增强财务报告可信度、提高信息透明度以及提升企业会计信息质量具有重要意义。基于2014—2020年我国上市公司样本数据,采用多期双重差分法和文本分析方法,实证检验了关键审计事项披露对企业会计稳健性的影响。研究发现：关键审计事项披露提升了企业会计稳健性,且在非国有企业和净资产收益率小于6%的企业中正向影响更大;关键审计事项披露数量越多,关键审计事项结论性评述积极程度和关键审计事项审计应对力度越高,披露资产减值类和损益类关键审计事项对企业会计稳健性的提升越显著;进一步分析发现,这一效应在企业信息透明度较低以及审计监督效应较强的企业中更为明显;作用机制检验表明,关键审计事项披露通过提高市场感知的审计质量和报表盈余的审计质量提升了企业会计稳健性。     

大股东会计信息披露质量的选择分析

目前在大部分上市公司中大股东仍然占有绝对的决策权,并决定了企业的会计披露政策,大股东必须进行会计信息披露程度的收益成本权衡,只有当企业提高会计披露质量,满足投资需求能够使大股东获得更多的现金流时,才会愿意提供更高质量的会计信息。本文通过对大股东面临会计披露程度选择决策时的成本收益权衡进行验证,试图发现促使大股东愿意提高会计信息披露质量的激励因素,以促使企业会计信息质量的改进。     

Affiliated block shareholders and analyst optimism

We investigate several previously under-documented conflicts of interest that may result in analyst optimism by utilizing two unique features of brokerage firms in China, namely, the dominant ownership of large shareholders within the brokerage firms and the mandatory disclosure of brokerage firms’ commission income derived from each mutual fund client. We show that controlling shareholders of an analyst’s brokerage-firm put pressure on the analyst to report more optimistically biased earnings forecasts and recommendations to the stocks they hold larger positions in. We also find that the magnitude of analyst optimism increases with the shareholdings of the mutual funds that contribute commission fees to the analyst’s brokerage firm. These findings remain robust after incorporating a regulation change that reduces conflicts of interest in the brokerage industry and higher dimensional fixed effects, and thus are unlikely to be driven by reverse causality or omitted variable bias.     

The Stewardship Role of Analyst Forecasts,and Discretionary Versus Non-discretionary Accruals

We examine the interaction between discretionary and non-discretionary accruals in a stewardship setting. Contracting includes multiple rounds of renegotiation based on contractible accounting information and non-contractible but more timely non-accounting information. We show that accounting regulation aimed at increasing earnings quality from a valuation perspective (earnings persistence) may have a significant impact on how firms rationally respond in terms of allowing accrual discretion in order to alleviate the impact on the stewardship role of earnings. Increasing the precision of more timely non-accounting information (analyst earnings forecasts) increases the ex ante value of the firm and reduces costly earnings management. There is an optimal level of reversible non-discretionary accrual noise introduced through revenue recognition policies. Tight rules-based accounting regulation, as opposed to leaving firms more choice over non-discretionary accrual policies, may lead firms to rationally respond by inducing costly earnings management. More generally, regulating both earnings persistence and the tightness of admissible auditing policies may not result in less equilibrium earnings management.     

Determinants and Economic Consequences of Non-financial Disclosure Quality

This paper examines the determinants and economic consequences of non-financial disclosure quality, which is measured according to the ratings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure provided by the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands. We find that firms with better CSR performance, greater external financing needs, and stronger corporate governance tend to provide higher quality CSR disclosures. In return, these firms gain greater analyst coverage, higher levels of institutional ownership, greater stock liquidity, higher valuations in SEOs, and lower yields to maturity in bond issuances. These benefits apply largely to firms with strong CSR performance. Collectively, our findings suggest that higher quality CSR disclosures deliver economic benefits.     

Disclosure quality,price efficiency,and expected returns

Using a composite disclosure quality measure, we examine the effect of disclosure quality on price delay and the effect of price delay determined by disclosure quality on expected returns in the Taiwan stock market. We find that higher disclosure quality can reduce stock price delay through more investor attention and higher stock liquidity after we control for accounting quality variables and consider the endogeneity issue. Furthermore, we show that disclosure quality reduces expected stock returns through the price efficiency channel associated with both investor attention and stock liquidity. Our results indicate that increasing a firm’s standardized information rating by one standard deviation can reduce its expected stock return by 0.63% annually. Taken together, our evidence suggests that regulatory activities enforced to improve public firms’ disclosure quality in the Taiwan stock market can make the stock market more efficient and therefore lower investors’ required return for stocks.     

Investor legal protection,capitalized development costs,and audit fees: A cross‐country analysis

Our study explores the association between capitalized development costs and audit fees. International Accounting Standard No. 38 stipulates the discretion to capitalize the development costs of internally generated intangible assets. We find a positive association between capitalized development costs and audit fees, which reflects auditors’ concern that managers may use the discretion of development cost capitalization to manipulate earnings. Moreover, this positive association is mitigated by stronger investor legal protection because stronger investor legal protection alleviates the earnings management concern from capitalized development costs. These results suggest that country‐level legal regimes affect auditors’ perception on client firms’ accounting choices. Our study contributes to the literature exploring how legal regimes affect auditor behaviors.     

The impact of voluntary corporate disclosures on the ex-ante cost of capital for Swiss firms

The relationship between disclosure quality and cost of equity capital is an important topic in today's economy. In general, economic theory and anecdotal evidence suggest a negative association. Empirical work on this link, however, is confronted with major methodological drawbacks – neither disclosure level nor cost of capital can be observed directly – and has documented somewhat confounding results so far. Adopting a finite horizon version of the residual income model, I provide evidence on the nature of the above relationship and try to quantify the effect of a firm's voluntary disclosure policy on its implied cost of capital. Switzerland seems especially suited for an analysis of this kind given that Swiss firms have considerable reporting discretion and the mandated level of disclosure is low. For a cross-sectional sample of seventy-three non-financial companies I show a negative and highly significant association between the two variables. The magnitude is such that the most forthcoming firms enjoy about a 1.8 to 2.4% cost advantage over the least forthcoming firms. The findings persist even after controlling for other potentially influential variables, e.g. risk characteristics and firm size. Furthermore, adjusting for self-selection bias – a major concern in disclosure studies – the marginal effect remains of the same direction and even increases in magnitude, although at lower levels of statistical significance. One reason for the strong relationship might be found in differing institutional factors between the US and Swiss capital markets.     

公允价值计量、信息披露质量与价值相关性

新企业会计准则中的公允价值计量对信息披露产生了重要影响。以2006年至2008年深市A股上市企业为样本进行的研究发现,公司受到公允价值计量的积极影响越多,信息披露质量就会越高。高质量的信息披露能够使会计信息的价值相关性得到显著提高,而公允价值计量则能够进一步提高信息披露质量对会计信息价值相关性的改善程度。     

The Effects of IFRS Adoption on Observed Earnings Smoothness Properties: The Confounding Effects of Changes in Timely Gain and Loss Recognition

Ball and Shivakumar [(2006), The role of accruals in asymmetrically timely gain and loss recognition. Journal of Accounting Research, 44, 207–242] show that the observed smoothness of earnings (i.e. negative contemporaneous correlation between accruals and cash flows) is the joint product of the role of accruals in smoothing out transitory fluctuations in operating cash flows (noise reduction role) and the role of accruals in providing timely recognition of economic gains and losses (contracting role). These two roles of accruals have opposite effects on earnings smoothness properties. Using a regression framework that allows us to simultaneously consider both roles, we show that failing to control for changes in timely gain and loss recognition as firms shift to IFRS can lead to erroneous inferences regarding the effects of IFRS adoption on earnings smoothness, and consequently on researcher’ conclusions about how IFRS adoption has affected accounting quality. Our results are consistent with mandatory (2005) IFRS adoption resulting in a change in the contracting role rather than the noise reduction role (or smoothness role) of accruals. A decrease in timely loss recognition, an increase in timely gain recognition, and a net decrease in asymmetric timely loss recognition are what drives the change in observed smoothness properties of earnings around mandatory IFRS adoption.     

环境会计信息披露研究

环境会计是现代会计的新兴分支,而环境会计信息披露则是环境会计最主要的基本问题。随着国民经济的迅速发展,对自然资源的消耗加剧,致使环境污染日益严重。环境会计是从环境保护、成本、收益、利润研究环境,环境会计信息的披露成为环境会计工作的重要组成部分,对环境建设、保护利用与开发起到了积极的作用。     

Multitasking,Information Disclosure,and Product Quality: Evidence from Nursing Homes

This paper uses a mandatory quality disclosure policy, the Nursing Home Quality Initiative (NHQI), to investigate how quality ‘report cards’ affect firms’ choices of multidimensional product quality. I show that after the introduction of NHQI: (1) scores of quality measures improve for the reported dimensions but deteriorate for the unreported ones; (2) there is no evidence that nursing homes decrease quality‐related inputs; (3) consumer demand becomes sensitive to changes in the NHQI quality measures. These findings are consistent with the multitasking hypothesis that firms may respond to information disclosure by reallocating effort across dimensions of quality without necessarily increasing overall quality.     

Do Board's Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy and Orientation Influence Environmental Sustainability Disclosure? UK Evidence

The environmental implications of corporate economic activities have led to growing demands for firms and their boards to adopt sustainable strategies and to disseminate more useful information about their activities and impacts on environment. This paper investigates the impact of board's corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy and orientation on the quantity and quality of environmental sustainability disclosure in UK listed firms. We find that effective board CSR strategy and CSR‐oriented directors have a positive and significant impact on the quality of environmental sustainability disclosure, but not on the quantity. Our findings also suggest that the existence of a CSR committee and issuance of a stand‐alone CSR report are positively and significantly related to environmental sustainability disclosure. When we distinguish between firms with high and low environmental risk, we find that the board CSR/sustainability practices that affect the quantity (quality) of environmental sustainability disclosure appear to be driven more by highly (lowly) environmentally sensitive firms. These results suggest that the board CSR/sustainability practices play an important role in ensuring a firm's legitimacy and accountability towards stakeholders. Our findings shed new light on this under‐researched area and could be of interest to companies, policy‐makers and other stakeholders. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

资产减值准备的相关实务处理分析

资产减值准备规范了企业对资产减值的判断标准、计量及损失的处理,为真实反映企业资产提供了政策依据。文章通过对不同情况下的资产减值准备分析,结合实际工作,对如何进行相关会计处理进行了实例分析。     

企业的利润结构与可持续增长 ——基于A股竞争性上市公司的经验证据

企业的可持续增长是社会经济可持续发展的基础,企业的可持续性增长能力与利润总额和利润构成密切相关.在新企业会计准则下,利润总额由核心利润、资产减值损失、公允价值变动损益、投资损益、营业外收支净额等五个部分构成,利润总额不同构成部分的来源不一样,稳定性和持久性也不一样.实证研究发现,盈利对企业增长的可持续性具有正面影响,利润总额的不同构成部分会对企业增长的可持续产生不同影响,利润结构可以提供有关企业可持续增长的增量信息,新企业会计准则下利润表项目的调整变化提高了利润表的信息含量.     

Voluntary adoption of non-local GAAP in the European Union: A study of determinants and consequences

Abstract

This study examines the determinants and consequences of voluntary adoption of non-local accounting principles (non-local GAAP) by firms listed and domiciled in the European Union (EU). We restrict ourselves to the two predominant internationally accepted sets of accounting standards: International Accounting Standards (IAS) and United States generally accepted accounting principles (US GAAP). We have used various sources to identify EU firms that use non-local GAAP. We examine the 1999 annual reports of all these firms, because accounting standard choices in more recent years may be affected by the announcement of the proposal by the European Commission in February 2001 to mandate IAS usage from 2005 on. The maintained hypothesis is that firms that voluntarily adopt IAS or US GAAP expect to experience net benefits from adoption. The finding that 133 non-financial firms in the EU voluntarily used non-local GAAP in 1999 suggests that the majority of listed EU firms does not expect to benefit from non-local GAAP adoption. By studying the characteristics of non-local GAAP adopters this study provides insight into the determinants of non-local GAAP adoption. We find that firms voluntarily using non-local GAAP are more likely to be listed on a US exchange, the EASDAQ exchange in Brussels, and have more geographically dispersed operations. Furthermore, they are more likely to be domiciled in a country with lower quality financial reporting and where IAS is explicitly allowed as an alternative to local GAAP. We also study whether non-local GAAP adopters have lower levels of information asymmetry, a much cited benefit of using more transparent financial reporting, than non-adopters. We examine three proxies for information asymmetry: analyst following, cost of equity capital, and uncertainty among analysts and investors (forecast dispersion and stock return volatility). We document a positive effect of non-local GAAP adoption on analyst following, but fail to find evidence of a lower cost of capital for non-local GAAP adopters. Contrary to expectations, uncertainty among analysts and investors appears to be higher for firms using IAS or US GAAP than for firms using local GAAP. However, by comparing ‘early’ and ‘late’ adopters, we find some evidence that suggests that benefits take some time to fully materialise.     

SFAS 133 and income smoothing via discretionary accruals: The role of hedge effectiveness and market volatility

This study investigates whether the Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 133 (SFAS 133) influences firms’ income smoothing via discretionary accruals decisions. Moreover, we investigate whether the level of hedge effectiveness and market volatility affects the impact of SFAS 133 on firms’ income smoothing via discretionary accruals decisions. Consistent with our predictions, we find a significant increase in income smoothing via discretionary accruals activity after the adoption of SFAS 133. We also find that income smoothing via discretionary accruals after the adoption of SFAS 133 increases with the level of hedge ineffectiveness. By contrast, we find that perfect hedgers do not engage in more income smoothing via discretionary accruals after the adoption of SFAS 133. Finally, we find that the higher the market volatility is the larger the income smoothing is via discretionary accruals after the adoption of SFAS 133. This implies that higher market volatility makes it more difficult for firms to meet hedge accounting requirements, thereby increasing unmanaged earnings volatility and income smoothing. Prior studies suggest that regulators are expressing concern about the effect of earnings management on the quality of reported earnings and the functioning of capital markets (e.g., Barton, 2001 ). In this regard, our findings imply that accounting standard setters should take into account the trade‐off between transparency and income smoothing.     

On the Relationship between Voluntary Disclosure,Earnings Smoothing and the Value-Relevance of Earnings: The Case of Switzerland

Abstract

This paper examines whether voluntary disclosure by Swiss firms constrains the use of discretionary accruals to smooth earnings, and explores the effect of voluntary disclosure on the value relevance of earnings. We focus on Swiss firms because Switzerland's financial reporting system provides managers with extensive discretion in corporate disclosure, and there are important variations in the level of information provided in their annual reports. We consider that managers can choose two different ways to voluntarily convey information, either through the quality and quantity of annual report disclosure or, through compliance with International Accounting Standards (IAS)/International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) or US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Relying on a simultaneous equations approach, our results suggest that Swiss firms use discretionary accruals to smooth earnings. However, this relation is reduced for firms that voluntarily disclose more information in their annual report or comply with IAS/IFRS or US GAAP. Moreover, we show that discretionary accruals of high disclosers or of firms voluntarily complying with IAS/IFRS or US GAAP receive a lower valuation weight.