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.     

Bank Relationships and Private Firms’ Financial Reporting Quality

Private firms with relatively high (proprietary) costs of disclosure may benefit from a close relationship with a bank. Relationship lending is based on intertemporal contracting that assumes that the bank is able to acquire private information about the firm and, moreover, to keep this information private. For both reasons, we expect and find that private firms with fewer bank relationships exhibit lower levels of financial reporting quality. Controlling for many other factors, firms with a single bank relationship disclose their financial reports about 14 days later. The size of such firms’ financial reports is also smaller, containing approximately 8% fewer words than the median report. Firms with a single bank relationship also exhibit more earnings management, exceeding the median value of the three-year sum of absolute discretionary accruals by about 20%. The results are robust to different econometric specifications, including endogeneity concerns. They indicate that private firms choose to be opaque in the presence of fewer lending relationships.     

Cash Flow from Operations, Accruals and Earnings Persistency

Persistency of earnings is an important measure of eamings quality. It is generally accepted that the more the persistency is, the higher the quality of earnings is. We analyze the characteristic factors influencing earnings persistency, use data of A-share listed companies during 1998-2004, and find that earnings persistency is significantly related to the nature of earnings, the cash content of earnings and the quality of accruals.     

Can Government Policies Induce Earnings Management Behavior? ‐Evidence from Chinese Public Listed Firms

Earnings management behavior is a concern of standard setters, regulators, and investors. This study predicts that government policies can induce earnings management behavior. Based on a sample of 8,765 firm years ranging from 2002 to 2009, this study uses two methods to detect the effect of government policies on managers' earnings management behavior. One is the earnings distribution method developed by Burgstahler and Dichev (1997), and the other is the modified Jones model proposed by DeFond and Jiambalvo (1994). We find that policies issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) can induce managers of listed firms to engage in earnings management to either avoid negative consequences (e.g., delisting) or to meet requirements (e.g., refinancing). So, although the purpose of government is to protect investors as well as to promote the healthy development of the securities market, its policies are a double‐edged sword: if there is no strict and effective control mechanism, government policies can harm investors and disturb the normal order of the securities market.     

Dividend Changes and Future Earnings Performance： Evidence from UK Market

This paper investigates the dividend signaling hypothesis, described here as the relationship between dividend changes and future earnings performance. We find that managers pursue different patterns in UK from that in US when making dividend policy. A positive and significant association between dividend changes and the growth of future earnings is observed in the immediately following year after dividend announced There isn＇t significant link in the longer future. These phenomena are caused by managers＇ near-eyesight in UK market. In addition, an interesting finding is that dividend decreases have larger negative influence on earnings growth than positive impact on earnings prospects of dividend increases. This is consistent with the infrequent occurrence of dividend reduction.     

International Differences in Conditional Conservatism – The Role of Unconditional Conservatism and Income Smoothing

Abstract

Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad vs. good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings attributes internationally. First, using panel data, we investigate whether competing earnings attributes such as unconditional conservatism and income smoothing affect conditional conservatism and its international differences. We find that these attributes are predictably correlated with conditional conservatism. Second, we address the question whether income smoothing and conditional conservatism are two fundamentally different earnings attributes. We show theoretically that both attributes yield different earnings distributions and that the motivations for producing earnings which possess these attributes differ. To test these predictions empirically, we calculate firm-specific time-series measures of asymmetric timeliness, using a novel trigonometric measure based on the standard Basu (1997)-type regression. Using this cross-sectional data, we test whether conditional conservatism and income smoothing are different and find them to be only weakly correlated for a broad international sample. Also, we demonstrate that income smoothing explains international differences in conditional conservatism. Finally, we estimate simple determinant models of conditional conservatism and income smoothing, showing that both earnings attributes are driven by different explanatory firm-level factors: Conditional conservatism increases with the importance of debt financing, while income smoothing increases with the importance of dividends. Despite some important limitations, we believe our results to be meaningful because they show that cross-country differences in conditional conservatism are influenced by the effects of other accounting properties, predominantly income smoothing. Especially, legal regime appears to drive income smoothing while losing its explanatory power for conditional conservatism when firm-specific factors are controlled for.     

Desperate housewives – social and professional isolation of German expatriated spouses

The spouses of expatriates have repeatedly been identified as a major component in the equation for success of international assignments. Their commitment, cooperation and contribution to the emotional, physical and mental well-being of the expats facilitate the successful completion of corporate missions across cultural and national borders. Yet, for spouses to be this positive influence on the expat, several requirements need to be met, such as a chance to maintain a sense of identity and self-worth through the possible continuation of their own careers as well as either the maintenance of old or creation of new social support networks for the duration of the corporate mission. This requires a strategic international human resource management (IHRM) effort of assigning companies that goes beyond the immediate needs of ordinary relocations. This research report answers questions about how traditional global players in Germany deal with these issues. The results draw a rather dark picture as the IHRM strategies of these German corporations display a severe lack of support to find employment either on or after the assignment and show little effort to facilitate the (re-)creation of a social support network. Consequences and future research questions are delineated.     

Board Characterstics and Capital Structure： An Empirical Study on China＇s Private Listed Companies

Board of directors is one of the important parts of the corporate internal governance mechanism. Using panel data from 144 China＇s private listed companies during 2001-2003, this paper empirically studies the relationship between board characteristics and capital structure with the methods of pooled OLS, first-order difference model and fixed ,effect model.     

Toward the Effect of Audit Quality on Earnings Management——Empirical Evidence from Manufacturing Enterprises Listed in Shanghai Stock Market

Nowadays, earnings management is a hot issue, but most of the researches focus on the incentives of earnings management and few of them refer to the effect of audit quality on earnings management. In this study, we directly examine the effect of external audit quality on earnings management by using discretionary accruals. We find that the discretionary accruals of non-dual audit companies are significantly greater than those of dual audit companies. We also find that clients of non-First Ten auditors intend to report greater discretionary accruals than those of First Ten auditors.     

Home alone and often unprepared – intercultural communication training for expatriated partners in German MNCs

This article reports the results of a study of partners who accompany the expatriated representatives of multinational corporations (MNCs) on overseas missions and identifies that they are mostly home alone and often unprepared. Following a review of the literature on issues related to expatriated partners, in particular intercultural communication training (ICT), the article presents the findings of empirical research conducted in Germany on current ICT trends for expatriated partners. The study identifies the ICT methods German MNCs use to support these partners before and during international assignments. The authors surveyed 141 German expatriated partners who went on overseas missions to 36 countries. The results of this research project indicate that traditional ICT is only provided to the minority of partners in German MNCs, follows no predictable time pattern, and is mostly perceived as rather useless by participants. Particular attention is paid, however, to the target culture in the ICT design. Non-traditional ICT methods, such as Look-&-See Trips, are rather generously taken advantage of.     

Firms’ innovation performance and the role of the metropolitan location. Evidence from the European periphery

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the role of metropolitan location in explaining firms’ innovation performance while accounting for other internal and external determinants of innovation. Using micro-level dataset and controlling for firm-specific, sector-specific and region-specific features, we identify a nuanced effect of location within metropolitan areas on the innovative performance of companies The results prove to vary for the different measures of innovation output of firms and in particular there is no metropolitan advantage detected for binary self-declared measures of innovations. The advantage is detected for the count-based quantity of innovation measures which is shown to critically depend on the higher performance of metropolitan-based firms in patenting and licencing. The interlinkages between location and firm-size matter and the results are asymmetric with particular benefits arising for micro-firms in their patenting and licencing.     

Absence and Variant Modes of Presence of Management Accounting in New Product Development – Theoretical Refinement and Some Empirical Evidence

Abstract

The purpose of this explorative multi-organisation study is to describe and explain absence and variant modes of presence of management accounting (MA) in new product development (NPD), and to problematise further the equivocal results and paradigm shift regarding the role and relevance of management control system (MCS) packages in innovative and uncertain environments, in particular, why there are environments without formal management controls such as MA. The study refines, and in certain respects develops the theory of MA absence by combining it with the theory base of MA change and stability. The theoretical analysis suggests that a wide variety of factors may explain the absence or the mode of presence of MA in NPD. These identified explanatory factors are analysed further within the developed theoretical framework. The strongest empirical evidence for MA absence arises from technical, economic and functional factors. Furthermore, lack of reasons-for-adoption of MA systems and other forms of control associated with engineering-oriented culture lead to MA absence in NPD. The empirical findings also reveal a number of variant modes of MA presence with only the ‘accounting thinking’ and concepts adopted in NPD. The contribution of the study extends from the refinement of the theory of MA absence towards increasing the understanding of the evolution, change, stability and relationship of various elements of MA systems, and the dynamics of MCS in general.     

Is there an equilibrating relationship between house prices and replacement cost? Empirical evidence from Berlin

It is a feature of competitive markets with forward-looking participants that a good’s benefit and its production cost are equalized in equilibrium and that no resources are wasted during the adjustment process. For housing markets, there is mixed evidence whether they meet this standard of allocative efficiency. Based on a unique data set with rich information on prices and cost, we examine the market for single-family houses in Germany’s capital Berlin. At the aggregate market level, we find that prices and cost tend to equalize in the long run. Short-run adjustment appears to be sufficiently fast and properly anticipated to prevent systematic excess profit opportunities. At the cross sectional level of individual houses, we find support that resources are allocated efficiently between different market segments. Taken together, our results provide sufficient evidence that the market in Berlin is efficient.     

Future and impact of backshoring—Some conclusions from 15 years of research on German practices

In this short comment, empirical evidence will be offered to some of the questions Fratocchi et al., 2014. J. Purchasing Supply Manage. 20(1), http://dx.doi.org/10.16/j.pursup.2014.01.004 have posed in their short conceptual paper in this issue. Dynamics of German backshoring activities over the past 15 years are described and differences in motivations between the main backshoring modes are depicted. Further implications for global value chains and local manufacturing modes are discussed and future research directions are proposed.     

Private equity and venture capital funds—from the state of research to a comprehensive model and an interdisciplinary research outlook

In the following article I not only aim at giving a comprehensive overview, but at integrating contemporary research on PE into a comprehensive model of PE investment. In doing so, I point out new avenues for future research and the methodological challenges. Finally, I attempt to look at the opportunities for interdisciplinary knowledge transfer to strategic management (SM) and international business (IB) research. I argue that the lessons of PE research offer a unique opportunity to (re)discover the ??liabilities side?? of strategy and international business.     

Change within purchasing and supply management organisations – Assessing the claims from maturity models

It is a wide-held assumption that professional development and change within purchasing and supply management (PSM) organisations can be explained and guided by a maturity model. In this paper the guidance which the maturity model concept offers to understand a PSM organisation's performance is assessed. The methodology is based on the outcomes of a literature review of PSM maturity models, development of an organisational change framework and the learning from three qualitative case studies. An alternative understanding of the development of the PSM organisation is offered through an organisational change framework, composing 1) movement transitions, 2) scalability of change, 3) acceptability of change, and 4) the substantive element of change. The research found that extant PSM maturity models are too rigid for PSM managers to apply, and although maturity models are commonly accepted in PSM literature, in practice, they may produce the opposite effect of what is promised. The PSM maturity models suggest that their application will lead to increased status and influence of PSM within the organisation; expectations that may not be met. PSM organisations’ change processes are subjected to a range of situational and contextual power relations which must be considered in order to advance the specific PSM organisation roles and responsibilities.     

Debt-deflation,financial market stress and regime change – Evidence from Europe using MRVAR

Since the economic meltdown of 2008–2009 many euro area countries have experienced disinflation, and even deflation, in a period with large debt overhang, creating the conditions for continuing financial market stress. As disinflation and deflation push up the real interest rate, while growth and income declines, the leveraging problem becomes more severe and the economy risks shifting into a regime with high insolvency risk, high financial stress, rising credit spreads, possibly accompanied by strong adverse macroeconomic feedback loops. Investigating the consequences of those magnifying feedback loops, given the debt-deflation, we demonstrate the possibility of unstable dynamics and downward spirals in the presence of regime-dependent macro feedback loops, using a theoretical model with decentralized matching mechanisms on both labor and financial markets. To explore the amplifying linkages between deflation, output, labor and financial markets, we employ a new solution procedure called Non-linear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) to solve our models variants for out-of-steady-state dynamics. We apply a four variable Multi-Regime VAR (MRVAR) model with regime dependent (generalized) impulse-response functions (GIRFs) to study deflationary and financial risk drivers empirically for Southern and Northern EU countries. New measures for financial risk drivers are employed and GIRFs for output, inflation rates, interest rates and financial stress are explored. The econometric results of the MRVAR are roughly in line with the theoretical regime change model.     

How cultural dimensions,legal systems,and industry affect environmental reporting? Empirical evidence from an international perspective

Past research has paid little attention to the impact of stakeholder engagement, cultural, legal, and industrial contexts on environmental disclosure. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore how these three institutional factors affect the reporting of environmental information by companies in different countries. This research draws on institutional theory: normative isomorphism, coercive isomorphism, and mimetic isomorphism. This study uses the generalised method of moments procedure. The findings show that the legal system and certain cultural dimensions such as individualism, uncertainty avoidance, long‐term orientation, and indulgence are determinants of voluntary disclosure of environmental information (individualism and indulgence—negatively; uncertainty avoidance and long‐term orientation—positively), particularly when companies belong to industries with high environmental risk.