This paper investigates how capital markets in a code-law country, Japan, react to the disclosure of internal control weaknesses (ICW). The Japanese government attempted to implement a more concise, efficient, and, thus, less strict internal control reporting system than Section 404 of the...

Unlike the situation in most developed countries, before the enactment of China's 2006 Bankruptcy Law it was difficult for Chinese-listed companies, which were mostly government owned, to declare bankruptcy. Our analysis of a sample of Chinese financially-distressed companies from 2001 to 2010...

This study extends the literature on audit pricing by examining the relationship between ethnicity (bumiputra vs non-bumiputra), corporate governance attributes, and audit fees using data from 559 publicly-listed companies in Malaysia in 2005. Drawing from theories of ethnicity and political...

The literature and many national regulatory frameworks have underlined the importance of audit committees as monitoring mechanisms. In the prevailing Italian firms' corporate governance system, there is no audit committee. Instead, its functions are responsibility of two different committees....

This study examines whether the internal control provisions under the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) have a disciplining effect on the governance structures of firms. We find that audit committee members and outside directors of firms that disclose material weaknesses (MWs) under Section 302 of SOX...

This paper examines audit reporting of Big 4 auditors versus non-Big 4 auditors for ex-Andersen clients and other clients. It suggests that ex-Andersen clients are more risky than other clients and are able to exert more influence than other clients on non-Big 4 auditors because they are larger...

We examine the impact of the 2008–2009 financial crisis on the earnings management behavior of European-listed firms. We find that earnings management has significantly decreased in the crisis years. This trend is confirmed in most of the 16 countries under review. We also report a link...

We examine the effect of IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) on the type of performance measures firms use to evaluate and reward their managers. We show that post-IFRS firms decrease the weight of Earnings-per-Share (EPS)-based performance measures in CEO pay contracts. We argue...

This paper develops a taxonomy of the different accounting systems that have evolved in Africa from the colonial era, through the early years of independence, to modern times. A preliminary test of the classification scheme for the current era of International Financial Reporting Standards...

Prior studies on whether or not International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption improves earnings quality have found mixed results. We note that some of the countries that have adopted IFRS had national accounting standards similar to IFRS prior to adopting IFRS, while others had...