This research is motivated by interest in recent changes in the audit approaches of audit firms. The business risk audit approach has been adopted based on assertions about its benefits by administrators of large audit firms and academics linked with these firms and, more recently, has been...

The paper presents a new methodology for evaluating corporate voluntary disclosures in the annual report discussion section. Based on a new dataset of electronic annual reports and a standard text analysis software package, we text-search a large number of annual reports at minimal (marginal)...

We extend prior research into the association between disclosure quality and share price anticipation of earnings by discriminating between firms that report profits and firms that report losses. As a measure of disclosure quality we count the number of forward-looking profit statements in...

PurposeTo empirically explore empirically the underlying factors that may affect the extent to which forward-looking information is disclosed.MethodologyThis study uses a list of forward-looking keywords to demonstrate the differences, if any, in the level of disclosure among firms and between...

Purpose – This paper examines the impact of audit quality, measured by financial statements audited by the big four accounting firms, on the investors' ability to predict future earnings for profitable and unprofitable firms.Methodology – The paper uses the returns-earnings regression model...

We investigate the joint effects of dividend propensity (i.e. whether a firm pays cash dividends) and voluntary disclosure on the relationship between current stock returns and future earnings. We examine whether dividend propensity and voluntary disclosure act as substitutes or complements in...