Pension accounting is anything but conservative since earnings can be protected from actuarial gains and losses. This paper shows that therefore conservatism measures based on models of the asymmetric relationship between earnings and positive versus negative stock returns are biased downwards....

This is the first empirical study that uses publicly available data to provide direct evidence about the role of the qualitative characteristics (QCs) of financial information in managements' accounting decisions. Based on 40,895 hand-collected IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards)...

Extractive firms form a major part of the stock markets of many countries which use IFRS for financial reporting, yet the key accounting issues are hardly regulated at all under a long-running ‘temporary' standard. The resulting variety in practice has not been studied by any large-scale...

Accounting for extractive costs is the last major issue to remain largely unregulated by IFRS. This is despite the fact that extractive firms are an important part of several big stock markets. Under a temporary permissive standard (IFRS 6), which has been in place since 2004, firms use a wide...