The association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of reported earnings is examined for a large sample of firms from 42 countries. Three attributes of earnings are evaluated: the magnitude of the association of a country's investor protection regime with the quality of...

This paper addresses the question whether adoption of IFRS-standards is associated with lower earnings management. Ball et al. (2003) argue that adopting high-quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information, but not necessarily a sufficient one. In Germany, a...

We explore how the readability of annual reports varies with earnings management. Using the Fog Index to measure readability (Li 2008), and focusing on the management discussion and analysis section of the annual report (MD&A), we predict and find that firms most likely to have managed earnings...

This paper explores the quality of accounting information in listed family firms. We exploit the features of the Italian equity market characterized by high ownership concentration across all types of firms to disentangle the effects of family ownership from other major block-holders on the...

This paper examines the relationship between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence. This is motivated by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plain English disclosure regulations that attempt to make corporate disclosures easier to read for ordinary...

The aim of this study was to investigate two aspects of accounting information that may be inherently related: income smoothing practices and conditional conservatism. Theoretically, the more a firm employs income smoothing, i.e., uses accruals to reduce the variability of profits, the less...

In this study, we dispel several popular notions regarding the meeting or beating expectations/thresholds (MBE) phenomenon that permeates the research design of many empirical papers. First, MBE is not unequivocally associated with aggressive earnings management. Second, MBE does not necessarily...

We revisit evidence whether incentives or IFRS drive earnings quality changes, analyzing a large sample of German firms in the period from 1998 to 2008. Consistent with previous studies we find that voluntary and mandatory adopters differ distinctively in terms of essential firm characteristics...

Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

We study whether mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is associated with changes in the sensitivity of CEO turnover to accounting earnings and how the impact of IFRS adoption varies with country-level institutions and firm-level incentives. We find that CEO...