Within the European Union, the IAS-Regulation has harmonized applicable accounting standards for consolidated financial statements of capital market oriented companies by requiring IFRS since 2005. Regarding enforcement of financial reporting, the IAS-Regulation offered only small guidance for...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

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...

The paper analyses the timing of disclosing financial statements for small and medium enterprises (SME) in Germany in 2007 and 2008. Comparisons of different regional areas and different company sizes are made and possible explanations for the results discussed. -- Rechnungslegungspolitik ;...

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We...

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) contain several policy options. This paper examines the choices made in 2008/9 IFRS financial statements by large listed companies from five countries on all the options that are observable. We compare these choices with those that had been made...

This study presents empirical evidence concerning the effect of different accounting standard on earnings management. Prior studies have shown that accounting standards influence earnings management. Tighter accounting standards regime restricts management's descretion to manipulate accruals,...

This study investigates the economic auditor-client dependency issue by examining the association between abnormal audit fee pricing and audit quality. Our study is the first to analyze this phenomenon empirically for the institutional setting of German IFRS firms by using a sample of 2,334...