Statutory auditors serve as an integral device to safeguard confidence in European financial markets. The market for corporate auditing is highly concentrated. A collapse of one of the top four auditing firms could cause a severe lack in the availability of auditing services. In a 2007 Staff...

Accounting is a media which communicates the business and financial information of each and every organisation so as to cater to the needs of various interested parties. Business involves undertaking a series of activities, which may be financial or nonfinancial, to achieve its prime goal....

Building on the knowledge-based view of the resource-based theory, we propose that accounting firms leverage the industry expertise acquired from the audits of the targets’ industries to produce fairer target valuations on merger and acquisitions (M&As). The accounting expertise competitive...

This paper discusses empirical evidence on the economic consequences of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union (EU) and provides suggestions on how future research can add to our understanding of these effects. Based on the explicitly...

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union (EU) initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers,...

The purpose of this paper is to study whether or not the convergence towards a 'high quality' accounting standard will be the natural result. One of the purposes of IASB is to make high quality accounting standards because of the convergence. It seems that the best strategy for the convergence,...

This report provides a review of the academic literature relevant to the mandatory adoption of IFRS reporting for member countries of the European Union in 2005 and an empirical analysis of the associated capital-market effects. In the empirical analysis, we focus on the effects on firms' costs...

Accounting-based profit distribution restrictions have been a key issue of the EU's company law harmonisation efforts. At present, the concept of creditor protection via the maintenance of a minimum level of nominal capital is challenged in several respects: (i) With its recent rulings, the...

The European Union (EU) has been debating for several years whether to change from the legal capital regime as regulated under the Second Company Law Directive to a solvency test regime as applied in the US, for example. Based on an analysis of direct compliance costs and capital maintenance...