Purpose This paper empirically investigates whether trade openness (TO) in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) countries affects how banks might employ loan loss provisions (LLPs) to smooth out their earnings and how adopting the International Financial Reporting Standards...

We study whether bank managers' use their discretion in estimating the allowance for loan losses (ALL) for efficiency or for opportunistic reasons. We do so by examining whether the use of this discretion relates to bank stability and bank risk taking, or whether it relates to earnings...

We empirically investigate whether the presence of trade openness in a bank-domiciled country affects how banks might employ loan loss provisions to smooth out their earnings, and how adopting IFRS can mitigate it. Using fixed-effect and two-step system panel GMM estimators, we find that trade...