At the peak of the financial crisis in October 2008, the IASB amended IAS 39 to grant companies the option of abandoning fair value recognition for selected financial assets. Using a comprehensive global sample of publicly listed IFRS banks, we find that banks use the reclassification option to...

This study hypothesizes and tests whether the degrees to which managers exercise earnings discretion relates to their value system (i.e., culture) as well as the institutional features (i.e., legal environment) of their country. We find that uncertainty avoidance and individualism dimensions of...

This study investigates whether culture in general and religion in particular mitigate earnings management. Using a cross-country data set, empirical tests based on rank regressions indicate that earnings management is unrelated to both religious affiliation and the degree of religiosity. In...

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of enforcement (greater monitoring of auditors and more regulatory scrutiny of financial reporting) on accounting quality under IFRS using measures of earnings smoothing, managing towards earnings targets, timely loss recognition and value...

In this paper, we investigate how firm reporting incentives and institutional factors affect accounting quality in firms from 26 countries. We exploit a unique multi country setting where firms are required to comply with the same set of international reporting standards. We develop an approach...

This paper examines the relation between investor protection and real earnings management. We build on the work of La Porta et al. (2000), who found that countries with different legal systems protect investors differently. Using a sample of more than 13,000 unique firms in over 54 countries,...

We examine the relation between auditor reputation and earnings management in banks using a sample of banks from 29 countries. In particular, we examine the implications of two aspects of auditor reputation, auditor type and auditor industry specialization, for earnings management in banks. We...

We quantify the degree of tax-induced earnings management associated with statutory tax rates and examine whether greater book-tax conformity alters this particular type of earnings management. We first validate a new empirical approach for examining tax-induced earnings management using...

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 studies how religion influences corporate accounting conservatism choice. Accounting conservatism is a mechanism to reduce the agency costs between the corporate insiders and outsiders. Religion potentially impacts firms' accounting conservatism choice in two contradictory ways. On...