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...

Using the Miles & Snow (1978, 2003) strategy typology and a measure of strategy based on Bentley, Omar, & Sharp (2013) and Ittner, Larcker, & Rajan (1997), we investigate whether business strategy is associated with the quality of reported earnings. Our sample comprises 44,264 firm-year...

Since the formation of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) has spread and they have become global standards for financial reporting. However, they are not used unanimously all over the world. This paper focuses on...

We investigate the relationship between the transparency of loan loss provision disclosures and the provisioning practices of privately held banks. We study a unique change in disclosure regulation under German banking law which introduces mandatory disclosures of loan loss provisions. Using...

Academic research on loan loss provisioning and the earlier incurred credit losses (ICL) model has a long tradition in the literature. Academic criticism of the ICL was taken up by the Financial Stability Board after the financial crisis of 2018, leading to a fundamental revision of accounting...

This paper investigates the role of technical reserves in the income smoothing behavior of insurance companies. This is one of the first attempts in the literature to trace such relationship in the insurance industry, especially at a multi-country setting. The experience of 770 insurance firms...

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...