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...

Prior research documented that higher disclosure quality reduces information asymmetry and cost of capital. Accordingly, firms have an incentive to comply with disclosure requirements and to provide voluntary disclosure. However, prior research on mandatory disclosures on goodwill impairment...

Most international stock exchanges distinguish solely between domestic and foreign issuers, whereas in Germany, issuers can choose between two market segments with diverse transparency levels: the Prime Standard and Non-Prime Standard segment. Transparency requirements for the Non-Prime Standard...

We examine the firm-level consequences of financial reporting enforcement investigations using proprietary data on risk-based and randomly selected investigations in Germany. We find that risk-based firms take longer to file financial reports, become opaque, and experience abnormal returns of...

Recent proposals on audit regulation, whether in the EU or by the PCAOB, have been motivated by efforts to increase audit quality. However, there does not exist any generally agreed upon definition of audit quality. This paper aims to critically assess the status quo of the discussion regarding...