This paper examines issues pertaining to standard setting in an increasingly interconnected world. It is argued that many present day accounting standards are flawed, generally because of inherent compromises welded into their structure, yielding needless complexity and sometimes absurd results....

By convention, the quality of an audit is understood to relate to the joint probability that its conduct results in the detection and reporting of material financial statement errors. Early research into this phenomenon suggested a positive relationship between audit firm size and audit quality....

Using a sample of Spanish listed firms for the period 1997-2002 we find that firms where the CEO has low influence over the functioning of the board of directors show a greater degree of accounting conservatism. We measure the influence of the CEO over the board of directors using two aggregate...

Accounting for stock options and executive remuneration have been one of the most debated and controversial issues in accounting regulation and corporate governance. The purpose of this study was to analyse the impact of the mandatory adoption of IFRS 2 for accounting of stock options in Italian...

This paper is a response to the critical comments of Alexander (2006) and Nobes (2006) on our article on revenue recognition, which was published last year in this journal (Wuuml;stemann and Kierzek 2005). While Alexander primarily objects to our statement that there is a 'requirement of legal...

This paper examined the key issues related to the effects of introduction of fair value in a stakeholder-oriented accounting system. In particular, it discussed how the decision of the Italian policymaker to limit the distribution to shareholders of fair value gains is rooted on the importance...

We address three research questions motivated by the recent ascent of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Europe. First, analyzing the determinants of voluntary IFRS adoption by publicly traded German firms during the period 1998-2004, we find that size, international exposure,...

Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad versus good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings...

The purpose of this paper is to provide some new evidence on the relationship between disclosure and the cost of equity capital. We propose a new specification for the empirical test based on the idea that in the previous models one crucial variable was missing: accounting policy choice. We test...