The ultimate objective of the financial statement is the give reliable information, which is to be relevant and therefore useful in economic decisions making. Thus a company which operates in different industrial sectors and geographical areas need to provide information about its various...

The Securities Exchange Commission has introduced a Roadmap that describes a process leading to mandatory use of IFRS by domestic issuers by 2014. The SEC justifies this initiative on the grounds that global standardization yields cost savings and an ultimate gain in comparability, facilitating...

This paper argues for the pivotal role played by accountability in both corporate governance theory and practice. The reader is invited to take a journey through the history of the concept, by highlighting ten major points of interest, either real-life events or academic debates, which can be...

The effect of disclosure level on the cost of equity is a matter of considerable interest and importance to the financial reporting community. In this research, the effects of the IAS/IFRS adoption in Europe on the cost of equity capital relative to the bank industry have been examined. Previous...

Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

This paper investigates whether Italian companies that cross-list in the United States between 1993 and 2005 show (i) a change in their internal policies as anticipated by the bonding hypothesis, (ii) an increase in market value, or (iii) an increase in the access to capital funds. We use the...

In December 2007 the SEC issued a formal rule release that allows foreign-private issuers that employ the IFRS to file their financial statements without providing a reconciliation to U.S. GAAP. While the rule change was made after the SEC received and analyzed comments from various constituents...

This paper investigates whether foreign institutional investors affect the global convergence of financial reporting practices. Using several measures of reporting convergence, we show that U.S. institutional ownership is positively associated with subsequent changes in emerging market firms'...

This paper examines the role of conditional accounting conservatism in mitigating the cost of equity and debt capital in an international setting. I find that firms domiciled in countries with more conservative financial reporting systems have lower cost of equity and debt capital. I further...

Previous studies (e.g., Sun and Tong, 2003; Wang et al., 2004) show that Share Issue Privatization (SIP) in China did not improve the profitability of State-owned Enterprises (SOEs). This is puzzling given that SIP improves firm profitability almost around the world and China's economic reform is...