Since the start of 2005 all European Union (EU) firms trading in a regulated market are required to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for their consolidated financial accounts. Many more countries will - soon or later - follow suit and adopt IFRS for all listed firms....

The widespread acceptance of International Accounting Standards (IAS)/International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) makes it timely to examine their technical determinants as well as their implications for the accounting profession and the process of accounting harmonization. In this...

We measure the persistence and predictability of sales and earnings growth for Australian-listed firms from 1989 to 2006. In contrast to results from the United States, there is evidence of persistence in growth. Rather, there is close to a two-thirds chance that a firm reporting growth above...

Accounting in shaped by economic and political forces. It follows that increased worldwide integration of both markets and politics (driven by reductions in communications and information processing costs) makes increased integration of financial reporting standards and practice almost...

We analyze the disclosure practices of companies as a function of their interaction with U.S. markets for a group of 794 firms from 24 countries in the Asia-Pacific and Europe. Our analysis uses the Transparency and Disclosure scores developed recently by Standard amp; Poor's. These scores rate...

The East Asian countries of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand provide a rare opportunity to study the interaction between the accounting standards under which financial statements are prepared and the incentives of managers and auditors who prepare them. Their accounting standards are...

We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm-specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multi-faceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate and...

Advocates of mandatory IFRS adoption claim that IFRS increases financial statement comparability and enhances the quality of financial disclosure, which in turn leads to more liquid markets. Using first-time disclosure (IFRS restatements), this study tests empirically this assertion by examining...

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...

This paper provides a perspective on the effect of IFRS adoption on the tendency of investors to under-invest in foreign equities. We consider explanations for the home equity bias described in prior research and discuss research relevant to the informational consequences of global adoption of...