The capitalization of research and development (Ramp;D) costs is a controversial accounting issue because of the contention that such capitalization is motivated by incentives to manipulate earnings. Based on a sample of Italian listed companies, this paper examines whether companies' decisions...

This paper examines whether the type of jointly controlled entity influences the management choice to report interests in this kind of joint venture using the equity method or proportionate consolidation. We address this gap in the accounting choice literature by exploiting the U.K. setting...

This study analyzes determinants and effects of differences between Domestic Accounting Standards (DAS) and International Accounting Standards (IAS). We use an extensive list of differences between DAS and IAS to create two indices, absence and divergence. Absence measures the extent to which...

Local governments on the municipal level were among the first organizations to take part in the accounting reform in Greece that sought the transformation of the traditional budgetary cash accounting system to a new system that combines cash and accrual accounting information. In this paper we...

This paper examines how capital market pressures and institutional factors shape firms' incentives to report earnings that reflect economic performance. To isolate the effects of reporting incentives, we exploit the fact that, within the European Union, privately held corporations face the same...

We examine how the transition from local GAAPs to IAS/IFRS of companies that are publicly traded on a European stock exchange affects earnings management. To measure earnings management we apply 15 different proxies. In analyzing 17 European countries and more than 18,000 firm-year observations...

Public hospitals in the U.K. apply GAAP as modified by the Treasury, the Financial Reporting Advisory Board (FRAB) and the Department of Health. Individual National Health Service (NHS) Trusts apply their interpretation of the accounting manuals with further guidance and scrutiny from oversight...

In the moment of China's new Standard for Asset Impairment change of no permission for the reversal of four items of impairment provisions, this paper studies that in the transitional years of 2005 and 2006, how loss and profit-turning listed companies choose their earnings manipulation...

We provide preliminary confirmation of Skinner's (1995) hypothesis that Canada's relatively principles-based GAAP yield higher accrual quality than the US's relatively rules-based GAAP. These results stem from a comparison of the Dechow-Dichev (2002) measure of accrual quality for cross-listed...

We examine whether UK managers use the flexibility provided under the partial method for deferred taxes to measure unrecognized deferred taxes opportunistically. We first test whether firm-specific operational and opportunistic factors are associated with the level of unrecognized deferred...