This study provides descriptive evidence on the controversial trend adopted by many firms in recent years of reporting earnings figures on a "pro forma" basis. Pro forma earnings exclude normal income statement items that managers deem to be nonrecurring or nonrepresentative of ongoing...

We revisit evidence whether incentives or IFRS drive earnings quality changes, analyzing a large sample of German firms in the period from 1998 to 2008. Consistent with previous studies we find that voluntary and mandatory adopters differ distinctively in terms of essential firm characteristics...

Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

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...

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...

We compare US firms' earnings with reconciled earnings for cross listed non-US firms. Non-US firms' earnings exhibit more evidence of smoothing, greater tendency to manage towards a target, lower association with share price and less timely recognition of losses. Firms from countries with weaker...

It would be interesting to know how the theories and hypotheses in auditing developed for a mature economy work in an emerging market. This paper uses the merger of Diwan, Ernst amp; Young and J. T. Lai amp; Co., CPAs in Taiwan in 2000 as a target to study the effects of a CPA-firm merger on...

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...

In this cross-border study, we document the usefulness of reported earnings as conditioned by varying levels of litigation risk. We focus on litigation risk, since Ball (2001) suggests that although litigation rights are seldom discussed in the context of international accounting, the threat of...