This essay is based on a keynote speech at the 2014 Journal of International Accounting Research (JIAR) Conference. That talk was built upon a 2009 American Accounting Association (AAA) annual meeting panel presentation titled “Is there any scientific legitimacy to what we teach in Accounting...

This paper studies how mandating higher book-tax conformity influences a manager's strategy to misreport financial and taxable incomes in the presence of a financial auditor and subsequently a tax auditor. The main result is that allowing for some differences between GAAP and tax laws minimizes...

Politicians frequently intervene in the regulation of financial accounting. Evidence from the accounting literature shows that regulatory capture by special interests helps explain these interventions. However, many accounting rules have broad economic or social consequences, such as their...

In this paper, we study two types of accounting conservatism in the property-liability (P&L) insurance industry – ex-ante and ex-post conservatism. Ex-ante conservatism means that firms over-report liabilities initially, before more detailed information becomes available. In contrast, ex-post...

We examine the costs and benefits of proactive financial reporting enforcement by the UK Financial Reporting Review Panel. Enforcement scrutiny is selective and varies by sector and over time, yet can be anticipated by auditors and companies. We find evidence that increased enforcement intensity...

This paper studies the impact of public audit oversight on financial reporting credibility. We analyze changes in market responses to earnings news after public audit oversight is introduced, exploiting that the regime onset depends on fiscal year-ends, auditors, and the rollout of auditor...

Today, financial reporting is not only limited to producing financial information. Besides financial information, non-financial information is also provided to the information seekers. The system of communicating both financial and non-financial information in a single report is known as the...

This paper provides an introduction to and a review of governmental capital markets based research. It updates earlier studies and focuses on recent methodological developments. Prior research is classified ac­cording to the type of data used, emphasizing special topics that have received...

This paper adopts the concept of accounting ecology proposed by Gernon and Wallace (1995) in examining the accounting environment of Vietnam to identify some of the factors that might explain the lack of support for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in that country. Drawing on...

The current paper reports on an exploratory study of the perceptions of three different sub-groups of accountants (i.e. public auditors, corporate accountants and accounting academics) about issues relevant to adopting and implementing International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in...