Journal of Business Finance and Accounting

Abstract:  This paper examines whether the incidence of earnings management by UK firms depends on board monitoring. We focus on two aspects of board monitoring: the role of outside board members and the audit committee. Results indicate that the likelihood of managers making income‐increasing abnormal accruals to avoid reporting losses and earnings reductions is negatively related to the proportion of outsiders on the board. We also find that the chance of abnormal accruals being large enough to turn a loss into a profit or to ensure that profit does not decline is significantly lower for firms with a high proportion of outside board members. In contrast, we find little evidence that outside directors influence income‐decreasing abnormal accruals when pre‐managed earnings are high. We find no evidence that the presence of an audit committee directly affects the extent of income‐increasing manipulations to meet or exceed these thresholds. Neither do audit committees appear to have a direct effect on the degree of downward manipulation, when pre‐managed earnings exceed thresholds by a large margin. Our findings suggest that boards contribute towards the integrity of financial statements, as predicted by agency theory.

Abstract:  This paper corroborates the finding of prior studies that managers avoid reporting earnings lower than analyst forecasts (i.e., negative earnings surprises) and provides new evidence of actions contributing to this phenomenon. Specifically, we provide empirical evidence of both (1) upward management of reported earnings and (2) downward ‘management’ of analysts' forecasts to achieve zero and small positive earnings surprises. Further analysis of the components of earnings management suggests that both the operating cash flow and discretionary accruals components of earnings are managed.

Abstract:  Religion has been shown to influence economic choices and outcomes in a variety of contexts. Honesty and risk aversion are two social norms forwarded to characterize the religious. Using the level of religious adherence in the county of a US firm's headquarters as a proxy for these religious social norms, we find that higher levels of religious adherence are associated with both a lower likelihood of financial restatement and less risk that financial statements are misrepresented because of overstated (understated) revenue/assets (expenses/liabilities). We also find that accruals of managers in areas of high religious adherence exhibit smaller deviations from expectations, and deviations, when they occur, tend to improve the time series mapping of accruals into cash flows. These results hold overall and separately for both Catholic and Protestant religious adherence. Further analysis reveals that the effects of religious social norms extend beyond accrual choices. We find that firms located in areas of high religious adherence are less likely to engage in tax sheltering, and are more forthcoming with bad news in their voluntary disclosures. Collectively, our results provide new evidence on the role of religion and social norms in corporate financial reporting.

The effect of government ownership on firm performance remains a controversial issue, especially in a transitional economy like China. Government ownership is typically viewed as adversely affecting firm performance. This study of that of Mainland China’s privatization experience indicates the opposite. No matter whether it is in the form of state ownership or legal person ownership, government ownership has a positive impact on partially privatized state‐owned enterprises. However, this relationship is nonlinear and shows an inverted U‐shape. Given the situation of highly indebted, non‐performing state‐owned enterprises, we argue that too much government control is indeed bad for enterprises. But too little government ownership may not be good either. It might mean a lack of the government’s political support and business connections, which are valuable and necessary to vitalize performance.

In this paper we present an index designed to capture differences between countries in relation to the institutional setting for financial reporting, specifically the auditing of financial statements and the enforcement of compliance with each country's accounting standards. The use of a common set of standards such as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) aims, in broad terms, to promote the comparability and transparency of financial statements and to improve the quality of financial reporting. However, the effectiveness of IFRS adoption may be hampered by differences, across countries, in the institutional setting in which financial reporting occurs. Studies of outcomes from adopting IFRS use a range of legal system proxies to capture these country differences, but the proxies are deficient in that they seldom focus explicitly on factors that affect how compliance with accounting standards is promoted through external audit and the activities of independent enforcement bodies. To address this deficiency, we calculate measures of the quality of the public company auditors’ working environment (AUDIT) and the degree of accounting enforcement activity (ENFORCE) by independent enforcement bodies. We do this for 51 countries for each of the years 2002, 2005 and 2008, using publicly available data provided by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), the World Bank and the national securities regulators. Preliminary tests suggest our indices have additional explanatory power (over more general legal proxies) for country‐level measures of economic and market activity, financial transparency and earnings management. We expect they will prove useful to researchers and other interested parties who require country‐level measures that focus on the degree of enforcement of financial reporting practices.

Abstract:  This paper examines the implications of mandatory IFRS adoption on the accounting quality of banks in twelve EU countries. Specifically, we analyse how the change in the recognition and measurement of banks’ main operating accrual item, the loan loss provision, affects income smoothing behaviour and timely loss recognition. We find that the restriction to recognise only incurred losses under IAS 39 significantly reduces income smoothing. This effect is less pronounced in countries with stricter bank supervision, widely dispersed bank ownership and for EU banks cross‐listed in the US. This provides additional evidence that institutions matter in shaping financial reporting outcomes. Further, the application of the incurred loss approach results in less timely loan loss recognition implying delayed recognition of future expected losses. In the light of the ongoing financial crisis it is questionable whether this is a desirable financial reporting outcome of mandatory IFRS adoption.

Abstract:  Is earnings management affecting (driving) the measures of earnings conservatism?Ball et al. (2000) point out that the asymmetry in the recognition of good and bad news in earnings (faster recognition of bad news: earnings conservatism) is more pronounced in common‐law than in code‐law based accounting regimes. However, comparative studies on earnings conservatism in Europe have failed to identify significant differences between common‐law and code‐law based countries. We argue that in code‐law based countries managers have incentives to reduce earnings consistently. This enhances the association between earnings and returns in bad news periods. We find that after controlling for discretionary accruals, the differential earnings response to bad news in Germany and France decreases significantly.

Abstract:  We introduce the concept of style drift to private equity investment. We present theory and evidence pertaining to style drifts in terms of a fund manager's stated focus on particular stages of entrepreneurial development. We develop a model that derives conditions under which style drifts are less likely among younger fund managers. We also show ways in which changes in market conditions can affect style drifts, and differences for funds committed to early‐stage investments compared to funds committed to late‐stage investments. We find some evidence of a positive relation between style drifting and investment performance.

We study theoretically the effect of product market competition on the incentives to engage in earnings manipulation, and we show how manipulating earnings is particularly rewarding in more competitive markets since the boost in market value of reporting good earnings is especially important. Using a panel dataset of about 70,000 observations spanning the period 1989–2011, we document that the competitive environment is an important determinant of Jones type discretionary accruals and it also affects real earnings management. In additional analysis, we find that the effect of competition on earnings manipulation is particularly important for companies that seem to be underperforming their competitors and that the competition‐earnings management linkage is moderated by the degree of information visibility at the industry level.

Abstract:  Given the increasing popularity of across‐sample R² comparisons in accounting research, this paper illustrates why the regression R²s are incomparable across samples and the general nature of this problem. The regression residual dispersion with proper control for scale is proposed as the alternative measure of explanatory power for across‐sample comparisons. In market‐on‐accounting variable regressions, this measure can be conveniently interpreted as the degree of accounting‐based pricing errors and be used as a measure of value relevance of accounting information. As an application, the issue of over‐time value relevance changes is re‐visited. In contrast to prior mixed findings based on the R² measure, a decline of value relevance since the early 1970s is robustly detected using the alternative measure.