Solomon Opare

Purpose: This paper investigates the impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption and domestic investor protection on the relationship between United States (US) cross-listing and earnings management.Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses to a matched sample of cross-listed and non-cross-listed firms from 2000 to 2018, covering 38 countries.Findings: We find that US cross-listed firms have lower real earnings management. The results also show that real earnings management is lower for US cross-listed firms that adopt IFRS and from high domestic investor protection countries. Our results further show that real earnings management is higher when cross-listed firms use Level 1 American Depository Receipts (ADRs) to cross-list but adopting IFRS and high domestic investor protection help reduce real earnings management. Using the SEC’s Rule 12h-6 as a quasi-natural experiment, we document that post-12h-6 Rule, firms in high domestic investor protection countries experience a reduction in both accruals and real earnings management. However, the result is the opposite in countries with low investor protection.Originality/value: Our findings have implications for regulators and policymakers on the impact of ADR levels and Rule 12h-6 on earnings management.

Purpose: This paper examines the effect of firms’ takeover susceptibility on the manipulation of financial statements through classification shifting.Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies ordinary least squares regression (OLS) with fixed effects analyses to a sample of United States listed firms over the period 1992–2014. We use takeover index as a proxy for takeover susceptibility of firms, with high values representing higher takeover susceptibility and lower values representing lower takeover susceptibility.Findings: The study finds that firms engage in classification shifting through core expenses, suggesting that takeover threats reduce the incentive to manage earnings through classification shifting. We also find that takeover susceptibility improves the monitoring mechanism for firms with low profitability because these firms have greater incentives to engage in classification shifting. Finally, we find that the Sarbanes–Oxley Act strengthens the monitoring mechanism influenced by takeover threats. Overall, the results provide evidence of the important role of takeover susceptibility in mitigating classification shifting. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests.Practical implications: The results emphasise the disciplinary role of the legal environment around corporate takeovers. The study suggests that policymakers and regulators should be cognisant of antitakeover laws which may increase agency conflicts between managers and shareholders and promote managerial self-seeking behaviours such as classification shifting.Originality/value: The paper highlights the important role of takeover threats as an external governance mechanism to mitigate classification shifting which is detrimental to investors’ value. From prior literature, this study is the first to provide evidence of the effect of takeover threats on classification shifting.

We examine the impact of corporate culture on environmental performance using a sample of 7199 firm-year observations over the period of 2002–2018. We find that stronger corporate culture improves environmental performance, measured by the amount of toxic chemical release (TCR). Our result is both statistically and economically significant. We also show that cultural norms of innovation, quality and teamwork as well as a technology-oriented corporate culture have a greater impact on enhancing environmental performance. Further analyses show that managerial competence and strong institutional ownership moderate the relationship between corporate culture and environmental performance. We introduce the decomposition of expected and unexpected components of TCR and document that firms with a strong corporate culture implement strategies to reduce the unexpected component of TCR in addition to the expected component of TCR. Finally, we document that strong corporate culture and environmental performance improve firms’ financial performance. Our results are robust to several sensitivity tests and procedures to mitigate endogeneity and self-selection problems. From a practical point of view, our findings suggest that a firm’s culture can determine its environmental sustainability and ethical practices.

We examine the association between audit committee (AC) busyness and financial restatement and determine whether AC share ownership moderates this relationship. Using logit regression analysis, we test our hypotheses on a sample of 6408 firm‐year observations from 2004 to 2015 for companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. The study reveals that firms with busy ACs engage more in financial restatements. We also find that AC share ownership reduces financial restatements and attenuates the association between AC busyness and financial restatement. Our results are robust to endogeneity concerns emanating from firms’ deliberate decisions to grant shares to AC members. The findings of this research have several important policy implications. For instance, shareholders can benefit from AC members’ monitoring ability by allowing for share ownership. Further, our findings suggest that principles‐based corporate governance guidelines have a beneficial effect on financial reporting quality. While prior studies offer mixed evidence, our research contributes to the auditing literature by providing evidence that AC share ownership moderates the association between AC busyness and financial restatement.

Purpose: This purpose of this study is to examine the association between earnings management (accruals earnings management (AEM) and/or real activities manipulation (RAM)) and firm underperformance following seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) using cross-country data.Design/methodology/approach: The study applies ordinary least squares regression analyses to a sample of 11,764 observations on firms from 22 countries over the period from 2005 to 2017. The methods include weighted least squares regression, sub-sampling approach and alternative measures of firm performance, earnings management and legal regime for robustness tests as well as a two-stage least squares instrumental variable (IV) approach to address endogeneity concerns.Findings: The results suggest that RAM has a greater negative impact on post-SEO performance than AEM. The result is economically significant for RAM only. The results also reveal that the negative impact of earnings management, in particular RAM, on post-SEO performance is greater in countries with a strong legal regime than in other countries.Practical implications: Earnings management around SEOs has important implications for investors, regulators and policymakers. The study suggests that policymakers should improve the current legal conditions to promote fairness in the equity market.Originality/value: The results from the cross-country data support earlier results from single-country studies on the impact of earnings management on post-SEO performance. The study also provides new evidence on the variation in the impact of earnings management according to the strength of the legal regime operating in a country.

Carbon emissions and agency costs can have an impact on firms’ financial performance. However, limited attention has been paid to the combined and gradual effects of these two factors on firms’ performance. We explore the separate and combined effects of carbon emissions and agency costs on firms’ financial performance by utilizing data from 2323 US firms that disclosed their environmental information to CDP from 2007 to 2016. The results indicate that firms with higher carbon emissions experience lower performance as the market reacts negatively. Further, firms with both higher carbon emissions and higher agency costs have lower performance. We also investigated year-on-year change in firm performance and found that, keeping agency costs constant, a change in carbon emissions leads to lower performance. Overall, the findings suggest that when the market responds negatively to firms’ environmental decisions, high agency costs exacerbate the adverse effect of high carbon emissions on firm performance.

A large number of empirical studies have addressed the effects of adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), but the results have been mixed. We use a meta‐analysis of 56 empirical studies with 1,265 effect sizes to determine the impact of adoption of IFRS on financial reporting comparability, market liquidity, cost of equity, and cost of debt. This approach provides an objective view of the empirical results, in contrast to narrative reviews which offer subjective conclusions. We find that IFRS adoption has increased financial reporting comparability and market liquidity, and reduced the cost of equity. For cost of debt, a decrease is observed only for voluntary adoption. Our meta‐regression analysis explains the variation in the observed effect of adoption of IFRS across mandatory and voluntary adoption of IFRS, and choice of measures, control variables, estimation methods, and the strength of the empirical results. We emphasize the importance of these study characteristics and call for further studies focusing on the cost of debt and also studies using recent data to reflect the changes in IFRS. This study should be of interest to regulators and policymakers as they are expected to assess the impacts of adoption of IFRS.

A large number of empirical studies have addressed the effects of adoption of IFRS, but the results have been mixed. We use a meta-analysis of 55 empirical studies with 1,259 effect sizes to determine the impact of adoption of IFRS on financial reporting comparability, market liquidity, cost of equity and cost of debt. This approach provides an objective view of the empirical results, in contrast to narrative reviews, which offer subjective conclusions. We find that IFRS adoption has increased financial reporting comparability, market liquidity, and reduced cost of equity. For cost of debt, decrease is observed only for voluntary adoption. Our meta-regression analysis shows how the results differ across mandatory and voluntary adoption of IFRS and that the measurement choices, type of control variables, study design, and strength of results explain the variation in the observed effect of adoption of IFRS. We emphasise the importance of these study characteristics and call for further studies using more recent data, on the debt market, and the long-term effect of IFRS adoption. This study should be of interest to regulators and policymakers as they are expected to assess the impacts of adoption of IFRS.