The international financial reporting literature identifies a multitude of country attributes that each appear to explain financial reporting differences around the world. We first show that a single underlying factor explains across-country variation in 6 reporting quality measures used in the...

In this paper, we investigate how firm reporting incentives and institutional factors affect accounting quality in firms from 26 countries. We exploit a unique multi country setting where firms are required to comply with the same set of international reporting standards. We develop an approach...

For the period of 2006 to 2008, we collect Comment Letters issued by the SEC that question the application of US GAAP by US firms or the application of IFRS by European firms registered with the SEC. We investigate whether institutional investors react to the letters by changing their holdings...

We use hand-collected data for a sample of large European firms to investigate the influence of countries' institutional and economic factors on managers' non-GAAP disclosures. We find that managers are more likely to use non-GAAP measures to meet or beat earnings benchmarks that GAAP earnings...

We examine whether investors’ commitment to socially responsible investment principles influences the public disclosure of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues of their investee firms. We find that following institutional investors’ public commitment to the United Nations...

We examine the role of industry-level product market competition on non-GAAP disclosure decisions. We consider traditional measures of industry competition (concentration, price-cost margin, and set up costs), and large reductions in import tariff rates that identify an exogenous increase in...

We examine whether similarities in legal, sociological, and cultural characteristics between countries (country-pair homophily) affect foreign director appointments. Our results from estimating a gravity model, which includes economic and geographic country characteristics, indicate that...

We examine whether similarities in legal, sociological, and cultural characteristics between countries (country-pair homophily) affect foreign director appointments. Our results from estimating a gravity model, which includes economic and geographic country characteristics, indicate that...

We provide new evidence on the co-dependence among the many country attributes previously linked to financial reporting quality. First, we show that the synchronicity of 21 changing country attributes spikes surrounding mandatory IFRS adoption. Thus, while IFRS adoption “explains” increased...

We study the market's reaction to the disclosure of non-GAAP earnings measures that are combined with high impression management. We construct an impression management score that captures several communication techniques that managers often use to positively bias investors' perceptions of firm's...