Accounting-based capital maintenance is a traditional feature of the Continental-European system of creditor protection, serving as a correlative of the limited liability enjoyed by shareholders of corporations. Due to recent developments at the EU regulatory level, this system has come under...

We investigate the interplay between creditor financing and the smoothness of earnings reported by European private firms and document how heterogeneous debt-contracting infrastructures across Europe moderate this relation. Most European private firms are owner-manager run enterprises with...

Financial accounting, the core of corporate reporting, is often characterized as the 'language of business'. Over the last roughly 100 years, and using an evolving set of theories, methods, and data, scholarly work in this area has been contributing to our understanding of this language and how...

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) faces a vast number of standard-setting issues at all levels of financial reporting. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of academic research for financial reporting standard setting and the role of academic researchers in the...

This paper reports the results of a field experiment investigating how attributes of carbon footprint information affect consumer choice in a large dining facility. Our hypotheses and research methods were preregistered via the Journal of Accounting Research’s registration-based editorial...

Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad versus good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings...

We address three research questions motivated by the recent ascent of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Europe. First, analyzing the determinants of voluntary IFRS adoption by publicly traded German firms during the period 1998-2004, we find that size, international exposure,...

Several studies document ex-post effects of accounting standards on firms’ business activities – such as reduced lease financing, R&D, or hedging. Are such ‘real effects’ unforeseen by accounting standard setters (as is sometimes assumed), or might they even be intended – to promote...