Download or read book Three Essays on Financial Reporting and Auditing written by Juliane Beer and published by . This book was released on 2021* with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Audit Committees and Financial Reporting Quality written by John Lewis Abernathy and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates the relationship between audit committee characteristics and financial reporting quality. The dissertation is organized into three essays that examine this topic. The first two essays examine audit committee characteristics and their association with various measures of financial reporting quality. Essay Three summarizes relevant literature regarding conservatism, a measure of financial reporting quality. In Essay One, I examine whether adding board members with accounting financial expertise to the audit committee is associated with an increase in a firm's accounting conservatism. The results of this study provide evidence that the addition of accounting expertise is positively associated with higher conservatism as measured by the Penman and Zhang (2000) C-Score measure of conservatism, but only for firms with a strong governance structure. For firms with weak governance, the addition of accounting expertise to the audit committee is associated with higher levels of conservatism as measured by the Givoly and Hayn (2000) negative accruals measure of conservatism. However, the addition of accounting financial expertise is not associated with higher levels of conservatism as measured by the Beaver and Ryan (2000) book-to market measure. Sensitivity analysis suggests that the addition of accounting financial expertise is associated with higher conditional conservatism as measured by the Basu (1997) asymmetric loss recognition measure. In Essay Two, I investigate the association between analyst earnings forecast properties and the presence of accounting financial expertise on audit committees. The results indicate that the presence of accounting financial expertise is associated with significantly higher forecast accuracy and significantly lower forecast dispersion. Additionally, I find that the non-accounting financial expertise is significantly associated with higher analyst forecast accuracy and lower forecast dispersion, but nonfinacial expertise is not. Essay Three summarizes relevant literature regarding conservatism, a measure of financial reporting quality.

Download or read book Three Essays in Financial Accounting and Auditing written by Ibrhaim Siraj and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Quality of Audited Financial Statements written by Ulf Mohrmann and published by Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation consists of four essays on the quality of audited financial statements. The first analysis investigates the association between several regulations of the audit market and earnings characteristics. The second essay differentiates between different drivers of audit quality after an auditor change by comparing the effects of voluntary and mandatory auditor changes. The third study analyses the different strategies of Big4 and non-Big4 auditors in dealing with Level 3 fair values. The fourth part examines banks' valuation behavior concerning Level 3 fair values.

Download or read book Three Essays on Financial Reporting written by Yan Li and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Governance written by Maryam Firoozi and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is comprised of three essays on corporate governance issues. The first essay focuses on how board members’ geographical diversity relates to financial reporting quality. In principle, it is often argued that diversity has a positive impact on a group’s decision-making and monitoring abilities. In governance matters, while the attention has recently been placed on gender diversity, diversity is in fact multi-dimensional and encompasses attributes such as gender but also experience, expertise, independence and origins. The results show that a local board is more successful in monitoring financial reporting quality. The first essay provides evidence that although regulators are encouraging the diversity of boards of directors in all aspects, they may not be aware that each dimension of diversity may have a different impact on the performance of directors. The second essay ponders how the presence of foreign directors on audit committees affects their effectiveness. The rules-based approach of Canadian regulators with respect to audit committee membership has caused many Canadian firms to nominate foreign directors on their audit committees, especially from the U.S. The second essay provides evidence that the nomination of foreign directors to a monitoring committee, mainly due to the requirements regarding audit committee membership, may have reverse outcomes on the quality of financial reporting, even though these directors may share many similarities with directors from the country in which they are sitting on a board and to which they are geographically close. The last essay looks at the effects of the adoption of a new set of accounting standards within a single national context, Canada, with different legal regimes (common law outside Quebec, code law within Quebec). The third essay offers evidence that the introduction of a new set of accounting standards may even result in a different level of financial reporting quality between firms, dependent on firm- and country- level governance mechanisms. Key words, Board of Directors, Geographical Diversity, Earnings Quality, Audit Committee, Foreign Directors, IFRS, Firm- level governance mechanisms, Country – Level Governance Mechanisms.

Download or read book Three Essays on Accounting and Regulatory Information Provided by Financial Instititions written by Romain Oberson and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thèse. HEC. 2018

Download or read book Three Essays on Financial Information Disclosure written by Bo Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is comprised of three essays on informational issues that revolve around financial reporting, governance, and disclosure. The first essay focuses on how International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption by the Canadian fund industry impacts the funds' reported performance and managers' behavior. When Canada implemented IFRS for publicly accountable enterprises (PAEs) in 2011, it received much attention from international researchers, professionals, and regulators mainly for three reasons: (1) IFRS were more mature when adopted in Canada as nine amendments had been made from 2005 through 2010, and issues and uncertainties faced by earlier adopters such as firms from EU members may or may not exist in Canada; (2) pre-IFRS Canadian accounting standards were very close to that of the US, and thus, the Canadian experience has strong implication to the largest capital market which has not accepted IFRS as primary standards yet; (3) Canadian accounting and financial regulations have been shown to be more effective in controlling risks during the 2008 financial crisis compared to those of other major economies; how IFRS can strengthen such a tight system is to be examined and is important to IFRS proponents and standard setters. In 2014, Canada took the lead by being the first common law jurisdiction mandating IFRS for investment funds while most other countries hold up IFRS adoption in this particular industry due to various complications. This paper shows that IFRS adoption does affect the funds' outcomes and managers' behavior in Canadian closed-end investment funds, and voluntary disclosure of cash flows also strongly affects fund managers' return and valuation discretion. The implication is that if a country is not ready to fully implement IFRS in the fund industry because of complications at the accounting and financial levels, mandatory disclosure of cash flows could lead to better accounting quality as well, since one major difference between IFRS and GAAP is the disclosure of cash flows which constrains manager's discretion on asset appraisals. The second essay studies the implications from outside directors' turnover. Outside directors have been extensively studied as a governance factor, but their behaviors are not well documented in the literature, partly because most agency theory-based research concentrates on the behavior of managers, not that of directors. While the majority of studies in the governance literature analyze characteristics of directors in a static way, I look at this question in a dynamic way which considers directors' behaviors. This paper studies S&P 500 companies that have boardroom turnovers due to outside directors' unexpected departures. The departures of these non-executive directors usually do not trigger investors' concerns. However, our results show that when they do not provide concrete reasons, the firms from which they resigned experience underperformance afterward. This result suggests that directors may have resigned ahead of sub performance because of information they became privy to. The implication is strong to both regulators and investors. While governance regulations require a certain proportion of outside directors on compensation and audit committees with the intention of achieving efficient governance and releasing timely and reliable information, such mechanisms are substantially affected if outside directors do not fulfill their responsibilities when firms face challenges. Investors who take long positions should be alerted about outside directors' unexplained departure, and investors who take short positions may find opportunities when a company has boardroom turnover. The third essay examines a financial question around mergers and acquisitions announcements. In a tender offer, the bidder contacts shareholders of a target firm directly by announcing a public offer to tender their shares. The risk arises because the acquisition may or may not go through. Insiders typically have a better appreciation of the likelihood of a successful acquisition than outsiders, who have very limited access to strategic and private information. As a result, outsiders are at the disadvantageous position during mergers and acquisitions. This paper documents that besides official and public releases, outsiders can also rely on stock returns around announcements to infer private information to reduce information asymmetry. While current regulations and reporting standards do not have effective ways to minimize information asymmetry during mergers and acquisitions, this study highlights an avenue that indirectly mitigates outsiders' information disadvantage.

Download or read book Three Essays on Financial Accounting written by Sunyoung Kim and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Audit Regulation Audit Market Structure and the Quality of Financial Statements written by Benjamin Heß and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Financial Accounting and Auditing written by Lucas Mahieux and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis focuses on financial reporting. The main objective of the first chapter is to understand the role of fair value accounting, taking into account the possibility for banks to use their private information (Level 3 reporting) to compute fair values. Namely, I analyze a model of prudential regulation to shed some light on banks' incentives to use Level 3 reporting. I bring in accounting measures as the primary inputs into capital requirements set by a regulator to efficiently allocate control rights within a bank and to provide managerial discipline. My analysis of the Level 3 reporting externalities highlights an interesting tradeoff between transparency and financial stability. On the one hand, Level 3 reporting reduces the ability for a bank's stakeholders to extract information from financial statements of similar banks. On the other hand, Level 3 reporting decreases systemic risk caused by mark-to-market accounting. Further, manipulation makes Level 3 reporting less desirable, which may in turn increase systemic risk. I believe that the framework of this chapter offers other opportunities to study the real-effects of fair value accounting that have not yet been explored. The second chapter of this thesis is co-authored with Jeremy Bertomeu of the University of California San Diego and Haresh Sapra of the University of Chicago. In this chapter, we tackle the question of the optimal loan loss provisioning system for banks. In particular, we develop first a framework to study how accounting measurement and prudential regulation interact to affect a bank's incentives to originate credit. Our main result is that the accounting measurement system and bank leverage are policy tools that should be used in tandem, generating more value than systems that rely either on accounting regulation or on prudential regulation. Then, we use our results to shed some light on the current debate on the appropriate loan loss provisioning model for banks. We show that while banks engage in excessive risk-taking under an incurred loss model, an expected loss model can lead to excessive liquidations. The third chapter of this thesis moves away from financial reporting for banks to focus on the analysis of auditors' incentives to deliver high audit quality. In particular, I try to understand the impact of the provision of non-audit services (NAS) on audit firms' incentives, in order to conclude on the best way to regulate this industry. I believe that a better understanding of auditors' incentives is necessary to design better regulations. To that end, I develop a framework that provides new insights into the incentive effects of NAS on auditors. I show that it can be optimal for the investors of a client firm to let the external auditor provide NAS because of an incentive externality. Indeed, the possibility of providing NAS contingent on detecting financial misstatements increases the auditor's incentives to exert audit effort. However, despite this positive externality, the provision of NAS may decrease perceived audit quality, which may in turn render the provision of NAS by auditors undesirable. Thus, my analysis uncovers an interesting tradeoff for regulators between the positive incentive effect and the decrease in audit quality. Removing the current restriction on contingent audit fees may offset this ex post decrease in audit quality while preserving the ex ante incentives.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Value Relevance of Financial Accounting written by Tom Fischer and published by . This book was released on 2021* with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Auditor Independence and Auditor Liability written by Ping Zhang and published by National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. This book was released on 1999 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Accounting Data Differences and Audit Learning written by Roman Chychyla and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation comprises of three essays that 1) compare accounting numbers in Capital IQ's Compustat North America Fundamentals Annual, the most popular accounting database in accounting research, to the original numbers in corporate reports, 2) study the effects of Compustat's data standardization procedures on accounting-based bankruptcy prediction models, and 3) develop a framework to enhance the performance of analytical learning models in a multi-period auditing setting. In the first essay, we conduct the first large-scale comparison of Compustat and 10-K data. Specifically, we compare 30 accounting line items of approximately 5,000 companies for the period from October 1, 2011, to September 30, 2012. We find that the values reported in Compustat significantly differ from the values reported in 10-K filings. We also find that the amount and magnitude of the original data alterations introduced by Compustat depend on the type of the accounting item and company characteristics such as industry and size. Numbers that appear in Compustat are standardized -- adjusted to fit fixed variable definitions -- to ensure " ... consistent and comparable data across companies, industries and business cycles ..." However, there has been no evidence in the academic literature that Compustat's standardized numbers provide more benefits than the original numbers in financial statements. In the second essay, we examine the effects of Compustat's data standardization using Altman's 1968 and Ohlson's 1980 bankruptcy prediction models as examples. We find that Compustat's data standardization not only yields no improvements for bankruptcy prediction models, but also has a significant negative impact on the predictive accuracy of Altman's model (up to 8.56%) There are several challenges in applying analytical models to the auditing problem of identifying irregular transactions. We argue that because of these challenges standard statistical models may not be well-suited for auditing and have to be modified to achieve better performance. In the third essay, we propose a framework to boost the performance of analytical learning models in auditing. The results of framework's testing on the real data show a significant increase of performance of the tested models.

Download or read book Three Essays on Goodwill Impairment Disclosure written by Ionela Andreicovici and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three distinct studies that empirically examine the role of the information disclosed on goodwill impairment for key firm stakeholders (i.e., financial analysts, peer firms, and external auditors). In the first study, I examine the effect of disclosure transparency on disagreement among analysts, and disagreement between analysts and managers, in the context of goodwill impairment. The second study examines whether the reporting of significant goodwill impairment by a firm (impairment firm) affects the corporate investment behavior of other firms in the same industry (peer firms). The third study investigates the impact of the expanded audit report disclosure on firms' financial disclosure decisions. Specifically, I examine whether firms adjust the levels of disclosure on goodwill impairment when auditors flag goodwill impairment as a risk of material misstatements in the expanded audit report. This study contributes to the debate about the usefulness of the expanded audit report by identifying the mechanism through which expanded audit report impacts financial reporting and corporate decisions.

Download or read book Three Essays On Auditor Liability written by Jeffrey Scott Pickerd and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Auditor liability is an important topic of accounting research as auditors respond to a constantly changing financial reporting and regulatory environment. Through three independent essays, I intend to explore how estimate uncertainty, financial statement aggregation, audit quality indicators, a company's investor base, and the size of the alleged misstatement can impact auditor liability both in the courtroom, as determined by jurors, and in out of court settlement, as determined by attorneys. I find that jurors do hold the auditor more likely to be negligent when audit quality indicators suggest the auditors did a poor quality audit. I also find that jurors hold auditors to be more negligent when both estimate uncertainty is low and the income statement is disaggregated. This juror finding is in contrast to lawyers where I find that high estimate uncertainty causes auditors' lawyers to believe that the auditors are more vulnerable for failing to detect a material misstatement and make more concessions in out-of-court settlement negotiation. Together, these studies have a number of important implications. First, the impact of high estimate uncertainty on auditor liability can go in opposite directions depending on whether the case disposition is determined by jurors or by lawyers negotiating settlement. Second, auditors' legal counsel may erroneously concede during settlement negotiations based on incorrect beliefs about their vulnerability to jurors. Third, while accounting research has focused on juror judgments to proxy for auditor litigation risk, auditors may face very different litigation risk in out-of-court settlement, where the vast majority of auditor liability is determined.

Download or read book Essays on Financial Reporting Quality written by Yuequan Wang and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of the importance of financial reporting quality in capital market, I explore the determinants to financial reporting quality in my second essay, "Market power and accrual management". I examine whether a firm's competition status in product markets affects its financial reporting quality, measured as discretionary accrual. I argue that because firms with greater market power have a greater ability to set prices for their products, they have comparatively fewer incentives to manipulate earnings through accrual management. I use the Lerner index to measure product market power and asset-deflated absolute discretionary accruals to proxy the magnitude of accrual management. Using a large sample of firm-year observations from 1997 to 2007, I find that, as hypothesized, firms with greater market power tend to have lower levels of accrual management. The final essay, "Product market competition and audit fees", goes one-step further than the second. As noted in the second essay, product market competition affects a firm's financial reporting quality. However, financial reporting quality may not be the only factor auditors take into account when they decide what fees to charge a client. The last essay, therefore, empirically explores the inter- and intra- industry effect of product market competition on audit fees. Prior literature posits two contradictory predictions on the relation between product market competition and audit fees. On the one hand, firms in a competitive market are expected to face higher liquidity risk, distress risk, and liquidation risk, thus increasing auditors' assessments of a client's business risk. So, audit fees are expected to increase with industry competitiveness. On the other hand, it is often argued in prior literature that product market competition decreases information asymmetry and mitigates agency problems between shareholders and managers and increases the accuracy of financial reporting, thus decreasing auditors' assessments of a client's audit risk resulting in necessary audits. So auditors tend to charge lower fees on firms in a more competitive industry. The study, then, empirically tests the relation between product market competition and audit fees and finds that auditors charge higher fees on firms in a more competitive industry. It also finds that auditors charge lower fees on firms with greater market power within the same industry.