{"title":"Relative Importance of Accounting Standards and National Regulatory Frameworks on Opportunistic Asset Sales Decisions","authors":"Domenico Campa, Ray Donnelly","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22783","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22783","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>We use a sample of UK-listed firms reporting under IFRS and US listed firms reporting under US GAAP, and a second sample of UK firms cross-listed in the US and reporting under IFRS matched with US domestic firms reporting under US GAAP, to explore differences in earnings management through asset sales between IFRS and US GAAP reporters. In the first sample, we find that both US and UK firms use asset sales to manage earnings upward at the benchmark of zero earnings, but only UK companies use asset sales to smooth income. Our second sample shows a consistent and similar use of asset sales for income smoothing purposes for companies reporting under IFRS and US GAAP that are subject to the same (US) regulatory environment. Our results suggest that the regulatory environment rather than accounting standards is pivotal in the decision to use asset sales to manage earnings.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"194-220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regulatory Fragmentation and Operational Efficiency","authors":"Hongkang Xu","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22780","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study employs a fragmentation index derived from Federal Register data to explore the relationship between regulatory fragmentation and operational efficiency. I find a positive association between regulatory fragmentation and operational efficiency, validated through various robustness checks, including entropy balancing, instrumental variable methods, fixed effects at different levels, change specification models, and alternative measures of operational efficiency. Additional analyses indicate that this positive association is more pronounced in firms exhibiting internal control weaknesses and facing higher operational uncertainty. Overall, my results suggest that although regulatory fragmentation poses challenges, it also creates opportunities for firms to enhance their operation efficiency. This research sheds light on the multifaceted effects of regulatory environments, providing valuable insights for policymakers and corporate strategists in managing regulatory complexities.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"176-193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Matt Bjornsen, Sarah Borchers, Matthew A. Stallings
{"title":"Disaggregated Financial Statement Comparability","authors":"Matt Bjornsen, Sarah Borchers, Matthew A. Stallings","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22781","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study develops a measure of financial statement comparability based on the disaggregated financial accounting components of earnings. The disaggregated financial statement comparability measure in this paper is contrasted with the aggregated (i.e., based solely on aggregate earnings) financial statement comparability measure used in prior research. The disaggregated framework allows for the measurement of comparability between two firms across multiple components of earnings, which enhances the ability to contrast a company's accounting system to that of other companies impacted by similar economic effects. This comparability measure is robust to a rigorous set of analyses, including tests of incremental informativeness, alternative specifications of comparability, and considerations regarding the information environment. The metric developed in this study extends financial reporting quality and financial statement comparability research based on its ability to capture the distinct components of earnings.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"152-175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corporate Life Cycles and Analyst Recommendations","authors":"Ahmed Al Hadi, Abdulsamad Alazzani","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22778","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study examines the relationship between firm life cycle stages and analyst recommendations. Using a dataset covering 1995 to 2022, we refine the sample to 62,731 firm-year observations and employ established models to create proxies for the corporate life cycle stages. The regression results reveal positive and significant associations between three life cycle stages—introduction, growth, and maturity (compared to shake-out)—and analyst recommendations, while the decline stage (compared to shake-out) is negatively associated with analyst recommendations. In an additional analysis, we find that financial distress impacts analyst recommendations, particularly in the introduction and decline stages, an association that reflects agency considerations and information asymmetry. An analysis of the interaction between analyst recommendations and corporate risk-taking reveals varying effects across the life cycle stages. Risk-taking and analyst recommendations positively interact in the introduction, growth, and decline stages, with a positive relationship in the maturity stage. These findings underscore the complex interplay between CLC dynamics, financial distress, risk-taking behavior, and analyst recommendations and provide insights into market factors and information dynamics. Our results are robust using different measures of CLC, Tobit regression, and Firm-Fixed Effect regression.</p>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"137-151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jcaf.22778","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corporate Value Creation and the Award of Procurement Contracts","authors":"Stephen P. Ferris, Reza Houston, Blake Rayfield","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22776","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study explores how federal procurement contracts influence shareholder value, revealing a consistent positive correlation between the size of the initial award and investor reactions. We uncover a significant impact of the contract's Sweetheart Index on investor responses, with no-bid (sole source) contracts, defense contracts, service contracts, and contracts exempt from cost or price reporting requirements attracting stronger investor interest. Notably, we observe significant information leakage around award announcements that affects investor behavior. Through difference-in-difference analysis, our findings show that long-term defense contracts lead to a greater increase in return on equity compared to other large government contracts, as assessed against a matched sample of firms. Additionally, our study highlights that contracts in industries with high concentration and those involving unique goods and services tend to be more lucrative, providing critical insights for investors and policymakers engaged in federal procurement strategies.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"119-136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CEO Overconfidence and Corporate Tax Strategy","authors":"Wei Hsu, Yvonne Lee","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22777","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Literature in accounting, economics, and corporate finance explores how top corporate executives’ personal traits and psychological biases affect firm decisions. This study focuses on one specific dimension of CEO personality: overconfidence and examines how CEO overconfidence influences corporate tax strategies. Overconfident executives tend to expect good outcomes due to optimistic bias or overestimation of their ability to bring about success. Therefore, they tend to overestimate the returns on investment projects and overinvest. We postulate that overconfident CEOs are inclined to seek risky tax planning activities to generate additional cash streams to make up for those projects not producing as much cash flow as originally expected. We find our three measures of overconfidence to be positively correlated with the book-tax difference (BTD). Our main overconfidence measure, proxied by CEOs delaying exercising their stock options, is negatively correlated with the cash effective tax rate (CETR), consistent with our prediction that overconfident CEOs exhibit more tax aggressiveness to preserve cash. Additionally, we test whether corporate governance affects corporate tax strategies and show that overconfident CEOs continue to have a negative effect on cash-effective tax rates regardless of the strength of board governance.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"103-118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impact of Cybersecurity Disclosure Frequency on Stock Price Crash Risk","authors":"Huaping Wu, Ming Ma, Jidong Zhang","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22775","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>By exploring the relationship between stock price crash risk and the frequency of cybersecurity disclosures in financial reports, we present evidence that cybersecurity disclosure does matter because its frequency increases stock price crash risk. We analyze the association between cybersecurity disclosure and stock price crash risk from the perspective of two different theoretical lenses: information asymmetry and investor sentiment. We perform textual analysis on the Chinese A-shares public companies’ cybersecurity disclosure in financial reports during 2017–2022. We find that the more cybersecurity disclosures in financial reports, the higher the stock price crash risk. Further findings reveal that the effect of the frequency of cybersecurity disclosure on stock price crash risk is more significant in non-Big-4 audit companies and companies with lower analyst coverage. These findings imply that the market presents the clear idea that cybersecurity disclosure's negative impact to stock price crashes would be greater than the positive impact under the current settings of the volunteer disclosure policies.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"87-102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Scale Dilemma: Investigating the Non-Monotonic Relationship Between Bank Size and Market Value in Emerging Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Economies","authors":"Yarob Kullab, Ahmad Sahyouni, Mohammed Shehada","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22772","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This study investigates the non-monotonic relationship between bank size and market value in the emerging economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, with a focus on comparing Islamic and conventional banks. The analysis uses fixed-effects panel techniques, supported by random-effects, pooled OLS, and Hausman–Taylor methods for robustness, based on a sample of 161 publicly listed banks across 17 MENA countries from 2009 to 2022. The findings show that bank size positively influences market value initially, indicating economies of scale, but larger sizes lead to diminishing returns, reflecting a non-monotonic relationship. This pattern is more evident for conventional banks, while the results for Islamic banks are less conclusive, suggesting the need for further investigation. Islamic banks seem to benefit less from economies of scale, possibly due to unique operational and governance challenges. This study fills a gap in the literature on the size-market value relationship in emerging markets, offering insights into how local conditions and regulations shape bank performance. It also provides a novel comparison between Islamic and conventional banks, enhancing understanding of sector-specific dynamics. By challenging the linear assumptions of prior research, the study highlights the complex non-linear effects of bank size, emphasizing the role of agency conflicts and regulatory oversight in managing systemic risks. The research contributes to both empirical and theoretical discussions on banking scale management and agency theory in emerging market contexts.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"70-86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carol Callaway Dee, Katherine Gunny, William R. Strawser
{"title":"Do Investors Perceive Improvements in Fair Value Accounting for Investment Assets After PCAOB Inspections?","authors":"Carol Callaway Dee, Katherine Gunny, William R. Strawser","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22771","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>We examine whether fair value (FV) deficiencies highlighted in Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspection reports improve perceptions of the reporting quality of FV investment assets. Qualitative studies illustrate that subjective and complex estimates pose unique challenges to audit improvement. Using a market-based measure of financial reporting quality (i.e., implied asset-specific betas), we find a positive association between the intensity of FV-deficient reports and perceived reporting quality of level 2 (but not level 3) FV investment assets and show that the association is stronger when audit office FV expertise is high. Consistent with improvements in disclosures, after a FV-deficient report, we find FV footnotes become relatively more readable and include less cautionary language as level 2 holdings increase. Overall, our evidence suggests investors value PCAOB inspections regarding level 2 FV assets.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"49-69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ESG Ratings and CEO Charitable Stock Donations: Is Firm ESG Aligned With CEO Personal Philanthropy?","authors":"Han Dai, Daeun Lee, Ying Liang, Barri Litt","doi":"10.1002/jcaf.22773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22773","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In the evolving landscape of sustainable investing, with unprecedented market attention on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information, our study delves into the relationship between a firm's ESG ratings and the philanthropic behavior of its chief executive officer (CEO), particularly in terms of charitable stock donations. Examining US firms and utilizing comprehensive ESG data from Refinitiv, we find that ESG-rated firm CEOs engage in greater personal stock donation activity as compared to their non-ESG counterparts. They also appear to time donations in a less self-serving manner. When we isolate ESG firms, we find CEOs of the strongest ESG performers exhibit no self-interested timing behavior. Our study contributes to the sparse literature on CEO charitable behavior, shedding light on the potential alignment between ESG performance at the firm level and genuine, altruistic giving at the CEO level. Such alignment provides valuable insight for investors, policymakers, nonprofit organizations, and researchers interested in the intersection of sustainable investing and executive action.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":44561,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Corporate Accounting and Finance","volume":"36 3","pages":"29-48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144635380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}