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This paper aims to examine the impact of CEO (chief executive officer) compensation and CEO attributes on the level of tax aggressiveness of French companies.

The sample comprises 180 firm-year observations of 40 companies listed on the CAC 40 during the period ranging from 2008 to 2018. For the purpose of overcoming the problems of heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation, the authors apply the generalized least square panel regression.

This study’s results corroborate the importance of CEO compensation and CEO attributes as determinants of tax aggressiveness. In addition, the authors come up with the fact that CEO compensation has a negative effect on tax aggressiveness, and that older CEOs and CEOs with accounting expertise are negatively linked with tax aggressiveness. The authors also find out that there is a positive relationship between the CEO tenure and tax aggressiveness. Moreover, the authors report that foreign CEOs are more likely to engage in tax aggressiveness practices than local CEOs.

The unavailability of all annual reports and the use of only one proxy to measure tax aggressiveness present limitations. This study shows significant implications for shareholders, regulators and researchers. As a matter of fact, shareholders will observe the effect of appointing a foreign CEO on the tax aggressiveness level. This study may also provide regulators with new ideas regarding the role of the CEO and its impact on aggressive decision-making. And it brings forth new insight for researchers through adding a foreign CEO as a new determinant of tax aggressiveness.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to provide empirical evidence regarding the effect of both CEO compensation and CEO attributes on tax aggressiveness. It also looks into the impact of a foreign CEO on tax aggressiveness.

This study aims to examine the impact of culture on earnings management after changing to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The study’s sample selection comprises all publicly listed firms in 25 countries between 2000 and 2017 from DataStream database with cultural dimensions ratings from Hofstede et al. (2010). The initial sample contained 2,451 firms.

This study provides evidence that the interaction between national culture and IFRS adoption remains influential in explaining differences in the magnitude of earnings management behavior across countries.

This study higlights how IFRS and the cultural values interact with each other and affect earnings quality. In particular, the authors provide evidence on the relationship between individualism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance and masculinity of national culture and earnings management and, primarily, find that national culture significantly influences the decisions of managers after adopting IFRS.

The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay between integrated reporting quality (IRQ) and capital markets. More specifically, the authors test the impact of IRQ on stock liquidity, cost of capital and analyst forecast accuracy.

The sample consists of listed firms on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa, covering the period from 2012 to 2020. The IRQ measure used in this study is based on data from Ernst and Young. To test the proposed hypotheses, the authors conducted a generalized least squares regression analysis.

The empirical results evince a positive relationship between IRQ and stock liquidity. However, the authors did not find a significant effect of IRQ on the cost of capital and financial analysts’ forecast accuracy. In robustness tests, it was shown that firms with a higher IRQ score exhibit higher liquidity and improved analyst forecast accuracy. Additional analysis indicates a negative association between IRQ and the cost of capital, as well as a positive association between IRQ and financial analyst forecast accuracy for firms with higher IRQ scores (TOP ten, Excellent, Good).

The study stands as one of the initial endeavors to investigate the impact of IRQ on the capital market. It provides valuable insights for managers and policymakers who are interested in enhancing disclosure practices within the financial market. Furthermore, these findings are significant for investors as they make informed investment decisions.

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of directors' home regions on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. Specifically, the authors aim to determine whether Anglo-American, European, French, other European and other regional directors' presence affects CSR disclosure differently.

This empirical study uses panel data analysis of all listed firms on the SBF 120 from 2008 to 2019. The environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores are collected from the Bloomberg database and indicate the extent of CSR information disclosure by French companies. The paper is based on a dynamic generalized method of moments panel estimator that makes it possible to control for unobservable heterogeneity and endogeneity and reduces estimation bias.

The findings of this study provide evidence that home region diversity and the presence of Anglo-Americans on a board are positively and significantly associated with ESG disclosure and environmental disclosure, whereas they are negatively associated with social and governance disclosure. Surprisingly, when directors come from European countries, they disclose less ESG and environmental information. Nevertheless, when only French directors are present, the company tends to divulge all dimensions of CSR. Indeed, while there is a significant positive influence of French directors on ESG disclosure, the presence of other European directors displays negative and statistically significant regression coefficients.

This study may be interesting the French policy makers who can now pay more appropriate attention to directors' nationality or region. Thus, firms should identify the foreign directors who can support their strategy with relevant experience in terms of CSR. This could help to change the opinion of some companies that consider the internalization of the board as a constraint rather than an opportunity. These results will be useful for French-listed companies in setting the criteria for the appointment of foreign directors. It may be interesting to recruit directors across European boundaries.

This paper attempts to provide a better understanding of the effects of the home regions of directors on CSR disclosure in order to enlighten corporate managers whose companies operate in different cultures given that they have to deal with this aspect. In this international business environment, CEOs should increasingly consider the international CSR experience of directors to be a resource. In addition, this study may be of relevance to French market authorities, which constantly encourage firms to diversify the profiles of directors on their boards and recruit more international members.

This study is the first to evince that the disclosure of each CSR disclosure score differs depending on the directors' home regions. Unlike previous studies, the authors focused simultaneously on the resource-based view (RBV) and institutional theory.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of cost stickiness on conditional conservatism.

The research sample consists of listed companies from 18 countries, using stock market indices of the BRICS, MIST, North Africa, USA and EU over the period ranging from 1997 to 2015. The authors use the firm-fixed effects method in the estimation of the models.

The results provide evidence of the existence of cost stickiness and conditional conservatism in the international context, using the Banker et al. (2016) model. They also argue that the conditional conservatism model (Basu, 1997) is overstated because it does not control for cost stickiness. In additional analyses, the authors conclude that the association between cost stickiness and accounting conservatism changes across country groups and across industries. The authors also document that the employee intensity and free cash-flow, as cost stickiness determinants, remain significant in the model including accounting conservatism. Moreover, the findings show that sticky cost behavior distorts inferences about standard demand drivers of conservatism such as leverage and size.

The findings are interesting and provide a better understanding of cost stickiness and conditional conservatism, and the interaction between these two phenomena in the international context, across country groups and across industries. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the study is the first one including free cash flow as a proxy for agency problem in the full model combining conservatism and cost stickiness models (Banker et al., 2016).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of tax-haven use of publicly listed Canadian firms.

Based on alternative measures of tax havens (TH) and referring to a sample of 235 Canadian firms over the period of 2014–2015, probit-regression analyses are used to examine the determinants of tax-haven use.

The authors provide evidence that multinationality, intangible assets, thin capitalization, withholding taxes, equity-based management remuneration and tax fees paid to auditing firms are positively associated with TH use. Furthermore, the authors show that the variable relating to R&D intensity is positively associated with TH use. The authors also document that strong corporate-governance structures are negatively associated with TH use.

This study is only limited to Canadian firms, so the results may not be generalizable to other countries.

The results may assist tax watchdogs in their efforts to understand the tax behavior held by Canadian firms. They may also be interesting for tax authorities in planning enforcement activities.

This study uses a sample from publicly listed financial and non-financial firms. It also uses various lists of TH published by various competent sources (IMF, 2000, 2007; TJN, 2005; OECD, 2012). The findings corroborate the recent media attention about the extensive use of TH by Canadian firms.