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The purpose of this study is to investigate whether audit quality is associated with the speed with which managers revise earnings forecasts to arrive at the actual earnings through the lens of the auditor selection theory. This study examines this relationship in a unique institutional setting, Japan, where nearly all managers disclose earnings forecasts.

The authors pioneer an empirical proxy to capture the speed of management forecast revisions based on well-established principles from the finance and disclosure literatures. This proxy is tested alongside other disclosure proxies (namely, accuracy, frequency and timeliness) to assess the influence of audit quality on managerial forecasting behavior.

This empirical analysis shows that forecast revision speed is higher for firms that select higher-quality auditors. While firms that select higher-quality auditors revise forecasts in a more timely fashion, these firms revise less frequently. Moreover, the authors find that the influence of audit quality on forecast revisions is asymmetric. Specifically, the analysis of downward forecast revisions shows that higher-quality auditors are associated with firms that disclose bad news via forecasts revisions faster, more frequently and in a more timely fashion. However, the analysis of upward forecast revisions shows that higher-quality auditors have no effect on the speed with which firms disclose good news via forecast revisions, even though they are associated with less frequent but more timely forecast revisions. These findings have important implications for prior studies that consistently document an asymmetric response of the stock market to good news and bad news.

The authors provide evidence on the relationship between audit quality and management earnings forecasts using a novel and intuitive measure that captures forecast revision speed. This measure speaks to the growing interest in understanding the notion of speed and timing of voluntary disclosures. This study provides a more robust and comprehensive measure of the speed with which managers revise their earnings forecasts to arrive at the actual earnings. Furthermore, this study is among the first to document an asymmetric effect of audit quality on the type of news disclosed in forecast revisions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the earnings surprise influences decision to make earnings announcements during or after the trading hours is influenced by the earnings surprise resulting from the difference between consensus earnings estimates and the actual reported earnings.

Event study methodology was employed to test the hypotheses relating to earnings surprise and timing of earnings announcements. Twelve quarterly earnings announcements of 30 companies, drawn from BSE SENSEX of India, were studied to test the hypothesized relationships.

The study has found statistically significant differences in the market responses to the earnings announcements made during and after the trading hours. The market demonstrated a negative response to the earnings announcements made after the trading hours. Further, the results of the logistic regression have shown that the presence of significant earnings surprises is likely to induce firms to make earnings announcements after the trading hours. The results indicate that those firms that intend to reduce the overreaction and underreaction to earnings surprises are likely to make earnings announcements after the trading hours.

This paper highlights the market response to the earnings announcement made during and after the regular trading hour. Further, the paper examines if the earnings surprise influences the decision to announce the results.

This study aims to find the response by stock market against the announcements of quarterly earnings is empirically tested by exploiting event study methodology. Efficient market hypothesis (EMH) on Saudi stock exchange is also tried on.

The market model is applied to help gauge the expected returns and to illustrate abnormal returns around the event date.

The results established that Saudi Stock Market does not bear semi-strong form of EMH. How efficient is the Saudi market is also reflected through evidence of significant abnormal returns and post-earnings announcement drift around earning announcements dates.

The authors have not used analysts’ forecast as the expected earnings which are the limitation. As mentioned earlier, the authors used the quarterly earnings of the previous year as a proxy and that proxy could have been replaced by analysts’ forecast. Another limitation is that the trading volume in the event window is not considered.

The behavior of Saudi capital market is of much concern, and the study of this with a perspective of EMH is the significance of this paper.

All stakeholders closely watch earnings announcements and its share price movement around the announcement date. Recently, Saudi Arabia has opened its doors to foreign investors, and big foreign investors are going to enter into Saudi capital market, and after their entry, the behavior of market could be different. In the authors’ opinion, this is the right time to study the efficiency of Saudi market before the entry of foreign investors.

This study is based on the gap created by EMH of Saudi market using event methodology, observed in the existing literature, and it will be a contribution to literature.

The authors provide a comprehensive empirical examination on the impact of earnings quality on stock price crash risk in China.

The authors acknowledge and distinguish two-dimensional proxies for earnings quality – accounting-based (earnings management degree) and market-based (earnings transparency) known in accounting and finance literature.

The authors find that both generally indicate that better earnings quality is associated with less crashes. However, extremely high earnings transparency interacted with insider trading profit can also actually exacerbate stock price crashes.

This study is the first to highlight the pertinence of accounting-based measures to proxy for earnings quality in a fast-growing emerging market environment such as China.

This paper examines the organizational resilience of audit firms during the early stages of COVID-19. The unexpected restrictions placed on travel and on-site working created unanticipated barriers for auditors in Hong Kong. The authors expect that auditors with greater organizational resilience can respond to unexpected situations and restore expected performance levels relatively quickly.

The authors utilize a sample of 1,008 companies listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) with a financial year-end of December 31. The authors identify five proxies contributing to organizational resilience: auditor size, industry specialization, diversity, geographic proximity to the client and auditing a new client. The authors use audit report timeliness as this study's main dependent variable.

This study's full-sample results suggest that larger auditors, industry specialists and auditors with closer relationships to clients issued more timely audit reports during the pandemic. The analysis of a subsample of companies that initially published unaudited financial statements reveals that industry expertise and longer auditor-client relationships significantly reduced the need for year-end audit adjustments. Finally, the authors find that larger auditors were more likely to offload clients, whereas industry specialists were more likely to retain clients.

The results of the paper suggests that audit firm characteristics associated cognitive abilities, behavioral characteristics and contextual conditions are associated with audit firm organizational resilience and, consequently, helps auditors respond unexpected changes in the audit environment.

The findings of the paper are informative for those involved in audit firm management or auditor hiring and retention decisions.

This study is the first to link organizational resilience to the performance of audit firms in a time of unexpected events. The authors connect three auditor and two auditor-client dimensions to the organizational resilience of the audit firms.

The authors examine how financial analysts respond to online investor sentiment when updating recommendations for specific stocks in South Africa. The aim is to establish whether online sentiment contains significant information that can influence analyst recommendations. The authors follow up the above by examining when online investor sentiment is most associated with analyst recommendation changes.

For online investor sentiment proxies, the authors make use of the social media sentiment and news media sentiment scores provided by Bloomberg Inc. The sample size includes all companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange All Share Index. The study uses traditional ordinary least squares to examine the relation at the mean and quantile regression to identify the scope of the relationship across the distribution of the dependent variable.

The authors find evidence that pre-event news sentiment significantly influences analyst recommendation changes while no significant relationship is found with the Twitter sentiment. Further analysis shows that news sentiment is more influential when the recommendation changes are moderate (in the middle of the conditional distribution of the recommendation changes).

The study is the one of the first to examine the association between online sentiment and analyst recommendation changes in an emerging market using high frequency data. The authors also make a direct comparison between social media sentiment and news media sentiment, some of the most used contemporary investor sentiment proxies.

This study reviews and discusses the accounting literature that analyzes the role of auditors and enforcers in the context of fraud.

This literature review includes both qualitative and quantitative studies, based on the idea that the findings from different research paradigms can shed light on the complex interactions between different financial reporting controls. The authors use a mixed-methods research synthesis and select 64 accounting journal articles to analyze the main proxies for fraud, the stages of the fraud process under investigation and the roles played by auditors and enforcers.

The study highlights heterogeneity with respect to the terms and concepts used to capture the fraud phenomenon, a fragmentation in terms of the measures used in quantitative studies and a low level of detail in the fraud analysis. The review also shows a limited number of case studies and a lack of focus on the interaction and interplay between enforcers and auditors.

This study outlines directions for future accounting research on fraud.

The analysis underscores the need for the academic community, policymakers and practitioners to work together to prevent the destructive economic and social consequences of fraud in an increasingly complex and interconnected environment.

This study differs from previous literature reviews that focus on a single monitoring mechanism or deal with fraud in a broadly manner by discussing how the accounting literature addresses the roles and the complex interplay between enforcers and auditors in the context of accounting fraud.

Since the UK Companies Act 1981, different reporting standards have developed for different classes of company to reduce the reporting burden on non-listed companies. There are now different regimes for listed, large private, medium-sized, small and micro companies. This strategy raises the issue of whether earnings quality across the different classes of company is comparable. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper uses the smoothness of earnings to measure reporting quality across the different types of companies from 2006 to 2013, based on 514,000 observations. Smoothness is an indicator of poor quality.

The authors find that listed companies have the highest earnings quality, closely followed by small and micro companies. In contrast, large private and medium-sized companies have much lower earnings quality. Overall, the authors find companies which switch between reporting regimes have lower earnings quality. The authors also find that earnings quality is not affected by the small company exemption from audit.

Companies filing abbreviated accounts are excluded since they do not file an income statement. The recent revisions to UK GAAP (FRS 102 and FRS 105) are not examined due to insufficient data.

The Financial Reporting Council’s (FRC) strategy of reducing the financial reporting and auditing obligations for small companies seems not to have significantly affected earnings quality. However, the FRC may need to review the reporting requirements of large private and medium-sized companies and also the option of companies to switch between reporting regimes; in these settings earnings quality appears to be weaker.

The paper studies the effect of earnings quality across the different reporting regimes in the UK. Novel and important features of the study are that the sample covers a wide variety of small and micro companies which have not been analyzed previously; the results are disaggregated by year, for assurance that the results are not driven by a single rogue year; and the authors also address the small company exemption from audit, and the flexibility of non-listed companies to switch between regimes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the Goods and Service Tax (GST) implementation on Malaysian stock market index.

This study used daily closing prices of the Malaysian stock index and futures markets for the period ranging from June 2009 to November 2016. Empirical estimation is based on the generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (1, 1) model for pre- and post-announcement of the GST.

Result shows that volatility of Malaysian stock market index increases in the post-announcement than in the pre-announcement of the GST which indicates that educative programs employed by the government before the GST announcement did not yield meaningful result. The volatility of the Malaysian stock market index is persistent during the GST announcement and highly persistent after the implementation. Noticeable increase in post-announcement is in support with the expectation of the market about GST policy in Malaysia.

The finding of this study is consistent with expectation of the market that GST policy will increase the price of the goods and services and might reduce standard of living. This is supported by a noticeable increase in the volatility of the Malaysian stock market index in the post-announcement of GST which is empirically shown during the announcement and after the implementation of GST. Although the GST announcement could be classified as a scheduled announcement, unwillingness to accept the policy prevails in the market as shown by the increase in the market volatility.

Past studies on Malaysian stock market index volatility focus on the impact of Asian and global financial crisis whereas this study examines the impact of the GST announcement and implementation on the volatility of the Malaysian stock market index.

The aim of this paper is to provide additional insights on the association between real earnings management (REM) and crash risk, particularly from the perspective of an emerging market economy. It also examines the moderation role that internal and external corporate governance may play in this area.

Relying on archival data from the RESSET and CSMAR databases over a timeframe from 2010 to 2018 of China listed company, the authors test the hypotheses by regressing common measures of crash risk on the treatment variable (REM) and crash risk control variables identified in the prior crash risk literature. The authors also introduce monitoring proxies (internal controls as an internal governance and institutional ownership as an external governance) and assess how effective internal and external governance moderate the relation between REM and stock price crash risk.

The results suggest firms with higher REM have a significantly greater stock price crash risk, and that this association is mitigated by external monitoring. That is, greater institutional ownership, particularly pressure insensitive owners, mitigates the impact of REM on stock price crash risk. However, internal control does not mitigate the association between REM and stock price crash risk.

Following the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Act, prior research has documented an increase in the use of REM and a positive association between REM and cash risk. The authors demonstrate that they persist in one of the largest emerging markets where institutional regulations, market conditions and corporate behaviors are different from those in developed markets. Also, the assessment of the moderation effect of internal and external governance mechanisms could have meaningful implications for investors and regulators in Chinese and other emerging markets.