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This study aims to examine the effects of firms’ accounting disclosure policies on stock price synchronicity and stock crash risk, using a sample including 13 emerging markets. Furthermore, this research investigates how these relationships are affected by country-level investor protection and firm-level governance rankings.

This paper uses accounting disclosure measures constructed based on survey questions by Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (2001, CLSA). The accounting disclosure measure is used to explain the two dependent variables, stock price synchronicity and stock crash risk. The stock price synchronicity measure is defined as the logistic transformation of R2 following Hutton et al. (2009) and Jin and Myers (2006). R2 is taken from the estimation of an extended market model. The stock crash risk variable is measured as the frequency difference between extremely negative and positive stock return residues following Jin and Myers (2006). These stock return residues are taken from the estimation of an extended market model. Because the CLSA firm-level disclosure data are from 2000, this paper matches other data taken from the same year, for consistency. The final sample includes 204 observations in 13 emerging countries.

This paper finds that firms’ stocks are less synchronized with the entire market and have less crash risk if firms have superior accounting disclosure policies. These results suggest that the cost to collect firm-specific information may be decreased for investors if firms are more transparent. Thus, these firms’ stocks have more firm-specific information content. These results also suggest that management is less likely to hide some negative information and release such negative information suddenly in the future if firms have higher levels of accounting disclosure. Thus, these firms’ stocks are less likely to crash. In addition, the influences of firms’ accounting disclosure policies on stock price synchronicity and crash risk are more significant for firms with superior country-level investor protection and firm-level governance rankings. These results imply that external investors place more value on accounting disclosure by well-governed firms because firms with superior governance standards are less likely to intentionally disclose misleading information. Thus, these firms’ stocks can incorporate more firm-specific information and have less crash risk.

The current study is the first to show that the effects of accounting disclosure on stock price synchronicity and crash risk are more pronounced for firms with superior country-level investor protection and firm-level governance standards. Thus, this research extends the literature by providing a comprehensive picture of the influences of accounting disclosure on stock markets. In addition, the existing literature (Chen et al., 2006; Durnev et al., 2004) shows that firms with lower stock price synchronicity are associated with higher investment efficiency because managers invest based on the information in stock prices. Obviously, higher stock crash risk is highly related to higher bankruptcy risk for firms. Thus, examining the effects of accounting disclosure on stock price synchronicity and stock crash risk is of obvious importance to policy makers.

This study aims to explore COVID-19-related accounting disclosures using sociological disclosure analysis (SDA) within the context of the developing economy of Bangladesh.

COVID-19-related accounting disclosures from listed banks’ annual reports have been examined using three levels of SDA: textual, contextual and sociological interpretations. Data were gathered from the banks’ 2019 and 2020 annual reports. The study uses the legitimacy theory as its theoretical framework.

The research reveals a substantial shift in corporate disclosures due to COVID-19, marked by a significant increase from 2019 to 2020. Despite regulatory and professional directives for COVID-19-specific disclosures, notable non-compliance is evident in subsequent events, going concern, fair value, financial instruments and more. Instead of assessing the implications of COVID-19 and making disclosures, companies used positive, vague and subjective wording to legitimize non-disclosure.

The study’s insights can inform regulators and policymakers in crafting effective guidelines for future crisis-related reporting like COVID-19. The research adds to the literature by methodologically using SDA to explore pandemic-specific disclosures, uncovering the interplay between disclosures, legitimacy and stakeholder engagement.

This study represents a pioneering effort in investigating COVID-19-specific disclosures. Moreover, it uses the SDA methodology along with the legitimacy theory to analyze accounting disclosures associated with COVID-19.

The objective of this paper is to review the use of the fog index in accounting research.

This paper uses a systematic literature review (SLR) methodology with a sample of 126 accounting research articles. The review applies the theoretical framework of disclosure's stewardship, valuation and accountability roles to identify the contributions and challenges of using the fog index in accounting research.

This paper shows that the primary contribution of the fog index to accounting research relates to the disclosure obfuscation hypothesis (e.g. whether management obfuscates narratives associated with earnings). It also finds that the challenge in using the fog index is in disentangling its measure of firm environmental complexity from narrative obfuscation. Regarding disclosure utility, there is limited evidence on the differential effects of complexity on investor types and whether the fog index findings are associated with narrative obfuscation or firm environmental complexity is driven by investor types.

The authors develop a research database of fog index studies categorised based on contributions to disclosure obfuscation or disclosure utility, highlighting contributions to the stewardship, valuation and accountability roles of disclosures, which researchers can use to develop future studies.

This paper contributes to accounting literature by offering the first comprehensive review on the use of the fog index in accounting research. It offers researchers a consolidated review of the study of linguistic complexity of accounting information and disclosure functions using a theoretical framework that can inform regulators, policymakers and future researchers in designing future research/policy.

This study aims to examine whether and how voluntary accounting disclosures can repair individual donors’ trust in a charity after negative events.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with active Australian individual donors, with a hypothetical vignette design. Hypothetical negative events and corresponding accounting disclosures are presented to participants during interviews.

Three types of individual donors are identified based on their decision-making patterns after negative events and primary trust relations with a charity-reasoned donor (giving-decision based on their analysis of the situation, competence-based trust), generalist donors (giving-decision based on trust in the charitable sector, institution-based trust) and emotional donors (giving-decision based on feelings and emotions about the charity, integrity-based trust). The research suggests that accounting disclosures can repair trust damage for reasoned donors and support institution-based trust for generalist donors, but do not seem able to repair trust damage for emotional donors and can potentially damage trust further.

Overall, the findings suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with individual donors after negative events is not likely to be very effective in repairing trust. Instead, charities may need to adapt disclosures to their different types of individual donors.

While prior accounting studies have largely focussed on how charity managers themselves grapple with accountability or how negative events impact charitable donations, the authors demonstrate how accounting disclosures can play different roles in the trust-repairing process for different types of individual donors.

In recent years accounting standard setters and professional bodies have issued directives aimed at improving the transparency and accessibility of financial reports compiled by government agencies. This study examines the availability and accessibility of local government financial reports on the Internet for a sample of 300 U.S. municipalities of varying size. Results indicate that provision of financial reports is more prominent among larger cities. Cities with higher income per capita and higher levels of accounting disclosure are also more likely to provide financial reports on the Internet. The accessibility of the financial data reported on the Internet is positively related to the number of residents, resident income per capita, and level of debt and financial position of the municipality.

This paper was motivated by the current debate over the voluntary approach to environmental disclosures in corporate annual reports and assesses the effectiveness of the current policy of voluntarism in the UK. A brief review of the relevant theories, which explain why managers might choose to voluntarily provide environmental responsibility information to parties outside the organisation, is presented. With this background, the paper then questions whether the UK government’s faith in voluntarism and the pursuit of best practice will be enough to generate any real change in current environmental reporting practices. We argue that voluntarism is not effective and that there is an urgent need to introduce strict governmental regulations on the information that must be disclosed and the form in which it should be presented in corporate annual reports as have been established in several other countries. In addition, further consideration is needed to achieve reforms in academic accounting education in order to improve corporate accountability and transparency in corporate annual reports. Organisations need to respond to the growing demands for corporate social and environmental responsibility and this will be possible with the support of an accounting profession that takes a more proactive approach to engaging with stakeholders. For this to happen, we need to rethink the focus of accounting and business education. We must move away from the dominant model, which treats accountancy as a set of techniques, towards a more holistic approach which recognises the social and environmental impacts of organisational activity.

This paper investigates the financial disclosure practices of corporate annual reports published in Asian countries including Bangladesh, Indonesian, Malaysia and the Middle East countries including Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The purpose of the study is to measure the financial disclosure diversity in these countries, with a view to developing a classification of their similarities and differences in respect to their compliance with International Accounting Standards (IAS). Annual reports of 126 public companies liisted on the countries' stock exchanges are the central data source, supplemented with other relevant information about financial disclosure practices in each country. A disclosure checklist adopted from all IASs and summarised in 306 individual items of financial disclosures is used as a means of extending an understanding of financial reporting in these countries. Results show the relative degree of conformity with IASs for each of the countries included in this study.

This paper provides a review of research on financial derivatives, with an emphasis on and comprehensive coverage of research published in 15 top accounting journals from 1996 to 2017. We begin with some brief institutional details about derivatives and then summarize studies explaining when and why firms use derivatives. We then discuss the evolution of the accounting rules related to derivatives (and associated disclosure requirements) and studies that examine changes in these requirements over the years. Next, we review the literature that examines the consequences of firms’ derivative use to various capital market participants (i.e., managers, analysts, investors, boards of directors, etc.), with an emphasis on the role that the accounting and disclosure rules play in such consequences. Finally, we discuss the importance of industry affiliation on firms’ derivative use and the role that industry affiliation plays in derivatives research. Overall, our review suggests that, perhaps due to their inherent complexity and data limitations, derivatives are relatively understudied in accounting, and we highlight several areas where future research is needed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the compliance level of Islamic banks with disclosure accounting standards in some Middle East and North African countries, and most importantly to analyse the factors associated with compliance.

This study uses a self-constructed checklist of 203 items to measure the compliance of 38 Islamic banks with disclosure accounting standards during the 2011-2013 period. A multivariate regression analysis is used to determine significant factors influencing the extent of this compliance.

The results show a wide variation in compliance levels among the disclosure accounting standards and reveal that compliance is positively related to the listing status, the existence of an audit committee, the bank’s age and the country of domicile.

This study analyses the compliance level with only disclosure accounting standards. It remains to future research to examine compliance with all Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions’ Financial Accounting Standards (AAOIFI FAS). Moreover, the explanatory power of the model remains modest. This connotes the existence of omitted variables that could be explored in future research.

The research contributes to the international financial accounting literature about the banking industry. The results are relevant for researchers, accounting professionals, stakeholders, standard-setters and regulatory bodies that are concerned with Islamic banks’ disclosures.

Although AAOIFI was established since 1991, very few empirical studies about compliance with the FAS have been undertaken. To the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies that investigated the determinants of compliance level with AAOIFI FAS. Then, this study concentrates on disclosure accounting standards (FAS 1 and FAS 5) with a high risk of non-compliance.

This paper seeks to empirically examine the influence of the new Portuguese environmental accounting standard on the environmental information disclosed in the annual reports by a sample of large firms operating in Portugal during the period 2002‐2004.

The method used is the content analysis technique by developing an index (which consists of the 16 environmentally‐related disclosure items) in order to assess the presence of the environmental disclosures and their breadth (number of items disclosed).

The results indicate that, in spite of the fact that the level of environmental information disclosed during the period 2002‐2004 is low, the extent of environmental disclosure has increased, as well as the number of Portuguese companies that disclose environmental information. The change in environmental disclosure behaviour between 2002 and 2004 is certainly consistent with the idea that the new accounting standard is starting to have an impact.

The study adds to the international research on environmental disclosure by providing empirical data from a country, Portugal, where empirical evidence is still relatively limited. Moreover, the study provides empirical support for the contentions of other authors that mandatory reporting guidelines affect corporate reporting practices.