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This study aims to investigate the adoption of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the new performance perspective in cities. It also aims to understand how accounting for SDGs begins in city administrations by following Power’s (2015) fourfold development schema composed of policy object formation, object elaboration, activity orchestration and practice stabilization.

Focusing on a network of cities coordinated by the Finnish local government association, we analyzed the six largest cities in Finland employing a holistic multiple case study strategy. Our data consisted of Voluntary Local Reviews (VLRs), city strategies, budget plans, financial statements, as well as results of participant observations and semi-structured interviews with key individuals involved in accounting for SDGs.

We unveiled the SDG framework as an interpretive scheme through which cities glocalized sustainable development as a novel, simultaneously global and local, performance object. Integration of the new accounts in city management is necessary for these accounts to take life in steering the actions. By creating meaningful alignment and the ability to impact managerial practices, SDGs and VLRs have the potential to influence local actions. Our results indicate further institutionalization progress of sustainability as a performance object through SDG-focused work.

While prior research has focused mainly on general factors influencing the integration of the sustainability agenda, this study provides a novel perspective by capturing the process and demonstrating empirically how new accounts on SDGs are introduced and deployed in the strategic planning and management of local governments.

This systematic literature review presents the evolution of accounting-related research in the Indonesian context. We examine 55 academic articles from the initial 296 records of accounting and finance research in the Q1 Scopus-indexed journals from 1995 to 2022. This study sheds light on Indonesia’s main research streams, unique settings and urgent future research agenda.

This study adopts a systematic approach for a comprehensive literature review. We select articles according to a series of criteria and compile the metadata for the bibliographic mapping.

Our bibliometric analysis suggests five main research streams, namely (1) political connection, (2) capital market, (3) audit and accountability, (4) firm policy and (5) banking. We identify the following distinctive country settings, which are well discussed in extant literature: political connection, two-tier board system, weak accounting profession, information opacity and cultural impact on accounting. We outline prospective agendas to examine the institutional mechanisms’ role in addressing major environmental challenges through accountability.

This study offers unique contributions to the literature by comprehensively reviewing accounting-related research in Indonesia. Despite Indonesia’s economic and environmental importance, it has received limited attention from scholars. Using dynamic topic analysis, we highlight the need to examine the role of informal institutions, such as political connections and culture and formal institutional mechanisms, such as corporate governance and environmental disclosure.

This study aims to analyse the role of the financial and accounting expertise of the chief executive officer (CEO) on financial reporting quality (FRQ) in an emerging economy.

This study is based on data collected from a large sample of all non-financial companies listed on Vietnamese stock exchanges during the period 2016–2020 with 2,435 observations. FEM-ROBUST standard errors regression model is used to examine the relationship between the financial, accounting expertise of CEOs and FRQ through earnings management by discretionary accruals.

The results show that CEOs with financial and accounting expertise have more influence and intervention on earnings management and thus adversely affect FRQ. This behaviour is explained by the fact that CEOs not only have a firm grasp of financial and accounting policies but also know the tricks to interfere with earnings management. Moreover, in the context of emerging economies, CEOs’ awareness and management level are still limited and legal sanctions are not yet strict, so when they have power in their hands, CEOs immediately find ways to build a reputation to enhance the power and earnings for the CEOs themselves.

The limitation of this study is first of all that the research data are not complete and rich because the companies are prohibited from disclosing information and the cooperation relationship is not close. Next is the new research in only one emerging market – Vietnam – so the generalizability is not high.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of CEOs’ accounting and finance expertise on FRQ in an emerging economy, contributing to the existing literature regarding the scientific debates about CEOs, CEO characteristics, earnings management and FRQ.

In 2000, Cañibano et al. published a literature review entitled “Accounting for Intangibles: A Literature Review”. This paper revisits the conclusions drawn in that paper. We also discuss the intervening developments in scholarly research, standard setting and practice over the past 20+ years to outline the future challenges for research into accounting for intangibles.

We conducted a literature review to identify past developments and link the findings to current accounting standard-setting developments to inform our view of the future.

Current intangibles accounting practices are conservative and unlikely to change. Accounting standard setters are more interested in how companies report and disclose the value of intangibles rather than changing how they are determined. Standard setters are also interested in accounting for new forms of digital assets and reporting economic, social, governance and sustainability issues and how these link to financial outcomes. The IFRS has released complementary sustainability accounting standards for disclosing value creation in response to the latter. Therefore, the topic of intangibles stretches beyond merely how intangibles create value but how they are also part of a firm’s overall risk and value creation profile.

There is much room academically, practically, and from a social perspective to influence the future of accounting for intangibles. Accounting standard setters and alternative standards, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and European Union non-financial and sustainability reporting directives, are competing complementary initiatives.

Our results reveal a window of opportunity for accounting scholars to research and influence how intangibles and other non-financial and sustainability accounting will progress based on current developments.

The research objective starts from the argument that small-scale multinational corporations’ (SMNCs’) managerial behavior toward auditing decisions is influenced by their personal value, especially when the auditing process is not mandatory. This study aims to examine how national culture-religiosity affects that decision. The authors further examine how foreign-owned MNCs might behave differently from local MNCs, although the host country’s cultural-religiosity value might influence that decision.

This study obtains the data from three sources: Hofstede Framework, Pew Research Center and World Bank Enterprise Survey in cross-sectional mode. The final sample consists of 8,590 SMNCs from 45 countries as the observations. This study uses robust regression analysis to test the effects of culture, religiosity and controlling shareholders on the audited financial statements decision.

The regression results support the hypothesis, whereas cultural-religiosity values are associated with the audited financial report. The findings confirm stakeholder theory and institutional theory.

This study fills a gap in the literature by providing empirical evidence on the cultural and religiosity effects on the accounting decision of SMNCs. The results can be used as the foundation for future research related to MNCs’ managerial behavior toward accounting policies, especially with the psychosocial factors.

The study examines the mediating role of accounting information quality (AQ), a proxy for firms' information risk, in firms' business strategy and the cost of equity (COE) nexus to highlight how AQ provides a mechanism through which a company's business strategy affects its COE.

The research study utilises data from 12,100 firm-year observations of United States (US) non-financial firms from 2001 to 2017, drawn from multiple databases, and employs the bootstrapping method of mediation analysis to test the indirect effect of AQ on the business strategy–COE relationship. The authors rely on Miles and Snow's two pure business strategy typologies, prospectors and defenders and use innate accrual quality and implied COE models to measure AQ and COE, respectively.

The results suggest that AQ partially mediates the relationship between business strategy and COE. The authors document that while innovative-oriented prospector firms have a lower AQ and a higher implied COE, efficiency-oriented defenders are associated with a higher AQ and lower COE. The higher (lower) COE of prospector (defender) firms is observed to be partly due to their lower (higher) AQ. The results indicate that while the idiosyncratic risk implied in firms' strategic orientation can directly influence their COE, the business strategy implications on firms' COE can be indirect through their AQ, a source of information risk.

Due to data limitation, it was not possible to measure all possible methods of measuring implied COE.

The paper highlights the role of firm's business strategy in pricing decisions by investors.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by providing evidence that AQ, a proxy for information risk, is a mechanism through which business strategy affects firms' COE. The authors thus complement extant literature to empirically test the information risk effect inherent in strategic orientation on security pricing.

This study aims to investigate the determinants of anti-corruption disclosures by construction firms in Asia-Pacific countries.

The sample comprises construction companies from seven Asia-Pacific countries from 2015 to 2019. The authors hand-collected data on anti-corruption disclosures by using content analysis.

This study provides empirical evidence that government ownership, country-level accounting competence and high-quality auditors increase companies’ anti-corruption disclosures. Meanwhile, this study finds that uncertainty avoidance does not affect companies’ anti-corruption disclosures.

This study has a number of implications. First, government and professional accountant organizations need to improve accountants’ knowledge and competence through education, training and continuous professional development. Second, public accounting firms need to ensure the quality of their auditors, particularly in the technical competence in financial and nonfinancial reporting. Finally, universities must improve and update their curriculum regarding nonfinancial reporting issues.

This study is among the first to examine anti-corruption disclosure practices in the most corrupted settings, i.e. the construction industry in Asia-Pacific countries. It uses the isomorphism perspective to explain the influence of government ownership, country-level accounting competence and high-quality auditors on anti-corruption disclosure transparency. The number of prior studies investigating this association is very limited. Moreover, disclosures of anti-corruption information are complex and sensitive; thus, coercive, normative and mimetic pressures are required to achieve higher transparency and sustainability.

This study uses a meta-analysis approach to analyse the impact of applying corporate green accounting practices as vital sustainable development tools on firm performance. This study aims to examine the moderating effects of country-specific variables and characteristics on the association between corporate green accounting and firm performance.

Three databases were used for a meta-analysis of 68 independent studies involving 19,625 subjects conducted over 25 years from 1996 to 2020.

The results show that corporate green accounting positively affects firm performance, but country-specific variables do not moderate this association. The positive association between corporate green accounting and firm performance was enhanced when it was measured in terms of environmental costs. Subgroup analyses revealed that study characteristics are significant source of heterogeneity in the corporate green accounting indicators-firm performance association.

The findings suggest that firms should strategise to integrate environmental costs into their respective financial accounting frameworks, which would help managers justify the contribution of their firms towards environmental protection.

Accessing accurate and timely information on corporate environmental functioning can assist national policymakers in framing appropriate legislation on environmental protection and sustainable development.

Although meta-analysis has been used previously in accounting research (Guthrie and Murthy, 2009; Alcouffe et al., 2019), to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use a meta-analytical technique to examine the impact of corporate green accounting on firm performance.

This study explores the impact mechanism of corporate digital transformation (CDT) on the quality of accounting information.

Samples of A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2007 to 2020 are used as a research sample. The empirical analysis is based on the ordinary least squares regression model, and mediation and moderation effect models were used in further analysis.

This study finds that CDT enhances accounting information quality by alleviating the agency problem. This positive effect is more significant among firms that exhibit less media coverage, have low industry competition and are not subject to cyber-attack.

This study extends the economic consequences of CDT and enriches the literature on the factors that affect accounting information quality. Further, this study's findings guide the government to actively promote CDT, facilitate the digital upgrading of industries and improve accounting information quality and efficiency in capital markets.

This paper tries to shed light on the international progress regarding the adoption of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), to accentuate the benefits resulting from the application of IPSAS, and to highlight the main differences between IPSAS and IFRS.

A comprehensive literature review is conducted which focuses on issues concerning the factors that induce the adoption of IPSAS, the obstacles that must be overcome, the degree of IPSAS’ proliferation worldwide, the repercussions from adopting IPSAS, the benefits of IPSAS, and the differences between IPSAS and IFRS. The selection process of the cited articles focuses on journals with high rankings in the ABS list.

It is accentuated that IPSAS carry significant benefits regarding the improved quality of the financial information reported by the public sector, the enhancement of transparency and accountability, the upgrading of the decision-making process and the restored trust in public finances. However, there is more work that needs to be done toward the global proliferation of IPSAS.

This study provides insights regarding the implementation process of IPSAS, which should be useful to all the parties engaged in the reform of the public administration, such as national governments, local or international regulators, accounting standard setters and institutional organizations.

The current study clarifies whether the public sector should move from using the business focused IFRS, as it is frequently the case, to the adoption of IPSAS. In addition, this study comprehensive literature review can be used by academics and researchers as a basis for further research on the issue. More importantly, policymakers and other officials who need to make informed decisions about financial reporting issues at the government level and the public sector in general can benefit from this study.