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The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, this study examines the relationship between the presence of a female (rather than a male) audit partner and the client firm’s accruals quality. Second, this study explores whether and how the female audit partners’ specific attributes influence the gendered auditor effect on the quality of the client firm’s accruals quality (if it exists).

Research hypotheses have been tested by conducting both univariate and multivariate empirical analyses based on a large sample of firm-year observations from the Swedish Corporation for the years 2010–2019. During the sample timeframe, the client firms have been audited by 56 female and 231 male audit partners.

The research findings first indicate that client firms of female audit partners are associated with downward earnings management, indicating a beneficial female auditor effect on client firm’s accruals quality. Results from the audit partner change analysis exhibit that the adverse female auditor effect on the client firm’s earnings management, and hence, the beneficial female auditor effect on the client firm’s accruals quality occurs from the first year of the assignment of a female audit partner to replace a male audit partner. When looking at how specific attributes of female audit partners influence accruals quality of their audited clients, this study reveals that the favorable female auditor effect on the client firm’s accruals quality holds constant for all the female audit partners’ specific attributes included in the researched models. This underscores that the mere presence of a female audit partner constrains earnings management and enhances, thereby, the client firm’s accruals quality.

This research supports regulators calling for the appointment of more women to the audit firms’ leading ranks (e.g. leadership).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether US regulatory actions around reverse mergers (RM) have exerted any spillover effects on the Chinese firms listed in China and whether Chinese firms have exhibited lower financial reporting quality than their US counterparts.

To test the possible spillover effect, this paper calculates three-day cumulative average abnormal returns (CAAR) and the aggregate CAAR for a series of US regulatory actions in 2010 and 2011. The study then compares the accrual quality, conditional conservatism, and information content of accruals of Chinese firms and US firms.

The paper documents a spillover effect of US actions around RM on Chinese stocks listed in China. Overall results do not support the perception that Chinese firms have lower financial reporting quality than their US counterparts.

While this study provides evidence consistent with investors perceiving poor financial reporting quality among Chinese firms, that perception is not justified by empirical evidence.

Investors need not be overly concerned about the financial reporting quality among the Chinese firms when they make asset allocation decisions.

A reality check is important given that perceptions may be outdated, biased, misleading, and costly.

This study puts the financial reporting quality of Chinese firms into perspective helping global investors assess information risk for optimal resource allocation.

Managers, investors and security analysts all pay special attention to the bottom line of income statements and they miss significant information included in accruals about the quality of earnings. A considerable portion of the earnings-quality literature examines the possibility of using the accruals to shift reported income among fiscal periods. One of the main roles of working-capital accruals is to adjust the recognition of cash flows. This paper aims to focus on earnings quality by examining the working-capital accruals quality using the method of Dechow and Dichev (2002).

Following the Dechow and Dichev (2002) model, the result of this paper shows that accrual quality is related to the absolute magnitude of accruals negatively. Also, the standard deviation of accruals, cash flows, sales and earnings is positively related to firm size. The result demonstrates and suggests that these observable firm characteristics can be used as instruments for measuring accrual quality. According to this framework, the author expects that the larger the unsigned abnormal accrual measure, the lower the earnings quality. Therefore, firms with low accrual quality have more accruals that are unrelated to cash flow realisations and so have more noise and less persistence in their earnings.

After examining earnings and accrual quality, this paper finds that average UK company behaviour was quite similar to the behaviour found earlier in the USA. This paper’s findings show that greater volatility of sales, cash flow, accruals and earnings results in a lower accrual quality. Without a doubt, some of the analysis in this paper, especially that using different equations to calculate working-capital accruals, leads us to a valuable improvement of the earlier studies.

In this paper, the author follows the method of Dechow and Dichev (2002) and define accrual quality as the extent to which accruals map into cash-flow insights based on the UK data. To find the quality of working-capital accruals, the author uses the standard deviation of the residuals as accrual quality that resulted from the author’s firm-specific OLS regressions of working-capital accruals based on last, current and one-year-ahead operating cash flow. Unlike prior research, to avoid a restriction to working-capital accruals, we use different equations to cover more items of working-capital accruals.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between the accrual quality and the growth/value characteristics (and their return premia) at firm level.

The paper employs a battery of univariate and multivariate cross‐sectional tests. Fama‐MacBeth regressions with main effects and interaction effects are used to identify the relation between accrual quality, book‐to‐market and returns. The analysis is conducted on the overall sample, as well as after conditioning on up and down markets.

Value (growth) stocks are more likely to be associated with high (low) accrual quality. Value stocks earn higher returns mainly in down markets, while poor accrual quality firms have significantly higher returns during up markets, but significantly lower returns during down markets. There is a significant interaction effect between accrual quality and the value premium, which only exhibits in the down markets (i.e. stocks with poor accrual quality earn a higher value premium in down markets than stocks with good accrual quality).

Results in this paper help disentangle between various explanations proposed for the accrual quality premium and the value premium. These findings are consistent with the idea that the same underlying risk factor generating the value premium also generates the cross‐sectional variation in accrual quality responsible for the accrual quality premium. From the corporate managers' perspective, the results imply that value firms can mitigate their higher costs of capital by providing high quality of accounting information. From an analyst's perspective, the study suggests that considering both accrual quality and growth characteristics can help make better portfolio allocation decisions than when these are considered separately.

This study examines how lenders modify their behavior and their use of traditional, transaction-based lending models in credit decisions when faced with low earnings quality.

To measure the earnings quality, following Bharath, Sunder and Sunder (2008), the authors use three measures of accrual quality and combine them into a simple parsimonious measure of accrual quality. Subsequently, the authors apply the incremental R-square approach used by Kim and Kross (2005) to determine the degree to which lenders modify their reliance on financial statement ratios when faced with low accrual quality.

Consistent with prior literature, this study shows that the cost of debt is higher when accrual quality is low. In addition, this study extends prior literature by showing that lenders decrease their reliance on income statement data to make credit decisions as accrual quality decreases.

This paper broadens existing literature on the pricing of information risk in capital markets by being the first to show that lenders modify their reliance on financial statement data when faced with low-quality accruals. In addition, this paper extends the findings of Billings and Morton (2002) and demonstrates to managers the futility of using accrual manipulations to obtain more favorable credit terms. Lastly, this paper aids regulators and standard setters who seek to improve the usefulness of financial statements by showing that creditors do not appear to be misled by reporting choices that lower the quality of accruals.

This paper aims to investigate the joint effect of product market competition (PMC) and institutional environment on accrual quality.

The sample covers a large data set of 52,138 firm-year observations from 35 countries over the period of 2011-2015. Using the weighted least square regression, the study estimates PMC and institutional environment on accrual quality. The study measures PMC based on Herfindahl-Hirschman index, anti-director rights index (ADRI) based on the revised and updated La Porta et al.'s (1998) and accrual quality using the modified Dechow and Dichev (2002) model proposed by McNichols (2002). The study also uses a series of specification tests using alternative measures for each variable.

The study finds that highly intensified PMC relates to a lower quality of accruals. The results also show that accrual quality is better in countries with stronger institutional environment, specifically countries with higher ADRI, investor protection, judicial independence, protection of minority shareholders’ interests, protection of property rights, strength of the auditing and reporting standards, efficacy of corporate boards and corporate ethics. The findings suggest that institutional factors weaken the negative impact of PMC intensity on accrual quality, hence suggesting that institutional environment has a significant role to enhance accrual quality among firms in highly intensified industries.

The findings provide additional insights to policymakers and regulators on the importance of strong institutional and industry environment that can provide incentives and extra governance mechanisms besides the conventional firm-level corporate governance.

This study contributes in understanding the impact of intensity of PMC on accrual quality internationally and subsequently highlights the role of institutional environment as significant country-level governance in determining financial reporting quality, particularly accrual quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Chartered Accountants South Africa (CAs(SA)) as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) have an association with accruals quality.

The theoretical base of this paper is the link between accounting expertise and accruals quality. The sample consists of 812 observations of Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)-listed firms between 2010 and 2013. The association is tested by regressing the CA(SA) as CEO interest variable and control variables on accruals quality, using three metrics of abnormal accruals.

The overall results suggest that less accruals management and estimation error is present when the CEO is a CA(SA).

This is the first study to test the association between having a CEO with a professional accounting qualification, such as CA(SA), and accruals quality. The findings will be of interest to shareholders and top executives when evaluating the appointment of a CEO.

The purpose of this study is to test and prove how the quality of innate accruals can make a significant contribution to the prospect of future market value for manufacturing industries.

This research used multiple regression method by gathering all observation data on a go public company in the industrial manufacturing sector.

The results of this test can show that the dividend policy helps reduce the use of accruals to increase investor perceptions about the prospects of the company's future period, especially the value of earnings informativeness, including valid information about the actual fundamental conditions. These results reflect high innate accruals quality, so the use of low accruals, especially in reporting earnings.

This test uses a measurement of a constant growth rate with the calculation of the indicator g in the next five-year period, and the proof has secondary data abnormalities reflecting a very high level of variation in the use of accruals. As an implication of the data that is not normal, it causes a large amount of data pruning through outlier tests. Samples that qualify for processing are 180 from 384 data.

By calculating the value of the dividend payout with the growth rate, the estimated future market price can be done with reasonable accuracy.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Japanese Sarbanes – Oxley Act (J-SOX) impacted earnings management and earnings quality of public firms in Japan.

This archival study compares earnings management and earnings quality of firms that disclose at least one material weakness with a sample matched on size and industry without a material weakness.

The authors investigate whether the differences in regulations, corporate governance and regulatory environment acceptance influence earnings management and earnings management of Japanese listed firms, relative to findings in the USA. They found the Japanese results to be slightly different from the results found in previous USA studies. First, the time-series observations suggest that while accruals management and real earnings management remained unchanged for control firms, accruals management and real earnings management increased for material weaknesses disclosing firms following J-SOX. The regression analyses suggest that accruals management for both the groups is significant in the pre-and post-J-SOX periods, but that real earnings management declined for both the groups post-J-SOX. Second, while, both accruals quality and accuracy of cash flow predictions improved in the post-J-SOX period.

The sample of Japanese firms disclosing a material weakness is small because the number of firms that disclose internal control deficiencies is decreasing in Japan. The authors have no evidence that their results are not generalizable to a larger sample and leave this for future research.

The authors provide evidence that J-SOX, which does not have a direct reporting system, does not constrain earnings management. Their results drive the regulator to reconsider whether the reporting system works in the Japanese business environment. Additionally, their results show that J-SOX has no effect on earnings management; thus, regulators need to reconsider the governance function of directors and internal auditors. This paper communicates to the world how J-SOX works in Japan through changes in earnings quality and management post J-SOX and the root problems.

This paper is the first (of which the authors are aware) to examine whether J-SOX impacted both earnings management and earnings quality in Japan. This paper discusses how the differences in regulations and corporate governance as well as the differences between USA-SOX and J-SOX may explain the results observed in Japan. This paper provides results regarding whether J-SOX improved earnings quality.

Bangladesh is an emerging economy and international audit firms operate there through affiliated local audit firms. The Bangladesh audit market can be characterized as an intensely competitive small audit market with relatively poor demand for high‐audit quality. In addition, Bangladesh has a relatively small and under developed but growing capital market that is characterized by poor corporate regulation and weak investor protection. The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between Big 4 affiliated auditors and accruals quality in Bangladesh.

Following prior literature, this paper uses both absolute discretionary accruals and signed discretionary accruals as proxies of accruals quality. The sample is 382 firm‐year observations and covers fiscal years 2000‐2003.

It was found that the association between Big 4 affiliates and accruals quality in Bangladesh depends on measures of accruals quality and accruals models used. Overall, Big 4 affiliates do not have a positive impact on accruals quality of their clients in Bangladesh.

This paper contributes to the literature on audit quality and accruals quality. The results potentially suggest that Big 4 affiliates do not have any positive impact on accruals quality of clients in an intensely competitive audit market where the demand for quality audit is poor and monitoring is lax and raise potential implications for policy makers and market participants in Bangladesh.