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Motivated by rapidly increasing CEO age in the USA, the purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of CEO age on financial reporting quality and consider the moderating role of clawback provisions.

This study uses a data set of 18,492 US firm-year observations from 2003 to 2019. Financial reporting quality is proxied with accruals-based and real activities earnings management measures, and with financial statement irregularities, measured by applying Benford’s law to financial statement line items. A number of sensitivity tests are conducted including the use of an instrumental variable.

The results provide evidence that financial statement irregularities are more prevalent when CEOs are older, and they suggest a complex relation between CEO age and real activities earnings management. The results also suggest that the effect of CEO age on financial reporting quality is moderated by the presence of clawback provisions which became mandatory for US-listed firms in October 2022.

This study is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to consider the effect of CEO age on financial statement irregularities and earnings management. This study has important implications for stakeholders evaluating the determinants of financial reporting quality, for boards of directors considering CEO age limitations and for policymakers considering mandating clawback provisions, which recently occurred in the USA.

This paper examines how “strategic” chief financial officers (CFOs) with an elite MBA (i.e. elite CFOs) influence (1) stock market reaction to CFO hiring announcements (ex ante measure) and (2) post-hiring firm performance (ex-post measure).

This paper utilizes a comprehensive, proprietary database with information about the educational qualifications and prior professional experience of 1,340 CFOs hired during the period 1994–2014. For each CFO, the authors hand-collected data on the CFO's prior experience as well as CFO's educational profile. The authors also identified the date of CFO hiring from financial press articles. To evaluate performance, the authors consider two different, yet complementary performance measures: (1) the stock market reaction, a priori measure and (2) a traditional measure of performance, which is a post-facto metric related to firm performance.

The results show that hiring CFOs with scarce and strategic human capital elicits a positive market response and leads to significant improvement in firm performance. Further, firms with greater managerial discretion benefit more from hiring elite CFOs. The results hold after controlling for chief executive officer (CEO), CFO, top managment team (TMT), and board characteristics.

This study shows converging and mutually consistent results about what specific types of CFO human capital create firm value and, more importantly, show that such value-creation is only in the case of small firms and high growth firms. The study also advances the stream of literature that contrasts the relative benefits of specialist versus generalist qualifications.

This study aims to examine the relationship between the educational background of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) from reputable universities and financial reporting quality (FRQ). Educational background is divided into two categories: an undergraduate degree from a reputable university and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from a reputable university.

This study uses data from all companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2019, except for financial companies, and obtains 2,583 research samples. The least-squares regression analysis model was used in this study.

This study finds that the educational background of CFOs with a bachelor’s degree and CFOs with an MBA from reputable universities has a positive and significant relationship with FRQ. This study also performs an additional analysis with high-low growth and high-low tech and robustness testing with coarsened exact matching method and Heckman to corroborate the results.

This study provides a theoretical contribution to the literature on the relationship between CFOs’ educational background and FRQ in Indonesia. It is also expected to contribute to the implementation of company policies, management and educational institutions in Indonesia.

This study provides a novel measurement of CFO reputation, measured using the ranking of CFO alumni from reputable universities and its association with FRQ.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of chief financial officer (CFO) gender, board gender diversity and the interaction of both factors on financial reporting quality (FRQ) proxied by restatements.

Restatements indicate inaccurate financial reporting. The authors use fixed effects conditional logistic regression models to compare firms with and without restatements matched by size, industry and year. The authors’ unique matched–pair sample consists of 546 listed US firms from the period 2005–2016.

The authors’ results provide evidence that restatements are less likely when the CFO is a woman and when a higher proportion of women serve on the board of directors (BOD). Considering the interaction effects, the authors find evidence that women on the BOD are more effective at reducing restatement likelihood when the CFO is also a woman. And that although female CFOs reduce restatement likelihood generally, they have no statistically significant effect on restatement likelihood when the BOD is all-male.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first that the authors know of to consider how FRQ is affected by the interaction effects of CFO gender and board gender diversity. The findings corroborate upper echelons theory and extend the understanding of the effects of managerial gender diversity at a time when firms face growing pressure to increase gender diversity at the highest levels. The unique sample, methodology and findings provide new insights into the impact of gender on FRQ that has important policy implications.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether female chief financial officers (CFOs) are associated with the occurrences of financial reporting fraud. This study offers new theoretical and empirical evidence on whether firms with more female CFOs are more (less) likely to engage in financial reporting fraud.

This study is based on a sample of US-listed firms from 2011 to 2021. The authors speculate that female CFOs play a weaker role in the occurrences of financial reporting fraud. So, firms with a proportional number of female CFOs should be less likely to commit financial reporting fraud.

The data provide support for the predictions of this study. This study suggests a negative and significant association between the dummy variables for female CFOs and the occurrences of financial reporting fraud. The authors find that this association is contingent on governance mechanisms [e.g. ownership structure, politically connected CEOs and firms' conditions that do (or do not) invest in a gender-diverse board].

This study offers different perspectives on the impact of female CFOs on the occurrences of financial reporting fraud. The results of this study are distinguishable from prior studies. This study moves the analytical focus from the macro level (gender diversity or female corporate leaders) to the micro level (female CFOs) to understand firms' propensity to commit financial reporting fraud. Additionally, this study is based on factual financial reporting fraud cases, considering the US firms' fraud characteristics.

This study aims to examine trends in audit committee characteristics of companies and associates characteristics subject to major change with a fee-based proxy for audit committee effectiveness.

The research adopts an empirical approach. Using descriptive and inferential statistics, observations for 253 Financial Times Stock Exchange 350 companies’ audit committee characteristics gathered from annual reports at the beginning and end of a five-year period are evaluated against averaged non-audit fees (NAF) as a proportion of total audit fees.

Audit committee composition shows an increased incidence of female membership and of members with previous audit experience. The increase in members with previous audit experience is more marked where this is gained with the incumbent auditor. An increase is also shown in chief financial officers with previous audit experience. Previous audit experience is associated with reduced NAF as a proportion of total fees. This is marked where audit experience has been gained with the incumbent auditor. These results suggest that the benefits of financial expertise gained from audit experience outweigh impairments to independence due to social ties. Nevertheless, other studies indicate concerns about independence are still well-founded.

This paper’s original contribution is to evaluate the potential effect of previous audit experience on those involved in audit committees in light of concerns raised in the literature and by regulators that external auditor independence should be maintained. The innovative fee-based proxy for audit committee effectiveness facilitates an evaluation as to which influence prevails.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of literature pertaining to how executive behavioral characteristics relate to financial reporting decisions.

The authors review 44 papers published between 2001 and 2021 in top journals that are nested in leading business, economic and accounting journals.

Through the systematic review, the authors provide a framework for the emergence of narcissism and how it relates to decision making and hence, firm performance. Additionally, this paper identifies different measures of measuring narcissism with their pros and cons and suggest that different measures lead to different outcomes in prior literature.

The study contributes to a growing stream of research on executives' attributes influence on decision making. The authors recommend that future research may focus more on the chief financial officer (CFO) role as the majority of literature in CEO based. Additionally, the authors suggest that different settings may moderate the outcomes, and the authors propose that future research may be conducted to show how the regulatory environment affects or moderates narcissism effect.

Research on gender and finance finds that women chief executive officers (CEOs) are relatively risk-averse and more ethical than their male counterparts. These differences are often presented as reasons for lower earnings management by firms led by women. A strand of contrasting literature however finds the notions of women being risk-averse and ethical not necessarily true for women occupying top leadership positions as women successful in shattering the glass ceiling adopt behaviors like men. This study attempts to understand the differences between the ethical tendencies of the two genders by examining if CEO power impacts the relation between CEO gender and earnings management.

The authors begin the analysis using standard regressions using the propensity score matched (PSM) samples and examine if CEO power mediates or amplifies relationship between CEO gender and earnings management. The authors use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression approach and instrumental variables (IV) estimation to address the endogeneity concerns.

This study’s results suggest that the relationship between CEO gender and earnings management is mediated by CEO power. The authors find that women CEOs with lower power engage in lower earnings management. However, women CEOs with more power tend to engage in greater levels of earnings management than their male counterparts.

This study contributes the finance literature by showing women leaders successful in occupying top leadership positions are not necessarily more risk averse and more ethical. Less powerful women CEOs are subjected to potentially higher levels of scrutiny and are forced into an environment where they have to be seen as ethical. However, powerful women face the same concerns as their male counterparts and not necessarily more ethical.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between top manager tenure and the sophistication level of management accounting system (MAS) in extant literature.

Cumulating evidence from 31 studies (N = 12,739), this study meta-analytically examines the central question of whether top managers' tenure is significantly associated with MAS sophistication after correcting individual studies for statistical artifacts. The study also assesses the strength of this association bniy exploring the influence of several moderating factors.

The findings show that long-tenured top managers are not significantly related to MAS sophistication. However, the moderator analtgcqyses indicate that the relationship between top manager tenure and MAS sophistication is moderated by tenure measurement type, firm sector and size. The study provides evidence for the significant moderation of tenure measurement type (i.e. position tenure). The results also argue that top manager tenure matters for MAS sophistication in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and firms in the private sector.

The meta-analysis summarizes existing studies quantitatively to expand prior narrative reviews by providing definitive evidence of the overall effect of top manager tenure on MAS sophistication.

This study aims to focus on automated text analyses (ATAs) of sustainability and integrated reporting as a recent approach in empirical–quantitative research.

Based on legitimacy theory, the author conducts a structured literature review and includes 38 quantitative peer-reviewed empirical (archival) studies on specific determinants and consequences of sustainability and integrated reporting. The paper makes a clear distinction between analyses of reports due to readability, tone, similarity and specific topics. In line with prior studies, it is assumed that more readable reports with less tone and similarity relate to increased reporting quality.

In line with legitimacy theory, there are empirical indications that specific corporate governance variables, other firm characteristics and regulatory issues have a main impact on the quality of sustainability and integrated reporting. Furthermore, increased reporting quality leads to positive market reactions in line with the business case argument.

The author deduces useful recommendations for future research to motivate researchers to include ATA of sustainability and integrated reports. Among others, future research should recognize sustainable and behavioral corporate governance determinants and analyze other stakeholders’ reactions.

As both stakeholders’ demands on sustainability and integrated reporting have increased since the financial crisis of 2008–2009, firms should increase the quality of reporting processes.

This analysis makes major contributions to prior research by including both sustainability and integrated reporting, based on ATA. ATAs play a prominent role in recent empirical research to evaluate possible drivers and consequences of sustainability and integrated reports. ATA may contribute to increased validity of empirical–quantitative research in comparison to classical manual content analyses, especially due to future CSR washing analyses.