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This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.

This paper aims to investigate whether the two dominant financial reporting regimes, US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), are associated with audit pricing and audit report lags.

In 2007, the US SEC eliminated the requirement for foreign registrants to reconcile their financial statements to US GAAP from IFRS. In this post-reconciliation setting in the USA, the authors use panel ordinary least square regressions to examine a sample of foreign firms cross-listed in the USA reporting under IFRS and US domestic firms reporting under US GAAP during the fiscal year 2007–2019.

The authors find that the firms reporting under IFRS have longer audit report lags than firms reporting under US GAAP. In addition, the authors find that firms reporting under IFRS pay higher audit fees than their US GAAP counterparts. The results are robust after controlling for the firm- and country-specific characteristics as well as using propensity-score matching.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to provide empirical evidence that the differences between the two reporting regimes are associated with auditor behavior, possibly through additional audit efforts and audit complexity associated with auditing the principle-based IFRS relative to the rule-based US GAAP.

The study examines the changes in audit market concentration, auditor choice and audit quality in Russia following International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption. Scholars have called for further examination of the effects of IFRS adoption on auditors, with an emphasis on the importance of analyzing emerging markets that are characterized by enforcement challenges and lack of proper infrastructure. It focuses on a unique feature of Russian companies – dual audits under Russian Accounting Standards (RAS) and IFRS – and investigates changes in audit concentration and audit quality for the two audit markets.

The authors rely on the audited financial statements of Russian public companies and perform pre-/post-IFRS adoption estimation using a logit regression to ascertain whether public firms change auditors from local firms with limited IFRS expertise to those with global reputation, namely Big 4 audit firms. Further, they examine whether the change in audit market concentration post-2012 affects audit quality as proxied by companies' propensity to receive a modified audit opinion and discretionary accruals. Auditor attributes were hand-collected from audited financial statements and matched with financial variables from Datastream.

The IFRS audit market was dominated by the Big 4 audit firms prior to 2012, and there is strong evidence that audit market share (concentration) increases for IFRS reports but not for RAS reports. In addition, companies are more likely to choose a Big 4 audit firm for an RAS audit, conditional upon a Big 4 firm conducting the IFRS audit. The authors do not find evidence of decrease in the probability of audit firms issuing a modified audit opinion under either RAS or IFRS, indicating that, in the Russian setting, increased auditor concentration post-IFRS adoption does not lead to enhanced risk or decline in audit quality. Moreover, they find that discretionary accruals decline post-2012. Overall, the findings indicate that the concern of global regulators regarding audit market concentration is not justified.

The Russian reporting environment is unique and generally characterized by significant agency problems, and the study’s estimation sample is not large, compared to prior studies conducted predominantly in Western jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the authors shed light on the audit concentration phenomenon within emerging markets, for which empirical evidence is scarce. Future research could explore the impact of other capital market events and exogenous shocks, not limited to IFRS adoption, on the characteristics of Russia's audit market.

The IFRS reporting regime is commonly associated with enhanced reporting quality and improved information transparency among public companies. Yet, impairment of audit quality as a result of IFRS-driven increase in audit market share of Big 4 can potentially negate these capital market effects. This study shows that the concerns of global regulators are not valid and that audit quality does not change with increased share of Big 4 post-IFRS adoption.

Dual audits, whereby companies must prepare two sets of financial statements per the IFRS mandate, are not unique to Russia, and the evidence of IFRS reporting on the structural changes in the audit market and implications for audit quality under a dual regime is scarce. Accordingly, the study's findings are important and timely and are expected to aid regulators of countries that have announced or are contemplating the adoption of IFRS for public reporting purposes.

Foreign directors from developed nations are significant brain gains for Chinese firms because they improve board competency and board diversity. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between foreign directors from developed countries on Chinese listed firms and firms’ green commitment.

For the empirical analysis, first, this study applies ordinary least square regression and firm fixed model to explore the relationship between foreign directors and green commitment. For the endogeneity concerns, this study first added more control variable in the main model, then applied instrumental variable approach and propensity score matching technique.

This study predicts and finds that percentage of foreign directors from developed countries on Chinese listed firms’ board positively enhances the firms’ green commitment. Furthermore, this study also finds that the positive relationship between foreign directors and firms’ green commitment is more significant when firms are in a low competitive industry, have no financial constraints and are overseas-listed. This study’s findings are robust after controlling for endogeneity concerns.

This is new research on the impact of foreign directors on corporate green commitment.

This paper aims to investigate whether managerial overconfidence has an impact on investment inefficiency beyond its influence on the use of internal financing or whether internal financing behaves as a full intermediary.

The study employed three dependent variables, namely business investment scale, overinvestment and underinvestment, and analyzed data from 282 firms across five different industries listed in 11 Middle East/North Africa (MENA) countries between 2013 and 2019 using regression analysis via least square dummy variable (LSDV).

The findings indicate that while internal financing can provide funding for investment opportunities and address capital shortages, it may also result in overinvestment, particularly in companies led by overconfident managers.

Stakeholders, including shareholders and board of directors, should pay attention to the chief executive officer (CEO)'s behavioral aspects such as overconfidence in decision-making while undertaking new investment projects. Additionally, regulators and policymakers in emerging markets like MENA should re-evaluate the corporate governance framework, devise a corporate governance index and promote boardroom gender diversity as it can significantly reduce risk.

This study adds to the limited research on the impact of managerial overconfidence on investment efficiency in the MENA region. By focusing on this region, which has unique economic, political and social characteristics, the study provides new insights into the role of behavioral biases in investment decision-making in emerging markets.

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of an exogenous corporate governance shock that curbs Chief Executive Officers’ (CEOs) power on the relationship between CEO narcissism and earnings management practices.

The authors performed a quasi-experiment using a differences-in-differences approach to examine Brazil’s duality split regulatory change on 101 Brazilian public firms during the period 2010–2022.

The main findings indicate that the introduction of duality split curtails the positive influence of CEO narcissism on earnings management, suggesting that this corporate governance regulation may act as a complementary corporate governance mechanism in mitigating the negative consequences of powerful narcissistic CEOs. Further robustness checks indicate that the results remain consistent after using entropy balancing and alternative measures of CEO narcissism.

In emerging markets, where governance systems are frequently perceived as less than optimal, policymakers and regulatory authorities can draw insights from this enforcement to shape governance systems, reducing CEO power and, consequently, improving the quality of financial reporting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine whether a duality split mitigates the influence of CEO narcissism on earnings management. Thus, this study contributes to the corporate governance literature that calls for research on the effectiveness of external corporate governance mechanisms in emerging markets as well as the CEO narcissism literature that calls for research on moderating factors that could curtail negative consequences of narcissistic CEO behavior.

This study aims to assess if the voluntary reporting of adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), a widely used non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) measure, has effects on information asymmetry and value relevance and how the adjustments to GAAP earnings made to derive it contribute to these effects. This study focuses on firms from two countries with contrasting institutional settings, Canada and France.

Relying on multivariate analyses and using Heckman’s procedure to address the sample self-selection issue, this study first estimates the likelihood of a firm to report adjusted EBITDA. Then, this study examines if adjusted EBITDA, as well as the adjustments made to GAAP earnings to derive adjusted EBITDA (adjustments), affect a firm’s information asymmetry and its value. These adjustments are essentially GAAP-grounded items that are discarded by management to derive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. The dependent variables are share price volatility, as a proxy for information asymmetry, alongside market-to-book and stock market return as indicators of value.

In terms of the used sample, results suggest that Canadian firms are much more likely to report adjusted EBITDA than French firms. Chief executive officer (CEO) attributes (CEO power) appears to increase such likelihood. Moreover, for both Canadian and French firms, adjusted EBITDA is associated with reduced stock market volatility, an indication of lower information asymmetry, as well as higher market-to-book and returns, suggesting value relevance. The results also indicate that investors view the adjustments to GAAP earnings made by management to derive adjusted EBITDA as not value relevant (similar to noise). The GAAP-grounded elements that management discard to derive adjusted EBITDA actually increase information asymmetry.

This study adds to prior research on the interface between a CEO attributes and governance and non-GAAP reporting. This study also provides evidence that, despite very different institutional settings, non-GAAP reporting conveys relevant information to capital markets’ participants in both France and Canada. Hence, a country’s institutional setting may have a differential impact on the disclosure choice but not on the resulting value relevance of such disclosure. Finally, this study extends the non-GAAP literature by examining the value relevance of a widely used yet under-researched measure, adjusted EBITDA.

This study aims to explore the status and drivers (including free-floated shares, board size, rule duality and board independence) of corporate risk disclosure (CRD) for the conventional listed banks in the Egyptian stock market from 2010 to 2021, which include the country’s major political upheavals and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study based on a sample of 117 annual reports of sampled banks from 2010 to 2021. RD index of Al-Maghzom (2016) was developed and adopted to quantify CRD using an unweighted scoring system. The multiple linear regression model was used to validate the hypotheses.

The analysis shows that the COVID-19 pandemic increased insignificantly disclosure of all risks except for segment risks. In addition, findings reveal that all sampled banks adhere highly to the requirements of mandatory RD, with a low level of adherence to voluntary RD. Moreover, the analysis concluded that the board size and free-floating shares positively affect the disclosure of financial, operational, general information.

The study’s limitations include the content analysis methodology, reliance on annual reports, emphasis on financial and non-financial risks, focus on listed conventional banks in Egypt.

Current study’s findings are more likely to be useful for many parties. It informs investors about the characteristics of the boards’ directors of Egyptian listed banks that disclosed risk information. Banks should disclose more comprehensive risk information. For academics, the current study’s limitations can be considered in their future research.

This work fills a new research area in which there is relatively little research in emerging financial markets that adds new evidence to the relationship between RD and both free-floating shares and board characteristics, particularly in Egypt.

This article aims to clarify the impact of stock market liberalization on corporate green technology innovation, analyze its mechanism from the perspectives of financing constraints and environmental management level and explore heterogeneity.

Using the panel data of Chinese enterprises from 2010 to 2020, this article adopts the multi-point difference-in-difference (DID) method to test the impact of stock market liberalization on enterprise green technology innovation and its conduction pathway.

The outcomes demonstrate that stock market liberalization contributes to the furthering of green technology innovation. The heterogeneity test reveals that this promotion is more pronounced for private companies, small-scale companies and companies with high information transparency. The mediating effect test shows that stock market liberalization boosts green technology innovation by alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate environmental management.

This article elucidates the impact path of stock market liberalization on corporate green innovation based on alleviating corporate financing constraints and improving corporate environmental management levels. From the perspective of corporate green technology innovation, this article provides evidence from emerging market countries for the economic effects of capital market opening, which helps to further improve the level of green innovation.

Understanding which market to invest in for a well-diversified portfolio is fundamental in economies that are highly vulnerable to fluctuations in exchange rates. Extant literature that has considered phenomenon hardly juxtapose the markets. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of exchange rate volatility on the Stock and Real Estate market of South Africa. The essence is to determine whether the fluctuations in the exchange rate influence the markets prices differently.

The Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity [GARCH (1.1)] model was used in establishing the effect of exchange rate volatility on both markets. This study used monthly South African data between 2000 and 2020.

The results of this study showed that increased exchange rate volatility increases stock market volatility but decreases real-estate market volatility, both of which revealed weak influences from the exchange rates volatility.

This study has implication for policy in using the exchange rate as a policy tool to attract foreign portfolio investment. The weak volatility transmission from the exchange rate market to the stock and real estate market indicates that there is prospect for foreign investors to diversify their investments in these two markets.

This study investigated which of the assets market, stock or housing market do better in volatile exchange rate conditions in South Africa.