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In this paper the authors aim to examine whether shareholder activism is associated with accounting reporting complexity (ARC).

The authors employ ordinary least squares (OLS) and a sample of 19,530 firm-year observations (representing 3,377 unique firms) over the 2010–2019 period to test the prediction.

The authors find that firms with shareholder activism provide more complex accounting reporting. Further, both types of activism (including Concern & Dispute and Control & Discussion) are positively associated with ARC. The authors also find that the association between shareholder activism and ARC is more pronounced when the firms have a higher level of litigation risk and a higher proportion of institutional ownership. Collectively, the findings suggest that firms with shareholder activism may be under more pressure to disclose more accounting items, leading to more complex accounting reporting.

The study may be informative to regulators considering the costs and benefits of shareholder activism in financial reporting.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of the readability of annual reports on firms’ ability to obtain trade credit from suppliers. Particularly, the authors conjecture that annual report readability helps firms obtain more trade credit from suppliers.

The authors use the Gunning Fog Index as the primary measure of annual report readability and the ratio of accounts payable to the book value of total assets as the measure of trade credit.

Results from the study of 4,754 firms during the 2004–2016 period indicate that suppliers extend more trade credit to firms with more readable financial reports. The authors’ results are robust to alternative measures of trade credit and annual report readability. The authors’ results remain robust when we control for firm fixed effects and potential endogeneity problems using the instrumental variable approach. A further test shows that the level of trade credit is higher for firms in business service industries, and that this relation is weakened when firms disclose less readable 10-K filings.

The authors’ findings provide new insight into the role of financial report readability in firms’ ability to obtain trade financing from suppliers. The authors’ results are also in line with the SEC’s encouragement that firms use plain English and easy language in financial reporting.

This study aims to examine the effect of real activities manipulation (RAM) on auditors’ decision of issuing going concern (GC) opinions for distressed companies.

This study estimates and examines three types of RAM: reduction of discretionary expenses, sales manipulation and overproduction. It investigates the effect of RAM on auditor reporting conservatism by including the three measures of RAM methods in logistic regressions that explain the issuance of going concern opinions. The authors perform the analysis specifically on distressed firms for 2004-2013 period.

This study finds a significant and positive association between RAM and the likelihood of receiving going concern opinion in the financial distressed firm sample, suggesting that client’s abnormal business activity affects the auditor reporting conservatism.

This study provides evidence that auditors make going concern reporting decisions in consideration of the client’s abnormal operating decisions and management’s opportunism.

Recent literature argues that auditors have little recourse other than to resign if a client uses RAM to impact earnings or the financial statements, and hence the enhanced audit quality in the post-SOX period is due to the shift from using accruals management to RAM (Cohen et al., 2008; Chi et al., 2011; Kim and Park, 2014). The evidence provided in this study indicates that auditors report more conservatively (rather than simply resign) in response to the aggressive RAM.