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This study examines the timeliness of quarterly financial reports published by companies listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE). In addition, this study extends prior research by determining the association between timeliness and each of the following company attributes ‐ size, profitability, growth and capital structure. An analysis of 117 quarterly reports ended on 30 September 2001 reveals that all, except one company reported within an allowable reporting lag of two months. However, a large number of companies were making the most of the time given to announce their quarterly reports. The study also provides evidence that there is a significant association between timeliness and each of the four company attributes, and the association is in the hypothesised direction. Plausible explanations for these findings are provided. The findings may provide some implications for future regulations and research regarding the timeliness of financial reporting in Malaysia.

India is one of the few countries where companies are required to give both consolidated financial statements (CFS) as well as parent‐only financial statements. While parent‐only statements have been in existence for a long time, CFS was introduced recently. The purpose of this paper is to examine the value relevance of CFS in India.

The value relevance of CFS is examined through an empirical study. The study examines the relationship between market values and consolidated earnings and parent‐only earnings is analysed. The study uses four years data of 59 companies whose subsidiary earnings are more than 20 per cent of consolidated revenue.

Initial results show that annual CFS are not value relevant, whereas annual parent‐only financial statements are value relevant. However, wherever quarterly financial statements are available, CFC are found to be value relevant and parent‐only financial statements are not value relevant.

While CFS and parent‐only financial statement on an annual basis are mandatory, companies have the option to publish parent‐only financial statement on a quarterly basis while not reporting quarterly consolidated financial statements. This inconsistency in the regulation causes confusion to investors who receive parent‐only quarterly financial statements for three quarters and suddenly consolidated financial statements at the end of the year. The paper shows how market reacts to such reporting practices.

In addition to examining the value relevance of CFS, the paper also examines the impact of incomplete regulations of financial reporting on asset pricing.

This study examines the effect of auditing and the integral approach to interim reporting on cosmetic earnings management, referred by Kinnunen and Koskela as earnings manipulative behavior to report earnings numbers to achieve key cognitive reference points represented by N×10^k.

Using Benford's Law, the analysis employs 182,278 positive quarterly earnings observations and 103,470 negative quarterly observations for all publicly listed US companies from 1993 to 2003.

The empirical results show that firms tended to engage in cosmetic earnings management in each of the four fiscal quarters. More importantly, it was found that the degree of cosmetic earnings management is significantly less severe in the fourth fiscal quarter, which is the only quarter audited, than any of the previous quarters. This result suggests that the auditor plays an important role in reducing the cosmetic earnings manipulative behavior.

The findings of the study add more evidence to the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of auditing in preventing earnings management.

This study aims to examine the levels of interim financial reporting (IR) disclosure by listed firms in the Asia-Pacific region and factors influencing these disclosure levels.

Drawing on a sample of 700 interim reports issued in 2012 by the top 100 listed firms in seven Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam), the author constructed a disclosure index consisting of disclosure items commonly required across the sample countries. Using this index, the study measures the extent to which listed firms in the Asia-Pacific Region comply with IR disclosure requirements. The study performs ordinary least square regression to investigate the influence of the four country-level factors including international financial reporting standard (IFRS) adoption, audit review, reporting frequency and reporting lag.

This research documents that IR disclosure varies significantly across the region. The IR disclosure levels are positively associated with IFRS adoption, audit review and mandatory of quarterly reporting, but negatively associated with reporting lag.

IR regulation varies across the Asia-Pacific region, but there is no existing research on the country-level factors influencing IR disclosure practices. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper providing some insights into IR disclosure levels by listed firms in the region. It also contributes to the disclosure literature by providing empirical evidence on the country-level factors influencing these disclosure levels. Deriving from the findings, the authors offer recommendations for regulators, investors and listed firms on the issue of reviewing the regulation, using information and preparing IR.

The ownership structure of a corporation can alleviate the agency problem that arises between shareholders and managers of a corporation, which implies that the ownership composition of a firm may infl uence the level of voluntary disclosure. This study investigates whether the ownership structure of U. S. based multinational corporations affects the managerial decision to voluntarily disclose quarterly foreign segment data. The empirical results show that the three ownership variables of interest, institutional stock ownership, managerial stock ownership and outside blockholder stock ownership are inversely related to the level of voluntary disclosure of quarterly foreign segment data. Therefore, it is inferred that an increase in the proportion of outstanding common stock held by these ownership groups is accompanied by a decrease in the probability that a U.S. multinational firm voluntarily discloses quarterly foreign segment data.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the audit effect hypothesis for the cross-quarter differential market reactions to earnings announcements.

Earnings response coefficients are focused upon as indicators of perceived earnings quality.

The evidence suggests that investors of Singapore listed companies respond more strongly to earnings announcements in the fourth quarter than other interim quarters. The findings support the notion that investors attach different degrees of reliability to interim quarter earnings relative to final quarter earnings.

Findings in this paper shed new light on the audit effect hypothesis and are relevant to accounting regulators and audit committee members seeking to enhance the credibility of earnings announcements.

Consistent and reliable data on farmland values is critical to assessing the overall financial health of agricultural producers. However, little is known about the idiosyncrasies and similarities of standard land value data sources – US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Federal Reserve Bank land value surveys, and transaction prices. The purpose of this paper is to determine the differences and similarities of land value movements from three land value data sources.

In addition to Oklahoma transaction prices, two survey sources are considered: the USDA annual report and the quarterly Tenth District Survey of Agricultural Credit Conditions administered by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The paper describes each data set and identifies differences in data sampling, collection, and reporting. Average values of Oklahoma farmland across data sources are examined. USDA estimates are regressed against quarterly Federal Reserve values across multiple states to determine the point in time represented by USDA estimates. Granger causality tests determine if Federal Reserve land value estimates anticipate movements in USDA land value estimates.

It is found that all three data sources are highly correlated, but transaction prices tend to be higher, especially for irrigated cropland and ranchland. USDA land values are reported as representing land values on January first, but instead they more closely represent first and second quarter land values according to a multi‐state comparison to changes in quarterly Federal Reserve land values. Given the finding that first quarter Federal Reserve Bank land values lead USDA land values and that they are published before the USDA release, Federal Reserve land values are a timely indicator of agricultural producers' financial position.

No previous research has addressed the topic of how various sources of agricultural land values compare.

This paper aims to investigate associations between related party transactions (RPTs) and governance and performance factors of new economy firms.

Previous research has examined the RPTs of large US firms. In contrast, the authors focus on smaller, newly listed Australian firms. Referred to as “commitments test entities” (CTE), these firms are distinguished by the unique Australian Securities Exchange listing requirements applying to them, and associated additional (quarterly cash flow) reporting requirements.

While strong corporate governance characteristics may be expected to constrain the amounts of payments and loans to related parties, we find only weak evidence to support that proposition. The results show that financial condition dominates the decision to engage in RPTs and suggest that external monitoring (associated both with larger firm size and the quarterly reporting phase) are a more effective restraint on the magnitude of RPTs for these high‐risk CTE firms.

The findings are generally consistent with the “conflict of interest view” proposed by Gordon et al. suggesting RPTs do not serve shareholders' interests.

The findings suggest that external monitoring may be a more effective control over RPTs than internal corporate governance mechanisms in this institutional context of small “cashbox” firms. Since RPTs may not be in the best interests of shareholders, extending mandatory RPT disclosures to all periodic cash flow reports warrants further consideration by regulators.

This study contributes to the limited research on the effects and implications of RPTs.

This paper aims to examine the characteristics of firms that voluntary disclose generally accepted accounting principals (GAAP)-compliant statements of income, statement of cash flows (SCF) and balance sheet (BS) concurrently with quarterly earnings releases. Cardinal motivation of the paper stems from the increasing demand over the past decade by professional analysts and the Securities and Exchange Commission for concurrent disclosure of GAAP-compliant financial statements with earnings’ announcements.

Using hand-collected archival data, a random sample was identified as disclosing GAAP-compliant SCF and BS with their quarterly earnings releases compared to a control sample identified as non-GAAP-compliant disclosing firms during the 36-month period of 2009-2011, and several hypotheses are tested to determine managements’ incentives to disclose GAAP-compliant versus non-GAAP financials with their earnings releases.

The results in this paper suggest that debt financing, corporate governance, operating performance, earnings volatility, industry membership (such as technology and more research and development-intensive) and complexity of operations (number of segments) are significant characteristics of firms electing to concurrently disclose GAAP-compliant SCF and BS with earnings releases.

The findings discussed in this paper are of special interest to financial reporting policymakers, financial analysts, firm managers and stakeholders and academics.

The voluntary disclosure literature on quarterly earnings releases is extended by differentiating between GAAP-compliant and non-GAAP-compliant voluntary disclosers. The specific findings of this study may provide valuable input to policymakers as they study prevailing voluntary disclosure rules and practices.

The authors investigate how managers adapt their financial reporting and disclosure practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic through changes in accounting estimates (CAEs).

The authors define the pandemic period as starting on March 1, 2020. The sample consists of 9,575 CAEs disclosed in quarterly (10-Qs) and annual (10-Ks) financial reports by US firms between January 1, 2004 and May 31, 2022. The authors perform multivariate analyses of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence of CAEs and on whether the impact of CAEs on firms' financial performance and reporting quality changes during the pandemic.

In the examination of the CAE footnote disclosures in the quarterly (10-Qs) and annual (10-Ks) reports of US companies, the authors find no evidence that the incidence of CAEs in 10-Ks or the number of firms reporting CAEs are significantly different in the pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, but the incidence of CAEs in 10-Qs is significantly higher in the pandemic period than in the pre-pandemic period. The authors also find that the number of CAEs related to revenue recognition increase significantly in the pandemic period, but CAEs in other categories decrease, with the sharpest drop seen in the liabilities category. Further investigation suggests that although the dollar impact of 10-K CAEs on current financial statements is higher during the pandemic period, firms with CAEs, especially positive CAEs, in either 10-Ks or 10-Qs are less likely to use CAEs to boost earnings in the pandemic period. However, the authors find evidence that firms tend to use CAEs to “big bath” current earnings and create reserve for future period. The authors have not observed any significant differences in how the various phases of the pandemic affect the reporting of CAEs. Additionally, there is no evidence to suggest that financially distressed firms report more or fewer CAEs during the pandemic.

The results are consistent with the notion that, during the pandemic, firms exercise greater caution in their CAE disclosures, refraining from using CAEs as a means of boosting earnings but as a strategy to create reserve for future period. The paper highlights the challenges that various stakeholders face when assessing a company's current and future financial performance based on management's accounting estimates.

This study captures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the incidence of CAEs and CAEs' impact on the financial performance and financial reporting quality of firms during the pandemic.