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The purpose of this study is to explore and identify the privacy concerns of smartphone app users pertinent to app usage.

Adopting a qualitative phenomenological approach, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with app users to explore the app users' privacy concerns.

Credibility concerns, unauthorised secondary use and vulnerability concerns are the three major privacy concerns of app users, under which these concerns have sub-concerns, i.e. popularity, privacy policy, stalking, data sharing, hacking and personal harm.

The findings are useful to app marketers, app developers and app stores. App marketers, app developers and app stores can use the findings to understand and properly address app users' privacy concerns, thereby increasing the apps usage.

By exploring the privacy concerns of app users, the authors' study extends the literature and provides a theoretical development of individuals' privacy concerns in the context of a widely used technology, i.e. smartphone applications. Accordingly, this study contributes to the consumer privacy literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent risk disclosure is associated with banks’ governance characteristics. The research also focuses on how the business environment and culture may create a bank’s awareness of risk management and its disclosure. This study is conducted in a setting where banks are not mandated to follow international standards for their risk disclosures.

Using 300 bank-year observations comprising hand-collected private commercial bank data, the study uses regression analysis to investigate the influence of risk governance characteristics on risk disclosure.

This paper reports a positive relationship between risk disclosure and banks’ governance characteristics, such as the presence of various risk committees and a risk management unit.

Because studies are lacking on risk disclosure and risk governance conducted in developing countries, it is expected that this research will make a significant contribution to the literature and provide a foundation for further research in this field.

This study complements the corporate governance literature, more specifically the risk governance literature, by incorporating agency theory, institutional theory and proprietary cost theory to provide robust evidence of the impact of risk governance practices in the context of a developing economy.

Previous studies on risk disclosure and governance determinants primarily involve developed countries. This paper’s contribution is to examine risk disclosure and risk governance characteristics in a developing country in which reporting according to international standards is effectively voluntary.

The paper aims to provide insights into executives' perceptions of risk management disclosures and such disclosures' determinants. The paper extends the emerging literature by using institutional theories in the context of a developing country.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 36 executives directly involved in risk management disclosures, policy-making and monitoring.

The interview data show evidence that corporate risk management disclosures are still at a low level. The reasons for non-disclosure can be related to institutional weaknesses, lack of disciplinary action and political interference. Additionally, central bank autonomy, limited perception of accountability, demand from influential stakeholders, lack of financial literacy, aim to keep annual reports brief, etc. results in the dearth of risk disclosure by the banks.

The study suggests that understanding the importance of risk management disclosures and preparing for the uncertainty will keep the business moving.

The study seeks to contribute to the literature by investigating the executives' perceptions of risk management disclosures and its' determinants in the context of a developing country where non-compliance to the regulatory standard is high.

This paper aims to examine the association between the adoption experience of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the quality of reported earnings in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region – a region that exhibits several features of emerging economies.

The authors analyse a hand-collected dataset of 222 firms across 4 countries in the GCC region over the period 2012–2017 and measure “IFRS experience” as the number of years since a country has mandatorily adopted the IFRS. In measuring earnings quality, the authors focus on two properties of reported earnings: persistence and accruals quality and employ multivariate regression models based on two-way cluster-robust standard errors and fixed-effects.

This study’s findings suggest that earnings persistence is decreasing, and discretionary accruals are increasing in IFRS experience in the GCC region over the period 2012–2017. The authors conclude that reported earnings quality has declined following IFRS adoption in this sample.

The authors contribute to the IFRS literature in the GCC region, which is in its infancy.

This study’s findings have important policy implications for countries that are about to adopt or are in the early implementation stage of IFRS and suggest that strong enforcement of accounting standards along with improvement in the institutional environments might be needed for improving financial reporting quality.

The authors provide the first cross-country evidence on the relation between IFRS adoption in the GCC region and earnings quality. Moreover, unlike most prior studies, the authors employ a continuous measure that is superior to a binary measure in capturing the effect of IFRS adoption.

This paper aims to examine the perspectives of auditors, regulators and financial report preparers on the effects of key audit matters (KAMs) reporting on audit effort, fees, quality and report transparency.

The authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (13 Audit Partners, 5 Chief Financial Officers and 3 regulators) and thematically analysed the interviews. They use the frame of “Paradox of Transparency” to explain the findings.

Auditors perceive that the overall quality control of their audits has improved both in the planning and execution stages, and such improvement can mostly be attributed to the coercive pressures from professional bodies and regulators. Nevertheless, audit fee remains unchanged. Auditors disclose industry generic items and descriptions of KAMs, sometimes masking the real problem areas of the clients. Even after improving the performative audit quality, transparency of audit reporting has not improved. Issues that warrant going concern qualifications or audit report modifications are now reported as KAMs. Hence, KAMs reporting might make the audit report less transparent.

Localised audit environments and institutions affect the transparency of KAMs reporting. Without attention to corporate governance and auditors’ independence issues, paradoxically, performative improvement in audit quality (due to the KAMs reporting requirement) does not enhance the transparency of audit reports.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to provide field-level evidence in Bangladesh and other developing countries about the perceptions of auditors, financial report preparers and regulators on the effects of KAMs reporting on audit efforts, fees, quality and report transparency.

The purpose of this study is to explore the sustainability reporting of a public sector organisation (PSO). This study focuses on socio-environmental practices of a major agro-economic platform in Australia – the Murray–Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) to provide a unique perspective on water resource management and sustainability.

This longitudinal qualitative case study collects published data from the MDBA’s annual reports over 21 years (1998–2018) and considers economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability using legitimacy and institutional theory.

This study finds that the MDBA’s sustainability reporting is influenced by its response to the Water Act 2007 and the Basin Plan 2012 regulations and to maintain its legitimacy with stakeholders. The MDBA wished to pursue sustainability through integrating these regulations complemented by stakeholder expectations. Although all categories increased in reporting, the environment category has the highest primacy in achieving a healthy basin through sustainable water management for the long-term benefit of the stakeholders.

This study contributes to the PSOs sustainability reporting literature. Particularly, this study provides insights of sustainability reporting patterns and practices over a long period through a longitudinal study. This study contributes new knowledge on the awareness of PSOs sustainability practice which has implications for governments, regulators, policymakers, managers and other stakeholders.

The Australian PSOs setting is under-researched from the perspective of a regulatory framework. The MDBA case provides unique insights on water resource management and sustainability which has value for many countries around the world.

This study aims to examine the relationship among corporate risk disclosure, cost of equity capital and performance within banking institutions in a developing country setting. The authors argue that corporate risk disclosure reduces the cost of capital as investors attain better information and have confidence in the business and that less risk disclosure may generate ambiguity for potential stakeholders.

This study uses the population of all 30 listed banks on the Dhaka Stock Exchange, Bangladesh, for the years 2006 to 2012 and uses three-stage least-squares simultaneous equations to deal with endogeneity issues.

There is evidence that Bangladesh has voluntarily adopted the International Financial Reporting Standard 7 – Financial Instruments: Disclosures (IFRS 7) and Basel II: Market Discipline and that these standards enhance risk disclosure even where compliance is not compulsory. The cost of capital is found to be negatively associated with risk disclosure, which has an inverse relationship with bank performance.

This study provides a link between risk disclosure, cost of capital and performance. It fills a gap in the literature by providing a longitudinal study of risk disclosure in the banking sector of Bangladesh. This research also highlights the importance of appropriate risk disclosure for banks and suggests its importance in the process of fulfilling stakeholders’ demands.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent of risk disclosure and the factors determining this for all listed banks in Bangladesh.

Relying on a theoretical framework based on agency theory and the creation of a risk disclosure index (RDI) based on International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 7, Basel II: market discipline, and prior literature, hand-collected data from the annual reports of all 30 banks traded on the Dhaka Stock Exchange over 2007-2012, creating 180 bank-year observations, are analysed.

The study suggests that implementation of IFRS 7 and Basel II: market discipline standards in a non-mandated environment raised the extent of risk disclosure in every category of financial institution risk (market, credit, liquidity, operational and equities). The effect can be attributed to regulatory concerns and voluntary adoption of international disclosure standards in the banking industry in Bangladesh. Specifically, whilst the determinants of disclosure vary across types of risk, the number of risk committees, leverage, company size, the existence of a risk management unit, board size and a Big4 affiliate auditor are significant determinants of at least one category of risk disclosure.

The source of risk disclosures is limited to listed banks’ annual reports.

The RDI, developed in this paper, contributes to the literature by: first, quantifying the extent of each of five types of risk disclosure; and second, identifying the factors determining them. Stakeholders, particularly depositors and investors, can use this index to select or monitor their bank of interest.

The RDI was developed according to the most relevant standards – IFRS 7 and Basel II: market discipline, plus prior scholarly literature. This type of benchmarking has not been conducted to date in previous studies. Inferences about risk disclosure are based on archival data derived from all listed banks in a virtually unregulated environment. Further, the study complements the literature by providing support for the applicability of agency theory in investigating the level of risk disclosure by banks.

The purpose of this paper is to increase awareness about the issues the world and, more so, Bangladesh faces in overcoming avian influenza. Also, the purpose is to examine whether the avian influenza situation and communication strategy adopted in the country follows risk communication principles.

An extensive literature review using recently published works, government documents, and organizational reports is employed.

If not controlled, avian influenza has the potential to become a global pandemic with extremely high morbidity and mortality rates. Bangladesh presently has policies and programs in place to attempt to control the virus but many challenges, such as the implementation of an effective risk communication strategy, remain.

This paper identifies a wide variety of sources that would be useful information for policy makers and program managers.