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We identify a novel concept of discretionary idiosyncratic volatility proxied by the idiosyncratic volatility component not related to the non-systematic industry volatility as a source of agency problems that have implications for firms’ cash holdings and their investment decisions. We find that firms with low discretionary idiosyncratic volatility, which likely captures discretionary effort and risk-taking by managers, have smaller cash reserves. Moreover, while high discretionary idiosyncratic volatility firms spend cash internally (internal capital building), low discretionary idiosyncratic volatility firms use it for external acquisitions, consistent with the “quiet life” hypothesis. Our findings thus indicate a need for reinforcement of existing regulations and corporate laws to control for agency costs, which could in turn reduce firm risk and the probability of financial meltdown at the aggregate level.

The purpose of this paper is to add an important new dimension to the earnings management literature by establishing a link between idiosyncratic risk and the degree of accrual management.

Based on a comprehensive sample of 44,599 firm-year observations during the period spanning 1987-2009, the study offers robust empirical evidence of the importance of firm-specific idiosyncratic volatility as a determinant of earnings manipulation. The authors use standard measures of earnings management and idiosyncratic volatility. The authors test the hypotheses with robust econometrics techniques.

The authors document a strong positive relationship between idiosyncratic risk and accruals management. Further, the authors find a positive association between residual volatility and discretionary accruals whether accruals are income inflationary or income deflationary. The findings are robust to alternate idiosyncratic risk proxies and variables associated with earnings management.

Overall, the knowledge derived from this study provides additional tools to assess the degree of earnings management by firms, and hence the quality of the financial reporting. Thus the findings will enable standard setters, financial market regulators, analysts, and investors to make more informed legislative, regulatory, resource allocation, and investment decisions.

Higher real earnings management (REM) reduces financial reporting quality and increases the uncertainty of future cash flows and profitability among investors. This study asserts that REM-induced noise increases idiosyncratic return volatility (IVOL), aims to examine the association between REM and IVOL and further investigates whether information asymmetry, firm life cycle and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) moderate the association between REM and IVOL.

The authors use 94,445 firm-year observations from the US over 1987 to 2019 and test this study’s hypotheses using ordinary least square regressions with robust standard errors clustered by firm. The authors use change analysis, two-stage models and the impact threshold of the confounding variable analysis to address endogeneity.

The authors find that REM increases IVOL. This positive association is more pronounced for firms with more information asymmetry, for firms in the mature stage of the life cycle, compared with their growth-stage counterparts; and during periods of high EPU.

Extant research suggests that accrual manipulation increases IVOL. However, the shift from accrual manipulation to REM and the managerial preference towards REM suggests that it is important to explore the impact of REM on IVOL. Thus, the authors enhance the understanding of the impact of earnings management on IVOL by documenting that REM-induced noise increases IVOL. The authors further extend the limited research on the consequences of REM and report an adverse consequence.

This paper aims to examine the association between earnings quality and firm-specific return volatility for a large sample of Japanese manufacturing firms.

This archival research uses idiosyncratic volatility and asynchronicity as two analogous proxies for firm-specific return volatility to investigate its association with earnings quality.

Using idiosyncratic volatility and asynchronicity as two comparable proxies for firm-specific return volatility, the author finds contradictory results. The author relates this contradiction to another debate in accounting and finance literature about whether firm-specific return volatility captures firm-specific information or noise. Initially, the author obtains conflicting results because the systematic risk, one of the components of asynchronicity, is highly correlated with earnings quality. After controlling for the systematic risk, the author finds that higher earnings quality is associated with lower firm-specific return volatility. This finding is consistent with the noise-based explanation of firm-specific return volatility. The author also separates earnings quality into an innate component driven by economic fundamentals and a discretionary component driven by managerial discretionary behavior and finds that both components have significant impact on firm-specific return volatility but the innate component has significantly stronger effect than the discretionary component.

This is the first research study presenting evidence on the association between earnings quality and firm-specific return volatility in the Japanese setting. The findings of this paper are likely to contribute to the resolution of a well-known debate on whether firm-specific return volatility captures more firm-specific information being impounded in stock prices or noise in stock prices.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between stock markets, environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors and Shariah-compliant in an integrated framework.

The authors employ the multivariate factor stochastic volatility (mvFSV) framework to extract the volatility of the different sectoral indices. Based on this evidence, the authors employ the quantile vector autoregressive (QVAR) approach to examine the dynamic spillover connectedness among the aforementioned indices.

The study emphasizes the following major findings: (1) significant time-varying spillover connectedness across quantiles, (2) bidirectional and asymmetric spillover effect among the ESG index and the other sectoral indices, (3) the strength of spillover connectedness is time-varying across quantiles, (4) based on the perspective of portfolio optimization, ESG market is a significant strong forecasting contributor to conventional and Shariah-compliant markets, (5) overall, the findings point out serious quantile pass-through effect among ESG index and the other sectoral indices during the COVID-19 health crisis.

This study extends the previous literature in the following ways. First, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, none of the existing studies have investigated the relationship between stock markets, ESG factors and Shariah-compliant in an integrated framework. Second, this study extends the previous scholarships by applying the mvFSV. Third, the authors propose a new rolling version to estimate dynamic spillovers, namely the rolling-window quantile VAR method. This approach provides a great advantage in computing the dynamics of return and variance spillover between variables in terms not only of the overall factor but also of the net (pairwise) aspect.

In this study the authors examine the nature and contents of key audit matters (KAMs), and the consequences of KAMs reporting on audit quality in the context of a developing country, Bangladesh. The authors’ proxies of audit qualities are discretionary accruals, small positive earnings surprise, audit report lag, earnings management via below the line items and audit fees.

The authors use content analysis of the KAMs for the period 2018–2021 to understand the nature and extent of KAMs reported by auditors in Bangladesh. The authors then use multivariate regression analysis to examine the effect of the number and content characteristics of KAMs on audit quality by using multivariate regression analysis.

Auditors in Bangladesh disclose a higher number of KAMs compared to other countries, disclose short descriptions of KAMs and industry generic KAMs. The authors document significant cross-sectional variations in the number and content characteristics of KAMs reported by auditors in Bangladesh. The authors’ pre-post analysis suggest that audit quality has improved after the adoption of KAMs. Cross-sectional analysis suggests that KAMs number and content characteristics are related to audit quality.

The authors’ findings imply that the KAMs reporting has the potential to play significant monitoring role in reducing the opportunistic behavior of managers. Hence, KAMs reporting can play a significant role in reducing the agency problem. For regulators, shareholders and corporate managers, the authors’ findings imply that if the audit quality is to be increased, the audit effort should be supported by an appropriate amount of audit fee.

The content characteristics of KAMs significantly influence managerial reporting behavior and affect the level of audit efforts.

Unlike developed countries (Gutierrez et al., 2018; Lennox et al. 2022), this study supports that KAMs reporting improves audit quality and control opportunistic behavior of managers in developing countries. The authors show that even though the KAMs disclosure quality is poor, it has the potential to improve financial reporting quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how pre-IPO cash flow and earnings volatility influence both post-IPO pricing and valuation. This paper provides an empirical extension of Pástor and Veronesi’s (2003, 2005) argument that uncertainty surrounding a private firm’s expected profitability can impact how the firm is valued in the IPO aftermarket.

This paper includes a sample of 695 IPOs between 1996 and 2011. Pre-IPO financial statement data are hand collected from the EDGAR database. Pre-IPO cash flow and earnings volatility is computed using the standard deviation of the firm’s three years of cash flows and earnings prior to the IPO. Tobin’s Q serves as a measure of post-IPO firm valuation. This paper includes two subsamples to account for the “hot” IPO market of the late 1990s.

Firms with higher pre-IPO cash flow volatility are associated with higher post-IPO aftermarket valuations. This result holds for both the “hot” IPO and the later sub-sample. Pre-IPO earnings volatility does not influence aftermarket valuations, suggesting that only the uncertainty surrounding cash flows serves as a salient measure to IPO investors. Finally, IPO underpricing is associated with pre-IPO cash flow volatility, suggesting another channel in which IPO pricing is influenced.

The hand collection for this paper is laborious and is limited to yearly cash flow and earnings numbers. The paper documents that quarterly and yearly cash flow and earnings volatility measures are highly correlated for the select stocks that allow for such testing. Further, a broader sample that accounts for more international IPO issues might corroborate the findings in this paper.

This study shows that investors both initially price and value IPO firms base on their pre-IPO cash flow volatility.

This is the first paper to examine the direct link between pre-IPO cash flow and earnings volatility on IPO aftermarket valuation and IPO pricing.

This paper aims to investigate the association between analyst forecast dispersion and investors’ perceived uncertainty toward earnings.

A new measure for investors’ expectations of earnings announcement uncertainty is constructed, using changes in implied volatility of option contracts prior to earnings announcements. Unlike other proxies of uncertainty, this measure isolates the incremental uncertainty regarding the upcoming earnings announcement and is a forward-looking measure.

Using this new proxy, this paper finds a significant negative correlation between analyst forecast dispersion and investors’ uncertainty regarding the upcoming earnings announcements. Further tests show that this negative correlation is driven by analysts’ private information acquisition rather than analysts; uncertainty toward upcoming earnings announcements. Additional cross-sectional tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced in the subsample with lower earnings quality.

This paper helps to further the understanding of the information content of analyst forecast dispersion, particularly the ways in which they gather and produce private information and their incentives for so doing.

This paper introduces a new market-based and forward-looking proxy of earnings announcement uncertainty that should be useful in future research. This paper also provides original empirical evidence that analysts gather and produce an additional private information to the market when facing noisy signals and that their information reduces investors’ uncertainty toward upcoming earnings announcements.

Corporate governance (CG) is an ongoing interesting topic getting the attention of market participant, business regulators and researchers in today’s business environment. The purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating role of earnings management on CG-value and CG-risk relationship in the emerging economy of Pakistan.

A panel data analysis is used in this study. A panel data of 71 non-financial listed companies of Pakistan for the 2008-2017 period is considered for this study. Secondary data is collected from the annual reports of non-financial firms listed on PSX. Seven econometric equations are developed to test the research hypothesis.

The results reveal that CG significantly enhances the firm value and performance measures. Moreover, CG mitigates the practices of earning management and eliminates the risk that develops opportunistic behavior among managers to commit frauds.

The results of this study suggest that the board of directors (BODs) should intensify their governance role and ensure that the executives perform their duties to maximize the wealth of the shareholders and not engage in any misrepresentation of accounts that may lower the company position and decrease the firm value. Moreover, the managers should be informed about their accountability and acknowledged that at the end of the year, they would be audited by an expert’s auditors for their responsibilities. Concerning regulatory bodies, regulatory authorities should ensure that there must be at least one independent member on the board. The better-governed system reduces both agency conflicts and enhances firm value.

A number of studies have already been undertaken by multiple investigators to build connection among CG with firm performance, but there is not even a single study in the literature that considers CG, firm value, firm Risk and discretionary earning management as a whole in one model to generalize its results in the emerging economy of Pakistan. A fundamental element of current analyzation process addresses that this is the very first graft of study conducted in Pakistan having combination of four variables together in one revision. There is minimal work that focuses on moderating effects of earning management on the CG-value and CG-risk relationships. This study uses two standard measures of firm performance (i.e. ROA and Tobin’s Q), one proxy of earning management (DEM) and three attributes of CG (board size, audit quality and ownership structure). Previously, researchers have not investigated a model that combines variables (CG as independent and Firm performance and Firm Risk as dependent along with DEM as moderator) in a single study.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether investors take flight to safety when sentiment is low. In other words, do safe firms perform better than risky firms following periods of low sentiment.

Using cash flow volatility and the percent of bullish investors as proxies for risk and investor sentiment the paper tests the relationship between sentiment and returns conditional on risk this performance. Second, a cross-sectional analysis is conducted based on individual firm characteristics and sentiment to explain annual returns.

The paper finds that there is a negative relationship between investor sentiment and the return of risky companies, which is contrary to prior studies. All told, risky companies perform worse following periods of high investor sentiment.

This paper presents evidence contrary to extant literature and that there is no concerted flight to safety. Investor sentiment has little influence on safe stocks.