Joint Call for Papers:
Special Issues on Corporate Disclosures
Accounting in Europe and The British Accounting Review
About the Special Issues
In conjunction with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), we invite submissions of papers on diverse aspects of disclosure, and drawing on diverse research methods and approaches. Successful submissions will have potential to demonstrate research impact by contributing to public policy development and in particular the regulation of financial reporting. Submissions are invited under three broad themes. Studies combining two or all themes are especially welcome:
A. Compliance with Mandatory Disclosure Requirements;
B. Specific Areas of Interest to the IASB;
C. Alternative Research Approaches.
We outline each of these in more detail below.
A. Compliance with Mandatory Disclosure Requirements
Lower levels of compliance with disclosures mandated by accounting standards generally result in less, or less meaningful, information. One strand of the literature has focused on compliance with mandatory disclosure requirements.
Theory suggests that the main reason for varying levels of compliance with disclosure requirements is preparers’ trade-off between the costs of compliance and non-compliance. There is a lack of empirical evidence to support this. Little is known, also, about how such trade-offs are operationalised and whether this differs across countries with different socio-economic environments. For instance, mandatory disclosure may be lower in environments which encourage managers’ reporting incentives to prevail (e.g, where enforcement is low or non-institutional norms encourage such behaviour), or where IFRS Standards’ adoption/convergence is perceived as detrimental.
The operation of national and pan-national oversight and enforcement agencies, including their processes, the sanctions at their disposal, and even the relative significance they attribute to compliance, remains unexplored. We also lack evidence on how and to what extent users of financial statements actually process disclosures and whether, and to what extent, they are concerned about (non)compliance. Also, with few exceptions, the evidence we do have is limited to research using quantitative methods.
Finally, the large majority of studies (published in English) on corporate mandatory disclosures relates to disclosures mandated by the IASB. There is therefore a lack of evidence relating to disclosures mandated by other standard setters and policy makers – including those mandating rules on auditing, corporate governance, and other spheres of corporate reporting.
Possible topics under Theme A include, but are not limited to:
B. Specific areas of interest to the IASB
C. Alternative Research Approaches
Virtually all of the literature on disclosures employs disclosure indices to capture disclosure and compliance levels, and most draws on quantitative methods to examine potential determinants of (non)disclosure.
The aim of this call for papers is also to elicit other forms of evidence than the purely quantitative, since quantitative research cannot capture all factors that influence corporate reporting practices. Qualitative approaches may therefore be better able to shed light on internal organisational influences on corporate disclosure decision, or on users’ information processing. Qualitative approaches may also be especially useful to explore the quality and content of disclosures. Thus, although quantitative research is welcome, we are particularly interested in research based on interpretative paradigms and qualitative methods, including, but not limited to, interviews, qualitative surveys, observation, (critical) discourse analysis, interpretative content analysis, as well as normative and conceptual contributions.
Guest Editors:
Lisa Evans, University of Stirling, lisa.evans@stir.ac.uk
Ioannis Tsalavoutas, University of Glasgow, ioannis.tsalavoutas@glasgow.ac.uk
Fanis Tsoligkas, University of Bath, f.tsoligkas@bath.ac.uk
Submission and Review Process
Authors are invited to submit their draft papers to the guest Editors via e-mail to ioannis.tsalavoutas@glasgow.ac.uk by 31 January 2022. With this preliminary submission, authors should state
By mid-February 2022, authors will be informed whether their paper will be considered for the special issues, and to which journal they are invited to submit. Papers will be subject to the usual double-blind review process. While the IASB is actively encouraging submissions, the review process will be completely independent of the IFRS Foundation and its subsidiary bodies. The editor of Accounting in Europe and the joint editors of The British Accounting review, respectively, will oversee the final set of accepted papers prior to publication. It is expected that accepted papers will be published during the first half of 2023. There is no submission fee.
Any queries about the special issue should be directed to the guest editors.
Accepted papers will be highlighted on the website of the IFRS Foundation.
Workshop
To enable authors to improve their work and to draw their findings to the attention of standard setters and practitioners in a timely way, authors of selected papers will be invited to present their work at a workshop in June-August 2022 (exact dates to be announced at a later stage), organised by the Adam Smith Observatory of Corporate Reporting Practices (Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow).
Each paper will benefit from constructive feedback from one discussant and an open exchange with the invited audience, which will comprise academics and nonacademics (including representatives from the IASB). Authors wishing to present at the workshop should express their interest with their initial paper submission. There is no registration fee. Further details on the workshop will be provided here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/adamsmithobservatory/ (more information about the event will be live from autumn 2021).
