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Professor Steve Zeff’s digital library

Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business is pleased to share Professor Steve Zeff’s digital library with the EAA community: https://business.rice.edu/stephen-zeff-digital-library. This open digital library was created by the Jones School as a permanent repository for Steve’s contributions to our understanding of the historical evolution of financial reporting standards and regulations in the U.S. and globally. The website includes several short video clips and two of Steve’s related publications. In the first video series, Steve…
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Update from the EAA Stakeholder Reporting Committee – Response to the Request for Information- Consultation on Agenda Priorities, issued by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) Posted by Liz Demers and Joanna Krasodomska on behalf of the EAA Stakeholder Reporting Committee (EAA SRC).

The ISSB published the Request for Information Consultation on Agenda Priorities on 4 May 2023. The objective of the agenda consultation was to ask all those interested in sustainability-related financial reporting for their views on: the strategic direction and balance of the ISSB’s activities; the suitability of criteria for assessing which sustainability-related matters (including topics, industries and activities) to prioritize and add to the ISSB’s work plan; and a proposed list of new research and…
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New version: Introductory Guide to Using Stata in Empirical Financial Accounting Research

A new version of my Stata guide is now available and freely accessible via Github (including code and data examples). Please see https://github.com/dveenman/stataguide or here to go directly to the pdf. The objective of this guide is to assist BSc/MSc students, PhD students, and junior researchers in using Stata for empirical archival research. Stata is a powerful program that can be used to analyze many different research questions in the fields of accounting, finance, economics,…
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One ESG metric is like squaring a circle

It appears to be extremely hard to produce  a meaningful ESG score. Standard and Poor’s recently decided that it will no longer rank companies’ environmental, social and governance risks from 1 to 5 . This decision can be understood in the light of how aggregate ESG scores are constructed as  discussed in a recent FT publication: “Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals.” This article made it clear that the current…
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The lease standard has changed, and firms’ transition disclosures confuse more than they clarify

In a paper recently published in the European Accounting Review, we study the text of the transition disclosures in firms’ financial statements explaining the likely effects of a new standard. For a sample of almost all affected firms, we extract the text that refers to how firms plan to transition to the new lease standard. The text runs from a couple of dozen to sometimes over 500 words per disclosure. We then quantify this text…
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How often and how much information should publicly listed firms report?

Disclosure regulation is pervasive and has been increasing in developed economies, despite regulators' difficulty determining the socially optimal level of disclosure. Showcasing this difficulty, regulators have struggled to reach a consensus on the frequency and content of interim reporting for decades. For example, the European Union (EU) introduced mandatory quarterly reports in 2004, only to abolish the mandate in 2013, returning to a semi-annual reporting frequency for firms whose securities are trading on a regulated…
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Compensation Shifting from Salary to Dividends

This study focuses on the strategic behavior of owner-managers in relation to their compensation and its impact on reported earnings. We investigate whether owner-managers of smaller firms manipulate their compensation, specifically by decreasing their salaries and increasing dividends, to meet or beat the zero earnings benchmark. We emphasize that owner-managers have significant compensation discretion, enabling them to choose between salary (which decreases earnings) and dividends (which does not decrease earnings). We conduct our analysis using…
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Red flags in research as a means to overcome group think

Red flags in research as a means to overcome group think   How independent tests can help to overcome group think so as to enhance fraud detection. In his classic experiment in 1955, Solomon Asch showed that as soon as one person paints an incorrect picture, this picture is confirmed by a non-trivial number of others. In his research Asch shows four lines: the test line and lines 1, 2 and 3. Participants in his…
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Why not use a funny game to start your next class?

  It was great having Patricia Everaert hosting a fantastic hands-on Classroom session during the EAA Annual Congress at Espoo, Helsinki.   We left the room with several ideas and readily-available tools to use in our accounting courses, that will certainly make learning more engaging, novel, surprising and exciting!   More specifically, to have a look at the DUGA tool, you can go to www.duga.castars.net and register.  Add the code 590de1 and you can start playing…
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Innovative Data – Use-cases in management accounting research and practice

With recent advances in technology, the amount of data available for academics and practitioners to analyze has grown exponentially. However, at this stage, the potential of this data to assist managers in improving decision-making and managerial control has not been fully realized.   The editorial In their editorial for the European Accounting Review special issue on innovative data sources in management accounting research, Matthias Mahlendorf, Melissa Martin, and David Smith present a series of ‘use-cases’…