In recent years, reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) became mandatory in many countries. The capital-market effects around this change have been extensively studied, but their sources are not yet well understood. This study aims to distinguish between several potential explanations for the observed capital-market effects. We find that, across all countries, mandatory IFRS reporting had little impact on liquidity. The liquidity effects around IFRS introduction are concentrated in the European Union (EU) and limited to five EU countries that concurrently made substantive changes in reporting enforcement. There is little evidence of liquidity benefits in IFRS countries without substantive enforcement changes even when they have strong legal and regulatory systems. Moreover, we find similar liquidity effects for firms that experience enforcement changes but do not concurrently switch to IFRS. Thus, changes in reporting enforcement or (unobserved) factors associated with these changes play a critical role for the observed liquidity benefits after mandatory IFRS adoption. In contrast, the change in accounting standards seems to have had little effect on market liquidity.

Firms with central boards of directors earn superior risk-adjusted stock returns. A long (short) position in the most (least) central firms earns average annual returns of 4.68%. Firms with central boards also experience higher future return-on-assets growth and more positive analyst forecast errors. Return prediction, return-on-assets growth, and analyst errors are concentrated among high growth opportunity firms or firms confronting adverse circumstances, consistent with boardroom connections mattering most for firms standing to benefit most from information and resources exchanged through boardroom networks. Overall, our results suggest that director networks provide economic benefits that are not immediately reflected in stock prices.

We provide insights into earnings quality from a survey of 169 CFOs of public companies and in-depth interviews of 12 CFOs and two standard setters. CFOs believe that (i) above all, high-quality earnings are sustainable and repeatable; specific characteristics include consistent reporting choices, backing by actual cash flows, and absence of one-time items and long-term estimates; (ii) about 50% of earnings quality is driven by non-discretionary factors such as industry and macro-economic conditions; (iii) in any given period, about 20% of firms manage earnings to misrepresent economic performance, and for such firms 10% of EPS is typically managed; (iv) earnings manipulation is hard to unravel from the outside but peer comparisons and lack of correspondence between earnings and cash flows provide helpful red flags. In addition, CFOs disagree with current standard setting on a number of issues including the sheer number of promulgated rules, the top-down approach to rule-making, the neglect of the matching principle, and the emphasis on fair value accounting. They indicate that a rules-based culture makes the audit function centralized and mechanical, and hinders the development of audit professionals. A summary impression from our work is that CFOs view earnings quality as more of a single and unconditional characteristic, in contrast to current research where measures of earnings quality are strongly conditional on the decision setting. This CFO view is related to their idea of “one number” – a single earnings metric that shapes both their interactions with external stakeholders and internal decision-making

Using detailed data of individual investors, this study shows that, on average, individuals invest more in firms with clear and concise financial disclosures. The results indicate this relation is less pronounced for high frequency trading and financially-literate individuals. The study also shows that individuals' returns are increasing with clearer and more concise disclosures, implying such disclosures reduce individuals' relative information disadvantage. Together, the findings suggest improved corporate disclosure practices benefit individual investors, in particular buy-and-hold investors.

Dichev, Graham, Harvey and Rajgopal (DGHR, in this issue) survey chief financial officers (CFOs) to elicit their views on earnings quality, broader trends in financial reporting, and the prevalence of earnings management. They provide some interesting insights on these issues. We discuss how CFOs' incentives in the financial reporting process are likely to affect what we can learn from them about earnings quality. We also discuss how DGHR's methodological choices regarding survey sample and question design affect their inferences, including what we can infer about the prevalence and magnitude of earnings management.

We discuss “Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Changes in Enforcement” by Christensen, Hail, and Leuz (CHL, in this issue). We begin by discussing CHL in the context of prior literature, and subsequently discuss the research design, results, and inferences. CHL seeks to contribute to the literature by disentangling the liquidity benefits of changes in accounting standards from those of changes in enforcement. Taken at face value, we believe that the evidence in CHL suggests that both change in enforcement and adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) confer liquidity benefits. The largest benefits obtain when the change to IFRS reporting is combined with change in enforcement. This is not to say that enforcement conveys capital market benefits but IFRS reporting does not, or that IFRS reporting conveys capital market benefits but enforcement does not; both are necessary to confer capital market benefits.

Using a unique dataset of Korean listed companies for which trade initiators are correctly identifiable, we estimate bias-free PIN (probability of informed trading) that is no longer subject to the trade misspecification problem and test whether it is related to expected returns. Unlike prior studies, we find that bias-free AdjPIN, the adjusted PIN purged of a liquidity component, is positively related to implied cost of equity. Our findings suggest that the errors in PIN variables hamper a proper identification of PIN pricing in prior studies.

A prevailing view in the disclosure literature is that firms who learn favorable market information are reluctant to disclose it, fearing it will attract new rivals. In this paper, we demonstrate that the presence of dual distribution arrangements, wherein consumers can purchase products either from traditional retail firms or directly from suppliers, can notably alter disclosure incentives. As under prevailing views, a retailer disclosing positive news risks entry by competitors. However, entry shifts the incumbent supplier–retailer relationship: the presence of new competitors leads the supplier to treat its retailer more as a strategic partner, translating into lower wholesale prices. This, in turn, can lead the retailer to willingly share favorable news, since such disclosure invites entry precisely when the retailer stands to benefit most from price concessions. Our results suggest that as dual distribution continues to increase in prominence, firms may be more willing to voluntarily disclose sensitive financial information particularly that which points to high demand for its products

We examine whether variation in the separation of ownership and control influences the tax practices of private firms with different ownership structures. Fama and Jensen (1983) assert that when equity ownership and corporate decision-making are concentrated in just a small number of decision-makers, these owner-managers will likely be more risk averse and thus less willing to invest in risky projects. Because tax avoidance is a risky activity that can impose significant costs on a firm, we predict that firms with greater concentrations of ownership and control, and thus more risk averse managers, avoid less income tax than firms with less concentrated ownership and control. Our results are consistent with these expectations. However, we also consider a competing explanation for these findings. In particular, we examine whether certain private firms enjoy lower marginal costs of tax planning, which facilitate greater income tax avoidance. Our results are consistent with the marginal costs of tax avoidance and the separation of ownership and control both influencing corporate tax practices.

We find that mean municipal debt costs are greater following financial restatement disclosures. Comparisons of the relative use of municipal debt, and of the use of unsecured versus secured debt, corroborate that financial restatements increase the cost of municipal debt financing. Additional analyses indicate that adverse consequences of restatements are mitigated by strong audit oversight and by provisions that encourage direct voter participation in the governance process. The evidence supports the use of restatements as a summary measure of financial reporting quality in the municipal context and informs thinking about auditor and voter oversight in the municipal financial reporting process.