Disclosure Incentives and Data Availability for Private Firms: Implications for Comparisons of Public and Private Firm Financial Reporting Quality

Author(s):  
Darren Bernard ◽  
David Burgstahler ◽  
Devrimi Kaya
2012 ◽  
Vol 87 (6) ◽  
pp. 2061-2094 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeong-Bon Kim ◽  
Xiaohong Liu ◽  
Liu Zheng

ABSTRACT: This study examines the impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on audit fees. We first build an analytical audit fee model to analyze the impact on audit fees for the change in both audit complexity and financial reporting quality brought about by IFRS adoption. We then test the model's predictions using audit fee data from European Union countries that mandated IFRS adoption in 2005. We find that mandatory IFRS adoption has led to an increase in audit fees. We also find that the IFRS-related audit fee premium increases with the increase in audit complexity brought about by IFRS adoption, and decreases with the improvement in financial reporting quality arising from IFRS adoption. Finally, we find some evidence that the IFRS-related audit fee premium is lower in countries with stronger legal regimes. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks. Data availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the paper.


2013 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 1007-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santhosh Ramalingegowda ◽  
Chuan-San Wang ◽  
Yong Yu

ABSTRACT Miller and Modigliani's (1961) dividend irrelevance theorem predicts that in perfect capital markets dividend policy should not affect investment decisions. Yet in imperfect markets, external funding constraints that stem from information asymmetry can force firms to forgo valuable investment projects in order to pay dividends. We find that high-quality financial reporting significantly mitigates the negative effect of dividends on investments, especially on R&D investments. Further, this mitigating role of financial reporting quality is particularly important among firms with a larger portion of firm value attributable to growth options. In addition, we show that the mitigating role of high-quality financial reporting is more pronounced among firms that have decreased dividends than among firms that have increased dividends. These results highlight the important role of financial reporting quality in mitigating the conflict between firms' investment and dividend decisions and thereby reducing the likelihood that firms forgo valuable investment projects in order to pay dividends. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources identified in the paper.


2011 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 1255-1288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Chen ◽  
Ole-Kristian Hope ◽  
Qingyuan Li ◽  
Xin Wang

ABSTRACT Prior research shows that financial reporting quality (FRQ) is positively related to investment efficiency for large U.S. publicly traded companies. We examine the role of FRQ in private firms from emerging markets, a setting in which extant research suggests that FRQ would be less conducive to the mitigation of investment inefficiencies. Earlier studies show that private firms have lower FRQ, presumably because of lower market demand for public information. Prior research also shows that FRQ is lower in countries with low investor protection, bank-oriented financial systems, and stronger conformity between tax and financial reporting rules. Using firm-level data from the World Bank, our empirical evidence suggests that FRQ positively affects investment efficiency. We further find that the relation between FRQ and investment efficiency is increasing in bank financing and decreasing in incentives to minimize earnings for tax purposes. Such a connection between tax-minimization incentives and the informational role of earnings has often been asserted in the literature. We provide explicit evidence in this regard.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 1387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keehwan Kim ◽  
Ohjin Kwon

<p class="s0">This study examines the investment efficiency of private and public firms in Korea. Prior studies suggest that the investment efficiency of firms can change according to the companies' agency problem caused by the existence of information asymmetry. Moreover, they argue that there is less information asymmetry in private firms than in public firms, because the major investors of private firms have access to the internal information of the companies. We extend these studies by comparing the investment efficiency of private and public firms using an extended audited financial dataset of Korean firms. Our results show that the investment efficiency of private firms is higher than that of public firms, because the agency problem of the former is lower than that of the latter. Additionally, private firms invest more efficiently in R&amp;D and capital expenditures than public firms. Further, when we use alternative exogenous firm-specific proxies to measure the likelihood of over or under-investment, the results are substantially consistent with the main results. Finally, we re-test our hypotheses by including financial reporting quality proxies as control variables in the main regression model. These investigations further support our main results. Our study contributes to emerging literature on the difference between private and public firms by showing that the investment efficiency of the former is different from that of the latter. In addition, this study provides additional evidence on the agency problem that affects firms' investment decisions.</p>


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 725-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hua-Wei Huang ◽  
Ena Rose-Green ◽  
Chih-Chen Lee

SYNOPSIS: This study examines the association between chief executive officer (CEO) age and the financial reporting quality of firms. The financial reporting qualities examined are the meeting or beating of analyst earnings forecasts and financial restatements. Based on extant research, we hypothesize that older CEOs are associated with higher-quality financial reporting. Using a sample of 3,413 firms for the period 2005 to 2008, we find a positive association between CEO age and financial reporting quality. Specifically, we find that CEO age is negatively associated with firms meeting or beating analyst earnings forecasts and financial restatements. Our study therefore extends the corporate governance and financial reporting quality literature by identifying CEO age as a determinant of financial reporting quality. Data Availability: Data are publicly available.


2016 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Soo Bae ◽  
Seung Uk Choi ◽  
Dan S. Dhaliwal ◽  
Phillip T. Lamoreaux

ABSTRACT This study examines the relation between auditors and their clients' investment efficiency. We hypothesize and find that auditor characteristics that proxy for an auditor's knowledge and resources are associated with higher client investment efficiency, after controlling for the auditor's effect on financial reporting quality. This result is consistent with auditors providing informational advantages to their clients in a generalized investment setting. We find that this auditor effect is more pronounced for clients who have a higher demand for information as measured by client size, industry competition, and client complexity. The effect is also more pronounced for clients of longer-tenured auditors. Overall, the results suggest that auditors may be one component to the management information environment and, as such, appear to influence capital investment behavior. JEL Classifications: M4; M42. Data Availability: All data are publicly available.


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