The board of directors is one of a number of internal governance mechanisms that are intended to ensure that the interests of shareholders and managers are closely aligned, and to discipline or remove ineffective management teams. Among the most significant governance issues currently faced by the modern corporation are those relating to diversity, such as gender and age, and independence of directors. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors; Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The purpose of financial reporting is to provide information that is useful for decision making. Recently, however, there has been a systematic decline in the usefulness of such information. Indeed, the current reporting model seems to be no longer sufficient mainly due to the fact that it ignores many of the nonfinancial intangible factors which are increasingly becoming important in determining corporate value and performance. That is, there is a need for the traditional reporting model to be modified or at least broadened to reflect Intangible Assets (IA) in order to enhance the usefulness of information being provided to different stakeholders. In the absence of mandatory reporting requirements, one alternative way of disseminating information regarding IA is to engage in voluntary disclosure practices. It has also been suggested that companies which would benefit the most from such practice are those originating from emerging economies looking to expand into international markets. While there exists an array of empirical studies which have examined the voluntary disclosure practices of corporations from developed economies, less considered are the reporting practices of emerging market companies regarding their IA. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the voluntary disclosure practices of the top 200 emerging market companies regarding the variety, nature and extent of IA and to consider some of the factors that may be associated with the level of such disclosure. Using a disclosure index based on the Value Chain Scoreboard™ (Lev, 2001), narrative sections of the 2002 annual reports of the top 200 emerging market companies are analysed. The findings indicate that emerging market companies engage in voluntary disclosure practices in order to disseminate different varieties of mainly quantitative IA information to their global stakeholders. Further, the variety and the extent of IA disclosure are associated with corporate specific factors such as leverage, adoption of IFRS/US GAAP, industry type, and price to book ratio. Contrary to the existing literature on voluntary disclosure, however, firm size and ownership concentration are not found to be associated with the IA disclosure level. Country specific factors such as the level of risks associated with economic policy and legal system are also found to be significantly associated with the IA voluntary disclosure level. Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (thi...

This paper analyzes the capitalization of Research & Development (R&D) expenditures underInternational Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Discretionary R&D capitalization can be exercised by managers to signal private information on future economic benefits to the market. It can, however, also serve as opportunistic earnings management. We analyze a unique, hand-collected sample of highly R&D intensive German IFRS firms during 1998-2012. We find that market values are not associated with capitalized R&D for the overall sample, indicating that earnings management may be a concern. We identify firm-years for which R&D capitalization is possibly used for pushing their earnings above a specific threshold (e.g. analysts' forecasted earnings, prior year's earnings). Our results show that both the decision to capitalize and how much to capitalize are strongly associated with benchmark beating. Consistently, we find that market values are negatively associated with capitalized R&D for firms who are likely to use capitalization for benchmark beating (about one third of the overall sample). On the other hand, the market values R&D capitalization positively for well-performing firms, for which capitalizing does not matter to beat an earnings benchmark (about half of the overall sample). This finding is robust to controls for endogeneity, various deflators, and different measures for earnings management.

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This study examines changes in segment reporting in Australia following the adoption of the international accounting standard, IFRS 8 Operating Segments. We analyse segment disclosures of the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in their pre-and post-adoption of AASB 8, the equivalent Australian standard to IFRS 8. Our findings indicate that the number of reportable segments and the extent of disclosure have increased post-adoption of AASB 8. Contrary to expectations, however, there is very little change in the identification of reportable segments. Companies, in general, have managed to retain their segment reporting formats and disclosures from the pre-AASB 8 period.

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This paper examines the content of voluntary disclosures of intangible asset (IA) information communicated by the world’s leading 200 emerging-market companies. We make a detailed assessment of the variety, nature, and extent of IA disclosures in annual reports using an index based on the Value Chain Scoreboard™ devised by Lev (2001). Our findings show that the vast majority of companies engage in IA voluntary disclosure practices. As expected, most companies disclose IA information stemming from the Discovery and Learning phase of the value chain, while significantly fewer companies disclose IA information from the Implementation phase. Contrary to popular belief, we find that the majority of companies disclose quantitative IA information, with both financial and nonfinancial components, rather than qualitative. Our results further indicate that the variety, nature, and extent of IA voluntary disclosures differ according to type of accounting standard adopted and industry, but not size or foreign listing.

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