Manuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: Effective corporate governance requires accurate and reliable financial information. Historically, each nation has developed and pursued its own financial standards; however, as financial markets consolidate into a global market, there is a need for a common set of financial standards. As a result, there is a movement towards harmonization of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) throughout the global economy. While there has been considerable research on the effects of IFRS adoption, there has been relatively little systematic study as to the antecedents of IFRS adoption. Consequently, this study seeks to understand why some economies have quickly embraced IFRS standards while others partially adopt IFRS and still others continue to resist. Research Findings/Results: After controlling for market capitalization and GDP growth, we find that foreign aid, import penetration, and level of education achieved within a national economy are all predictive of the degree to which IFRS standards are adopted across 132 developing, transitional and developed economies. Theoretical/Academic Implications: We found that all three forms of isomorphic pressures (i.e., coercive, mimetic, and normative) are predictive of IFRS adoption. Consequently, institutional theory with its emphasis on legitimacy-seeking by social actors was relatively well supported by our data. This suggests that the IFRS adoption process is driven more by social legitimization pressures, than it is by economic logic. Practitioner/Policy Implications: For policy makers, our findings suggest that the institutional pressures within an economy are the key drivers of IFRS adoption. Consequently, policy makers should seek to influence institutional pressures that thwart and/or enhance adoption of IFRS. For executives of multinational firms, our findings provide insights that can help to explain and predict future IFRS adoption within economies where their foreign subsidiaries operate. This ability could be useful for creating competitive advantages for foreign subsidiaries where IFRS adoption was resisted, or avoiding competitive disadvantages for foreign subsidiaries unfamiliar with IFRS standards.

Financial reporting via XBRL is a low-cost method for increasing transparency and compliance while potentially decreasing a firm's cost of capital.

Accountants. Educators can use these common and specialized competencies to design accounting curricula to prepare students for entry into auditing careers. Practitioners can also use them to design hiring and evaluation criteria. The job market for accounting graduates is no longer dominated by public accounting. A more generalized skill set may be taught across accounting curriculums that was previously deemed necessary. Also recent international accounting scandals have put the accounting profession under public and regulatory scrutiny. New regulation and auditing standards may regain public trust. The knowledge, skills, and abilities for entry-level accountants are: communication skills, interpersonal skills, general business knowledge, accounting knowledge, problem-solving skills, information technology, personal attitudes and capabilities, and computer skills.

After several high-profile data security breaches (e.g., Target Corporation, Michaels Stores, Inc., The Home Depot), corporate boards are prioritizing the oversight of Information Technology (IT) risk. Firms are also increasingly faced with disclosure decisions regarding IT security breaches. This study proposes that firms can use the creation of a board-level technology committee as part of the firm's information technology governance (ITG) to signal the firm's ability to detect and respond to security breaches. Using reported security breaches during the time period 2005–2014, results indicate that firms with technology committees are more likely to have reported breaches in a given year than are firms without the committee. Further analysis suggests that this positive association is driven by relatively young technology committees and external source breaches. Specifically, as a technology committee becomes more established, its firm is not as likely to be breached. To obtain further evidence on the perceived value of a technology committee, this study uses a returns analysis and finds that the presence of a technology committee mitigates the negative abnormal stock returns arising from external breaches. Findings add to the evolving ITG literature, as well to the signaling theory and disclosure literatures.

Firms have the incentive to aggregate multiple pieces of good and bad news together in a consistent direction (i.e., all positive news or all negative news) and disclose it either sequentially or all together (simultaneously) in order to reduce the risk of stock price volatility or large stock price declines. Unfortunately for investors, disclosure patterns such as these may result in order effects, which reduce decision quality. My paper examines the results of three experiments in order to determine: (1) which order effect, if any, results when long series of consistent direction voluntary disclosures are made, and (2) if the sequential or simultaneous nature of the disclosures exacerbates any order effect found. The first two experiments use undergraduates as participants, while the third experiment uses actual nonprofessional investors to try and tease out explanations for the experimental findings. I find recency effects for all conditions in all experiments, and significantly greater recency effects for the sequential conditions relative to the simultaneous conditions in the 40-cue experiments. Additionally, results of the supplemental experiment provide evidence that nonprofessional investors can be information seeking and active in their investment decision-making, which can prohibit attention decrement. Findings contribute to the voluntary disclosure, judgment and decision-making (JDM), and belief revision literatures, as well as highlight the context-specific nature of the belief-adjustment model’s predictions.