A large number of empirical studies have addressed the effects of adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), but the results have been mixed. We use a meta‐analysis of 56 empirical studies with 1,265 effect sizes to determine the impact of adoption of IFRS on financial reporting comparability, market liquidity, cost of equity, and cost of debt. This approach provides an objective view of the empirical results, in contrast to narrative reviews which offer subjective conclusions. We find that IFRS adoption has increased financial reporting comparability and market liquidity, and reduced the cost of equity. For cost of debt, a decrease is observed only for voluntary adoption. Our meta‐regression analysis explains the variation in the observed effect of adoption of IFRS across mandatory and voluntary adoption of IFRS, and choice of measures, control variables, estimation methods, and the strength of the empirical results. We emphasize the importance of these study characteristics and call for further studies focusing on the cost of debt and also studies using recent data to reflect the changes in IFRS. This study should be of interest to regulators and policymakers as they are expected to assess the impacts of adoption of IFRS.
Carbon emissions and agency costs can have an impact on firms’ financial performance. However, limited attention has been paid to the combined and gradual effects of these two factors on firms’ performance. We explore the separate and combined effects of carbon emissions and agency costs on firms’ financial performance by utilizing data from 2323 US firms that disclosed their environmental information to CDP from 2007 to 2016. The results indicate that firms with higher carbon emissions experience lower performance as the market reacts negatively. Further, firms with both higher carbon emissions and higher agency costs have lower performance. We also investigated year-on-year change in firm performance and found that, keeping agency costs constant, a change in carbon emissions leads to lower performance. Overall, the findings suggest that when the market responds negatively to firms’ environmental decisions, high agency costs exacerbate the adverse effect of high carbon emissions on firm performance.
PurposeThis purpose of this study is to examine the association between earnings management (accruals earnings management (AEM) and/or real activities manipulation (RAM)) and firm underperformance following seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) using cross-country data.Design/methodology/approachThe study applies ordinary least squares regression analyses to a sample of 11,764 observations on firms from 22 countries over the period from 2005 to 2017. The methods include weighted least squares regression, sub-sampling approach and alternative measures of firm performance, earnings management and legal regime for robustness tests as well as a two-stage least squares instrumental variable (IV) approach to address endogeneity concerns.FindingsThe results suggest that RAM has a greater negative impact on post-SEO performance than AEM. The result is economically significant for RAM only. The results also reveal that the negative impact of earnings management, in particular RAM, on post-SEO performance is greater in countries with a strong legal regime than in other countries.Practical implicationsEarnings management around SEOs has important implications for investors, regulators and policymakers. The study suggests that policymakers should improve the current legal conditions to promote fairness in the equity market.Originality/valueThe results from the cross-country data support earlier results from single-country studies on the impact of earnings management on post-SEO performance. The study also provides new evidence on the variation in the impact of earnings management according to the strength of the legal regime operating in a country.
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