Includes research papers that examines various issues including the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs), management accounting change in the context of public sector reforms, corporate reporting disclosures, auditing, etcetera.

This book provides researchers and scholars with a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of earnings management theory and literature. While it raises new questions for future research, the book can be also helpful to other parties who rely on financial reporting in making decisions like regulators, policy makers, shareholders, investors, and gatekeepers e.g., auditors and analysts. The book summarizes the existing literature and provides insight into new areas of research such as the differences between earnings management, fraud, earnings quality, impression management, and expectation management; the trade-off between earnings management activities; the special measures of earnings management; and the classification of earnings management motives based on a comprehensive theoretical framework.

This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?

This is a major new reference work covering all aspects of finance. Coverage includes finance (financial management, security analysis, portfolio management, financial markets and instruments, insurance, real estate, options and futures, international finance) and statistical applications in finance (applications in portfolio analysis, option pricing models and financial research). The project is designed to attract both an academic and professional market. It also has an international approach to ensure its maximum appeal. The Editors' wish is that the readers will find the encyclopedia to be an invaluable resource.

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.

Estimating the Cost of Capital Implied by Market Prices and Accounting Data focuses on estimating the expected rate of return implied by market prices, summary accounting numbers, and forecasts of earnings and dividends. Estimates of the expected rate of return, often used as proxies for the cost of capital, are obtained by inverting accounting-based valuation models. The author describes accounting-based valuation models and discusses how these models have been used, and how they may be used, to obtain estimates of the cost of capital. The practical appeal of accounting-based valuation models is that they focus on the two variables that are commonly at the heart of valuations carried out by equity analysts -- forecasts of earnings and forecasts of earnings growth. The question at the core of this monograph is -- How can these forecasts be used to obtain an estimate of the cost of capital? The author examines the empirical validity of the estimates based on these forecasts and explores ways to improve these estimates. In addition, this monograph details a method for isolating the effect of any factor of interest (such as cross-listing, fraud, disclosure quality, taxes, analyst following, accounting standards, etc.) on the cost of capital. If you are interested in understanding the academic literature on accounting-based estimates of expected rate of return this monograph is for you. Estimating the Cost of Capital Implied by Market Prices and Accounting Data provides a foundation for a deeper comprehension of this literature and will give a jump start to those who have an interest in these topics. The key ideas are introduced via examples based on actual forecasts, accounting information, and market prices for listed firms, and the numerical examples are based on sound algebraic relations.