Admitting Mistakes: Home Country Effect on the Reliability of Restatement Reporting

We study the frequency of restatements by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that the restatement rate of U.S. listed foreign firms is significantly lower than that of comparable U.S. firms and that the difference depends on the firm's home country characteristics. Foreign firms from countries with a weak rule of law are less likely to restate than are firms from strong rule of law countries. While the lower rate of restatements can represent an absence of errors, it can also indicate a lack of detection and disclosure of errors and irregularities. We infer the magnitude of detection and disclosure by associating the frequency of restatements with the quality of the firm's internal reporting system. We find that only U.S. firms and foreign firms from strong rule of law countries show a positive association between restatement frequency and internal control weaknesses. Firms from weak rule of law countries show no significant association. We interpret these findings as home country enforcement affecting firms' likelihood of detecting and reporting existing accounting irregularities. This suggests that for U.S. listed foreign firms, less frequent restatements can be a signal of opportunistic reporting rather than a lack of accounting errors and irregularities

Accounting Standards and International Portfolio Holdings

Do differences in countries' accounting standards affect global investment decisions? We explore this question by examining how accounting distance, the difference in the accounting standards used in the investor's and the investee's countries, affects the asset allocation decisions of global mutual funds. We find that investors tend to underweight investees with greater accounting distance. Using the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as an event that changed the accounting standards of various country-pairs, we examine how two sources of changes in accounting distance—(i) change due to IFRS adoption of the investee and (ii) change due to IFRS adoption in the investor's country—affect global portfolio allocation decisions. We find that the tendency to underinvest in investees with greater accounting distance significantly weakens when accounting distance is reduced either from an investee's IFRS adoption or from IFRS adoption in the investor's country. The latter finding holds despite the fact that IFRS adoption in the investor's country had no impact on the accounting standards under which the investee firms present their financial information; the only change is in the investor's familiarity with these standards. This suggests that differences in accounting standards affect investor demand by imposing greater information-processing cost on those less familiar with the reporting standards

How do firms achieve corporate social performance? An integrated perspective

International audienceThis study provides an integrated view of the combined direct and indirect effects of the main drivers of CSR performance, at country, firm and CEO levels respectively. We extend prior literature by showing that the institutional context, firm CSR governance practices, and CSRrelated compensation incentives have impacts of different magnitudes on CSR performance, as well as significant combined effects. Using an international sample of 1,272 observations over 20 countries, we document significant indirect cascading effects of the institutional setting and firm-specific governance practices on CSR performance. From a managerial perspective, we find that firms operating in countries that are less oriented towards satisfying the needs of the stakeholders still have the ability to counterbalance this institutional impact and achieve relatively high CSR performance by implementing sound firm-level CSR governance practices and incentives