Female Audit Partners and Extended Audit Reporting: UK Evidence

This study investigates whether audit partner gender is associated with the extent of auditor disclosure and the communication style regarding risks of material misstatements that are classified as key audit matters (KAMs). Using a sample of UK firms during the 2013–2017 period, our results suggest that female audit partners are more likely than male audit partners to disclose more KAMs with more details after controlling for both client and audit firm attributes. Furthermore, female audit partners are found to use a less optimistic tone and provide less readable audit reports, compared to their male counterparts, suggesting that behavioural variances between female and male audit partners may have significant implications on their writing style. Therefore, this study offers new insights on the role of audit partner gender in extended audit reporting. Our findings have important implications for audit firms, investors, policymakers and governments in relation to the development, implementation and enforcement of gender diversity

Market Reaction to the Expected Loss Model in Banks

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordWe investigate how investors perceive the adoption of the expected-loss model (ELM) for impairment incorporated in IFRS 9. Using a sample of European listed banks covering the period of the standard-setting process of IFRS 9, we examine whether the market perceives the new regulation to increase shareholder wealth. First, we document a positive market reaction to the ELM adoption events. Second, we find that investors perceive that the potential benefits of ELM are more pronounced for larger banks, banks with lower profitability and higher systemic risk, and for those that received a public bailout and with more positively skewed returns. Overall, these results support a “monitoring” channel suggesting that ELM may lead to greater bank transparency and more effective market discipline, fundamental for improving financial stability

Reporting strategies: What makes family firms beat around the bush? Family-related antecedents of annual report readability

We investigate the heterogeneity of reporting strategies across family firms by focusing on the readability of annual reports. Adopting the socioemotional wealth perspective, we introduce three family-related antecedents of annual report readability to accounting and family business literature: family power, the overlap between family and firm name, and generational stage. Our findings, based on the textual analysis of 288 annual reports of Italian listed family firms, reveal that annual report readability increases at higher levels of family power, decreases at later generational stages, and when the firm carries the family name