8th CompNet Annual Conference
From Micro to Macro: Market Power, Firms’ Heterogeneity and Investment 8th Annual Conference of CompNet, jointly organized with IMF, EIB, ENRI and IWH, March 18-19 2019, European…
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7th vintage
7th Vintage CompNet Dataset The CompNet dataset includes a set of micro-aggregated indicators to enhance policy and academic analysis on competitiveness and productivity. All the…
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6th vintage
6th Vintage CompNet Dataset CompNet has created a competitiveness indicator dataset including a number of European countries. The dataset is unique in terms of its coverage and…
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Charts
Info Graphs Sometimes pictures say more than a thousand words. Therefore, we selected a few graphs to present our main topics visually. If you should have any questions or would…
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Annual Reports
IWH Annual Reports The IWH Annual Reports beginning from year 2003 are provided as pdf documents. The latest reports are available in English and in German, former reports only in…
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State Ownership and Financial Statement Comparability
William Francis, Xian Gu, Iftekhar Hasan, Joon Ho Kong
Journal of Business Finance and Accounting,
No. 7,
2024
Abstract
This paper investigates how state ownership affects financial reporting practices in China. Using several measures of state (government) ownership, we show that a one-standard-deviation increase in state ownership decreases financial statement comparability by 36.61%, and the impact is more pronounced when the central authority has majority control of the company. Moreover, lower earnings quality and lower levels of accounting conservatism among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) may explain the lower accounting comparability between SOEs and non-SOEs (NSOEs). Additionally, similar (different) managerial objectives converge (diverge) financial statement comparability between SOEs and NSOEs. Last, the geographical locations of firms also contribute to financial statement comparability. We employ a difference-in-differences design, changes regression and entropy balancing to mitigate potential endogeneity bias.
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Members' Assembly
Members' Assembly As an association established and registered under German civil law the IWH is composed of different internal bodies through which it is led and coordinated,…
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CompNet Database
The CompNet Competitiveness Database The Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) is a forum for high level research and policy analysis in the areas of competitiveness and…
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Disentangling Stock Return Synchronicity From the Auditor's Perspective
Iftekhar Hasan, Joseph A. Micale, Qiang Wu
Journal of Business Finance and Accounting,
No. 5,
2024
Abstract
This paper investigates a firm's stock return asynchronicity through the auditor's perspective to distinguish whether this asynchronicity can proxy for the company's firm-specific information or the quality of its information environment. We find a significant and positive association between asynchronicity and audit fees after controlling for auditor quality and other factors that affect audit fees, suggesting that stock return asynchronicity is more likely to capture a company's firm-specific information than its information environment. We also find that asynchronous firms are more likely to receive adverse opinions on their internal controls over financial reporting, but are associated with lower costs of capital and auditor litigation, providing further evidence in support of the firm-specific information argument. Asynchronicity's positive association with audit fees is driven by firms with higher accounting reporting complexity, suggesting stock return asynchronicity captures a firm's complexity, resulting in more significant efforts by the auditor.
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Green Transition
Green Transition Research and Policy Advice for Structural Change in the German Economy Dossier, 18.06.2024 Green Transition The green transition is a key topic of our time. In a…
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