Three essays are comprised in this dissertation to examine how institution and regulation frameworks affect the quality of financial reporting by banks. The empirical investigation on whether some governance mechanisms provide incentives for banks to report high quality financial information can have policy implications regarding bank regulation. Financial reporting quality is measured either by the level of earnings management or the extent of reporting conservatism. Using these two types of proxies for financial reporting quality, we examine whether reporting quality is affected by the legal protection on investors, bank supervision/regulation practices, or securities market governance mechanisms. In the first essay, we examine international differences in bank earnings management around the world. Following Leuz et al. (2003), we argue that bank earnings management is closely linked to private benefits of insiders. As a result, bank earnings management should be negatively related to institutional factors such as legal protection on investors and bank supervision policies that encourage market discipline on banks. Consistent with this prediction, we provide evidence that earnings management is less pervasive for banks in countries where investors are better protected and where supervision policies strongly encourage private-sector monitoring on banks. We also show that the legal protection mechanisms have stronger effects on curbing activities of earnings discretion, but bank supervision policies that encourage private-sector monitoring are better at limiting income smoothing activities. Our results also suggest that stringent capital requirement or strong government supervisions are less effective in reducing earnings activities of banks. In the second essay, we document that banks, especially those that are publicly traded, are conservative in their financial reporting. In particular, banks are conservative in reporting earnings changes and they incorporate more loan loss provisions when their operating cash flows decrease or when the amount of their problem loans increases. Banks also charge off more problem loans when their loan loss provisions increase. Our cross-country comparison shows that conservative financial reporting is more pronounced in countries where supervisors are empowered to take adequate actions against banks or where bank supervisory policies to encourage private-sector monitoring are more prevalent than in countries where there is less supervision or where there is less private-sector monitoring. In the third essay, we further investigate whether securities market governance explain the international differences of reporting conservatism across listing status of banks. Our results indicate that, after controlling for banking industry regulations, securities market governance has incremental effects on the reporting conservatism by public banks. The conservative reporting by public banks is stronger in countries where securities regulators are more empowered to intervene in banks for violations to securities laws. Furthermore, the stronger conservatism for public banks relative to private banks is widespread in countries with more developed bond market. The evidence suggests that public banks practice more conservative reporting than their private counterparts when debt contracting mechanisms function well.