Does compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) mandatory disclosures appear in form but not substance? This paper examines the conflicting incentives, both national and European, faced by firms in the European Union (EU) when complying with IFRS mandatory disclosures. The purpose of the study was to test Ball's (2006) assertion that international companies used one of two tiers of IFRS compliance: (a) boilerplate disclosures that present a veneer of uniformity with no national enforcement or (b) detailed disclosures backed by a national enforcement regime. This research reviewed annual reports from 3,300 listed companies within the 27 EU member nations and sampled 150 companies within the EU to see if these companies complied with IFRS mandatory disclosures in a consistent and comparable manner. This study compared compliance levels for the original EU15 member nations with New Member States (NMS). The key findings were that most EU companies did comply in form with Level 1 IFRS disclosures regardless of the country of origin or the level of enforcement. An ADR Listing was very important in predicting Level 1 Compliance. For Level 2, compliance in substance, companies from the EU15 member states and from stronger enforcement regimes had better compliance than those companies from NMS or weaker enforcement regimes. Having a Big 4 auditor and an ADR listing also had a positive influence on Level 2 Compliance.

This thesis investigates statutory executive stock option (ESO) disclosures by Australian listed companies, and their nature, extent and association with governance characteristics. The study is motivated by the limited prior Australian studies that find evidence of low levels of compliance with ESO disclosures (Nelson and Percy, 2005), and by the changes in Australia's regulatory environment over the financial years 2001 to 2004. Arising from these motivations, three research questions are addressed: 1) what is the nature and extent of compliance with ESO disclosures in annual reports and does it change over time?, 2) how does corporate governance influence compliance with ESO disclosures?, and 3) what other factors influence compliance with ESO disclosures? Based on prior research and an application of agency theory, the research questions are addressed by systematically evaluating ESO disclosure compliance, and by modelling and testing the governance and other factors associated with companies' disclosure practices over the 2001 to 2004 study period. Within the agency framework, it is argued that effective governance mechanisms mitigate agency costs by decreasing information asymmetry through increased disclosure. Hence it is predicted that internal governance mechanisms, including the effectiveness of the board of directors, the effectiveness of the audit committee, the existence of a compensation committee, and management incentives are associated with the level of compliance with ESO disclosures. In addition, external governance mechanisms are predicted to influence compliance with ESO disclosures. Specifically, it is predicted that firms responded positively to the increased media and regulatory scrutiny on financial reporting practices as a result of major corporate collapses in Australia and the United States. Furthermore, it is predicted that regulatory intervention, in the form of new and comprehensive ESO disclosure requirements, as well as the authoritative guidance on valuing options and active enforcement efforts by ASIC, have contributed to increased levels of compliance. Using a combination of univariate and multivariate procedures, compliance and governance characteristics are tested over the financial years 2001 to 2004, to capture the changes in compliance over time and to examine the hypothesised relationships. The results of this thesis indicate that Australian companies do not fully comply with ESO disclosure requirements. Nevertheless, the results show that overall compliance has increased progressively from 2001 to 2004, suggesting that the increased scrutiny of companies' financial reporting practices following major corporate collapses has motivated companies to increase compliance. Notably, compliance has increased after the introduction of new and more comprehensive disclosure requirements for ESOs, as well as increased authoritative guidance and enforcement efforts by ASIC. However, despite the overall evidence of improvement in compliance levels, the results continue to reveal management's reluctance to disclose ESO information that may be considered sensitive (for example, price and value-related information). The multivariate results indicate that firms with a larger board of directors and a larger audit committee are more likely to encourage greater levels of compliance with ESO disclosures. However, a larger board of directors appears to take a holistic approach to monitoring company activities by encouraging higher overall compliance rather than focusing on specific, sensitive disclosures. Where a less independent Chairperson is present, the firm is more likely to disclose more sensitive information only, indicating a substitution effect whereby firms mitigate the agency problems associated with this lack of independence by increasing sensitive disclosures. Also, where the Chief Executive Officer's remuneration is relatively larger, companies are less forthcoming about ESO information. With respect to the influence of external corporate governance, the findings indicate that companies identified as poor performers by the Australian Shareholders' Association (a measure of external governance) exhibit lower levels of overall compliance, but not compliance with sensitive disclosures. This latter finding suggests that poorly performing firms provide similar levels of sensitive and important information as other firms, possibly to direct attention away from the low performance of the company. Consistent with prior disclosure research, other factors associated with compliance include leverage, where firms that are more highly leveraged disclose more sensitive information in an effort to become more transparent to creditors, thus reducing their monitoring costs. The use of a Big 4 auditor (a proxy for auditor quality) is associated with overall compliance, which indicates that external auditors primarily ensure that the financial report as a whole is compliant with the regulations, rather than identifying sensitive disclosures in detail, particularly where these disclosures may not have a material effect. Lastly, performance (as measured by profit or lossmaking status) is negatively associated with compliance. By investigating in detail the nature and extent of compliance with ESO disclosures over time and its relation to governance characteristics, the findings of this study demonstrate that while companies appear to lack full compliance with ESO disclosures, compliance has increased over time with active regulatory enforcement and assistance and comprehensive disclosure requirements. Of particular interest, is that the nature of compliance illustrates the very low levels of compliance with important, but sensitive, components of the required ESO disclosures. Importantly, the adoption of stronger governance structures appears to enhance compliance with ESO disclosures, including sensitive disclosures. Therefore, the findings of this study have important implications for corporate regulators, standard setters, financial statement preparers, shareholders and other users of financial reports with an interest in ESOs.

This thesis presents a new methodology for measuring and reporting the value of human capital (HC). Building on prior research in strategic HC management and related fields, a disclosure-based HC index, which contains both HC proxies and disclosures scores, is built based on information collected from the annual reports and other stakeholder reports of “the best companies to work for” survey (“Universum” 2010). This thesis examines the importance of the degree of HC disclosure and its correlation with company “Universum” ranks and tests whether higher employee benefits and welfare are positively related to HC information disclosed in the issued reports. Furthermore, it investigates whether higher levels of financial and non-financial HC information disclosure are associated with better firm performance and tests whether the positive relationship between human capital proxies and firm performance (concluded by resource-based theory and strategic HRM) is still valid during the crisis years (2008-2010). Regression results indicate that human capital information disclosed in previous years has a weak effect on company’s Universum rank and no influence on firm performance. Moreover, the commonly used employee incentive-based management methods may no longer be effective during the economic crisis years. Investing in training during the financial crisis period is critical for better firm performance. More research is needed in the future to examine the role of human capital in firm performance and how it should be measured, managed and governed in modern corporations.

This study examines the corporate environmental disclosures of South African mining organisations from 2009 to 2011 to establish the level and type of these environmental disclosures. An examination is made of mining organisations’ media articles to establish whether their environmental disclosures can be explained by the concept of an implicit social contract. Legitimacy theory posits that an organisation needs to be aware of all their stakeholders’ needs and needs to portray themselves as acting in line with stakeholder values and norms to ensure their continued success. Although environmental reporting has been on the strategic agenda of several organisations disclosures in South Africa, only a minority of research papers have explored how an environmental crisis may impact upon the provision of such disclosures. This paper will help fill this void by performing an examination of management communication strategies, organisational actions and the change in the level of environmental disclosures contained in the mining organisations’ annual report as a result of the acid mine drainage incident that occurred in late 2009. Media articles during and after the mining organisations’ legitimacy had been challenged were examined using Suchman’s (1995) three types of legitimacy: pragmatic, cognitive and moral to identify the type of legitimacy used in the context of a developing country. Regarding the annual report disclosures and media articles’ communication strategies, results were found to be consistent with the legitimacy theory. They indicate that South African mining organisations use mostly the repair strategy in attempting to change the perceptions of the public after an environmental crisis. The strategies utilised by the mining industry in the media disclosures are expected of an organisation in crisis. The mining industry used, primarily, repair strategies in interacting with its relevant stakeholders. The study’s finding that maintenance strategies were the least of the three types of legitimacies is consistent with an industry in crisis. Even though the mining industry primarily used the repair legitimisation tactic, the range of legitimacy techniques has proved to be a finding worth discussing. The mining industry did not completely avoid the event i.e. use disclaimer strategies. Overall, the mining organisations reacted to the heighted institutional pressures by increasing their environmental disclosures and disclosed environmental information that conformed to stakeholders’ values and persuaded society to view acid mine drainage as less problematic than it was reported to be.

This study investigates the role played by corporate governance in the firm's decision to disclose forward-looking information in financial reports, as well as the quality of such reports. More effective corporate governance has often been linked to voluntary disclosure within the annual report (Karamanou and Vafeas 2005). Similarly, recent studies document a positive association between reporting quality and the standard of corporate governance (Wright 2001). This study proposes that stronger corporate governance will be associated with increased forward-looking disclosures in financial reports and higher financial reporting quality. The results indicate that audit quality, the presence and quality of board committees and the overall efficacy of corporate governance are positively associated with forward-looking disclosures in 2000. However, corporate governance does not have a positive association with such disclosures in 2002. Regarding the relationship between financial reporting quality and corporate governance, audit quality is the only governance variable that yields a significant result and is only associated with higher reporting quality in 2002.

In this paper, the impact of significant short selling disclosures (> 0.5%) on returns and trading activity is studied. By investigating how Swedish small cap shares are impacted through an event study on the returns and analysing the change in daily volume and turnover, our study contributes with a Swedish perspective to the short selling literature. Short selling is widely debated, where some scholars argue that it improves market efficiency and price informativeness, while others argue that it is damaging for liquidity and leads to abnormally negative returns. Following the 2008 financial crisis, authorities around the world increased the regulation on short selling. Subsequently, in 2012 the European Securities and Markets Authority mandated a reporting threshold of 0.5% on net short positions on traded securities (ESMA, 2022). We find insignificant CARs after a disclosure, where the closest to significance is the (0,1) window with a CAR of 1.08%, contradicting previous research on short-term impact (Aitken et al.,1998) and how small cap firms are affected (Israel & Moskowitz, 2013; Asquith et al., 2005). We detect no significant change in trading activity in the five or ten trading days after a disclosure. Small cap is not deemed to be a significant factor in predicting the CAR, with the slope having a 7.98% p-value. Ultimately, mandated disclosures are concluded to not impact Swedish small cap securities, contradicting previous research that short selling has a greater impact on smaller firms. The conclusion drawn is that the news value is low, and therefore is not relevant enough to drive price change or trading activity.

Much of accounting research is predicated on the fact that the capital markets operate well because disclosures of annual earnings are verified. It is generally observed, however, that market responses to the unverified management forecasts may be as strong as responses to similar l verified information disclosures. This dissertation is concerned with the credibility of such unverified information. Three hypotheses are investigated in the study. The data includes managements' annual earnings forecasts gathered from the 1986 to 1992 editions of the Wall Street Journal. The first hypothesis concerns the timing of the disclosure of the forecasts by management. It is tested by comparing liquidity and leverage ratios at the event date to prior same-firm ratios. Evidence is found that supports the conclusion that the firm is preparing the market for a possible capital offering. The second hypothesis concerns the asymmetry of information between the firm and investors. This asymmetry affects the stock market reaction. It is tested using OLS regressions with the market reaction as the dependent variable and various asymmetry surrogates as independent variables. Evidence is found that supports the conclusion that as more investors follow the firm, there is less new information associated with the management forecast disclosure. Further, as fewer investors follow the firm, there is a lower tendency to disclose forecasts. The third hypothesis concerns the ability of the firm to provide credible communication. It is tested using OLS regressions with the market reaction as the dependent variable and various proprietary information surrogates as independent variables. Weak support is found for the conclusion that those firms releasing proprietary information through the forecast disclosure provide more credible communication. The support is restricted to the negative forecasts. For positive forecasts, it may be that reputation is most important to investor response. / Ph. D.

Nuvarande Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) och International Accounting Standard Board (IASB) har gemensamt utvecklat en ny leasingstandard. Syftet är att skapa konvergens på en internationell nivå samt förbättra finansiella rapporter som ska underlätta användarnas ekonomiska beslut. Tidigare studier visar att den nya leasingstandarden medför effekter på företagens redovisningen och finansiella nyckeltal. Emellertid finns lite kunskap om hur företagen på Large Cap förbereder sina investerare på en ny leasingstandard. Följaktligen är syftet med studien att beskriva hur svenska Large Cap företag väljer att förbereda sina investerare med upplysningar om IFRS 16 i sina finansiella rapporter. Vidare syftar studien till att förklara hur graden av förberedelse påverkas av leasingintensitet, antal bevakande analytiker och vilken implementeringsmetod företagen väljer vid införandet IFRS 16. För att satisfiera syftet användes agentteorin och teorin om frivilliga upplysningar för att analysera och förklara företagens val att lämna förberedande upplysningar. Upplysningarna kvantifierades genom att upplysningarna i företagens fjärde kvartalsrapport och årsredovisning 2018 kodades med en diskret variabel. Resultatet visar att företagen på Large Cap förbereder sina investerare med mer omfattande upplysningar i årsredovisningen jämfört med kvartalsrapporten. Företagen bedömer att kvalitativa upplysningar är av mer väsentligt värde för investerare än kvantitativa upplysningar eftersom de kan skapa bättre förståelse för leasingstandardens innebörd hos investerare. Vidare visar studien att varken leasingintensitet, antal bevakande analytiker eller val av implementeringsmetod påverkar företagens förberedande upplysningar. Den rimligaste tolkningen är att leasingintensiva företag inte bedömer att effekterna av leasingstandarden är av mer väsentligt värde för investerare än icke-leasingintensiva företag. En förklaring till att det inte föreligger ett samband mellan antal analytiker och företagens förberedande upplysningar kan förklaras av att företagen inte upplever att upplysningar om leasingstandarden leder till fördelar. Istället kan upplysningarna resultera i negativa marknadsreaktioner. Resultatet visar även att en övervägande andel av företagen på Large Cap föredrar den förenklade metoden till förmån för den retroaktiva metoden vid implementering av leasingstandarden. Författarna kan emellertid inte dra säkra slutsatser om företagen som använder den retroaktiva metoden förbereder sina investerare med mer omfattande upplysningar än företagen som använder den förenklade metoden. / The Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standard Board (IASB) have jointly developed a new accounting standard for leases. The main objective is to harmonize accounting across international borders with a common new lease standard and to ameliorate financial reporting for users of financial reports. Furthermore, researchers have discovered that the new lease standard has a significant impact on firms accounting and key financial ratios. Meanwhile, there is barley any studies in the field which examines how Swedish Large Cap firms chooses to prepare their investors with substantial disclosures on the new lease standard. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to describe how Swedish Large Cap firms chooses to prepare their investors with substantial disclosures on the new lease standard in their financial reports. Authors of this study also seek to explain how firms lease intensity, number of analyst followers and their choice of transition approach have an impact on firm’s preparatory disclosures. To satisfy the purpose, the authors of this study choose to deploy agency theory and voluntary disclosure theory in order to analyse and explain how firms choose to prepare their investors with IFRS 16 disclosures. Firms disclosures in their interim report for the fourth quarter 2018 and annual report 2018 were quantified with a discrete variable. Furthermore, it appears that Swedish firms on Large Cap prepare their investors with more extensively disclosures in their annual reports compared to their interim reports. Firms assesses that qualitative disclosures are of more material value to investors than quantitative disclosures. One explanatory factor may be that qualitative disclosures provide investors with better understanding of the new lease standard. Moreover, the study fails to explain the relationship between firms lease intensity, number of analyst followers, and firm’s choice of transition approach with the firm’s preparatory disclosures. One interpretation is that firms with high lease intensity do not assess the impact of the new lease standard to be of more material value for investors decisions than firms with low lease intensity. Since the study fails to explain the relationship between number of analyst followers and firm’s preparatory disclosures, a reasonable interpretation is that firms do not benefit from disclosing information about the new lease standard since the information might result in negative market reactions. Meanwhile, this study also provides evidence that a significant proportion of firms on Large Cap chooses the modified retrospective approach in favour of the full retrospective approach to adopt IFRS 16. Although, there is not enough strong evidence to support the hypothesis that Swedish firms which adopt the full retrospective approach prepare their investors with more extensively disclosures than firms which adopt the modified retrospective approach.

Software is still being produced and used that is vulnerable to exploitation. As well as being in devices in the homes of many people around the world, programs with these vulnerabilities are maintaining life-critical systems such as power-stations, aircraft and medical devices and are managing the creation and distribution of billions of pounds every year. These systems are actively being exploited by governments, criminals and opportunists and have led to loss of life and a loss of wealth. This dependence on software that is vulnerable to exploitation has led to a society with tangible concerns over cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism and cyber-warfare. As well as attempts to eliminate these vulnerabilities, techniques have been developed to mitigate their effects; these prophylactic techniques do not eliminate the vulnerabilities but make them harder to exploit. As software exploitation is an ever evolving battle between the attackers and the defenders, identifying methods to bypass these mitigations has become a new battlefield in this struggle and the techniques that are used to do this require vulnerabilities of their own. As many of the mitigation techniques are dependent upon secrecy of one form or another, vulnerabilities which allow an attacker to view those secrets are now of importance to attackers and defenders. Leaking of the contents of computer memory has always been considered a vulnerability, but until recently it has not typically been considered a serious one. As this can be used to bypass key mitigation techniques, these vulnerabilities are now considered critical to preventing whole classes of software exploitation. This thesis is about detecting these types of leaks and the information they disclose. It discusses the importance of these disclosures, both currently and in the future. It then introduces the first published technique to be able to reliably identify specific classes of these leaks, particularly address disclosures and canary-disclosures. The technique is tested against a series of applications, across multiple operating systems, using both artificial examples and software that is critical, commonplace and complex.

This study investigates the determinants and effects of voluntary book-tax difference (BTD) disclosures in earnings releases. Unlike prior studies, I find no evidence that managers are more likely to voluntarily disclose BTD information when firms have low earnings quality. I also find that managers are more likely to disclose BTD information when firms have large negative but not large positive BTDs. Because BTDs are particularly informative when earnings quality is low and when book income significantly exceeds taxable income (i.e., large positive BTDs), these results suggest that managers selectively disclose BTD information in earnings releases. Interestingly, I also find that managers are more willing to disclose BTD information when tax avoidance activities are high. This result suggests that managers are willing to bear some taxrelated disclosure costs to reassure investors that BTDs are not due to aggressive financial reporting. Prior research provides evidence of a systematic association between BTDs computed using required 10-K tax disclosures and future forecast errors and stock returns. I provide evidence that voluntary BTD disclosures attenuate the association between BTDs and future forecast errors. I also provide limited evidence that voluntary BTD disclosures attenuate the association between BTDs and future stock returns. These results suggest that voluntary BTD disclosures help analysts and investors impound BTD information into earnings forecasts and stock prices. / text