Essays in Financial Accounting Defended on Friday, 12 June 2009

This dissertation aims to contribute to the literature about the quality of accounting information by investigating its interaction with institutional factors (i.e., their external environment) in which firms operate, such as industry and stock exchange. The research topics of this dissertation include the motivation of earnings management (chapter 2), the consequence of accounting frauds on the failure rate of IPO firms (chapter 3) and the effectiveness of actions taken by standard setters to improve the quality of accounting information (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 focuses on firms’ industry environment and investigates whether industry valuation impacts management’s decision to manage earnings. Chapter 3 has been devoted to examine the consequence of large scale earnings management or accounting scandals on the firm’s external environment. Chapter 4 examines whether the uniform adoption of IFRS by EU countries in 2005 improves the quality of accounting information by investigating the changes in the quality of analyst forecasts.