Search results

This study aims to investigate the effect of mandatory international financial reporting standards (IFRS) adoption on the risk disclosure quality by listed European insurers.

The study used a content analysis of the annual reports and consolidated accounts of 13 insurance companies listed in the European market between 2002 and 2007 based on two regulatory frameworks, Solvency and IFRS.

The results showed a significant effect of the mandatory adoption of IFRS and a clear improvement in the quality of risk disclosure. Moreover, risk disclosure is positively associated with the size of the company.

The authors can consider the relatively limited size of the sample as a limitation of this study. Moreover, the manual content analysis used to be considered subjective.

The findings of this study provide useful insights to professional and regulatory bodies about the consequences of IFRS adoption to enhance transparency and particularly risk disclosure.

The research contributes to the existing literature. First, the authors have shown that companies are improving in the quality of risk disclosure even before 2005. Second, the authors have shown that the year 2005 is distinguished by a marked improvement in disclosure trends, with companies aligning themselves with coercive and mimetic regulatory forces. Third, the authors highlight the significant effect of mandatory IFRS adoption even in highly regulated industries, such as the insurance industry.

The purpose of this study is to investigate R&D investments in family firms.

The socio-emotional wealth (SEW) perspective, considered as a dominant paradigm in the family business field, is the theoretical framework used to report different behaviors ascertained within family firms. This paper focuses on two dimensions of the SEW, namely, family control and influence and family identity. A suspected moderating role played by the firm’s life cycle stage on the dimensions is also investigated using panel data. To analyze the results, this paper uses the Smart PLS software on secondary data collected for 76 German family firms.

The empirical results reveal a negative influence of SEW on R&D investments. The prominent effect of the family control and influence dimension on R&D is higher in the first part of a firm life cycle.

The analysis of this study is subject to several caveats. First, to measure the R&D investment, this paper used R&D intensity computed as the total annual R&D expenses by total sales. Except for the fact that the use of proxies received several criticizes from scholars (Berrone et al., 2012) claiming how they do not directly relate to the essence of the dimensions measured. Second, this paper used two out of five FIBER dimensions only in the study. This paper took the right direction, but still, the complexity of SEW may not be fully captured following this approach (Berrone et al., 2012).

This study could be considered as an important extension of prior research investigating R&D in family firms. The authors provide a valid empirical construct, the FIBER scale, to capture non-monotonic behaviors in family firms and an enlargement of the family firms and innovation management field of research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential influence of corporate governance mechanisms on risk disclosure quality in Tunisia.

The authors examine 152 annual reports of Tunisian non-financial-listed firms during 2008–2013, and use the manual content analysis method to measure the risk disclosure quality.

The authors find that the quality of risk disclosure in Tunisian companies is relatively low, and also find that the quality of risk disclosure is positively associated with institutional ownership, board independence, the presence of women on the board, the presence of family members on the board and the independence of audit committee. Managerial ownership has a negative effect on risk disclosure quality. Finally, the authors find that the revolution decreases the influence of concentration ownership, government ownership, family ownership and audit committee size on risk disclosure quality.

Using a comprehensive set of corporate governance mechanisms and a new measure for risk disclosure quality in Tunisia, the authors provide the first empirical evidence on the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on risk disclosure quality in a developing country. The study has theoretical and practical implications for both developed and developing countries.