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In this paper the authors aim to examine whether shareholder activism is associated with accounting reporting complexity (ARC).

The authors employ ordinary least squares (OLS) and a sample of 19,530 firm-year observations (representing 3,377 unique firms) over the 2010–2019 period to test the prediction.

The authors find that firms with shareholder activism provide more complex accounting reporting. Further, both types of activism (including Concern & Dispute and Control & Discussion) are positively associated with ARC. The authors also find that the association between shareholder activism and ARC is more pronounced when the firms have a higher level of litigation risk and a higher proportion of institutional ownership. Collectively, the findings suggest that firms with shareholder activism may be under more pressure to disclose more accounting items, leading to more complex accounting reporting.

The study may be informative to regulators considering the costs and benefits of shareholder activism in financial reporting.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are an important strategic tool for continuous adaptation, sustainable corporate development and external growth. At the same time, M&As involve high levels of risk with mixed performance results even under normal circumstances. Even though the M&A market was continuously growing for the last decade, it was abruptly ended by the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as executives were more concerned about liquidity than with long-term growth strategies. This raises the question how M&A behaviour is affected by the economic fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The mixed method research design was employed in this study.

The authors particularly investigate how target selection as well as synergy management are affected by the pandemic. The study analysis reveals four archetypical responses to the COVID-19 crisis. The authors describe those responses in detail and analyse antecedents that seem to influence firms' acquisition behaviour during the pandemic.

The paper draws on survey and interview data of M&A practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of the readability of annual reports on firms’ ability to obtain trade credit from suppliers. Particularly, the authors conjecture that annual report readability helps firms obtain more trade credit from suppliers.

The authors use the Gunning Fog Index as the primary measure of annual report readability and the ratio of accounts payable to the book value of total assets as the measure of trade credit.

Results from the study of 4,754 firms during the 2004–2016 period indicate that suppliers extend more trade credit to firms with more readable financial reports. The authors’ results are robust to alternative measures of trade credit and annual report readability. The authors’ results remain robust when we control for firm fixed effects and potential endogeneity problems using the instrumental variable approach. A further test shows that the level of trade credit is higher for firms in business service industries, and that this relation is weakened when firms disclose less readable 10-K filings.

The authors’ findings provide new insight into the role of financial report readability in firms’ ability to obtain trade financing from suppliers. The authors’ results are also in line with the SEC’s encouragement that firms use plain English and easy language in financial reporting.

This study aims to examine the effect of real activities manipulation (RAM) on auditors’ decision of issuing going concern (GC) opinions for distressed companies.

This study estimates and examines three types of RAM: reduction of discretionary expenses, sales manipulation and overproduction. It investigates the effect of RAM on auditor reporting conservatism by including the three measures of RAM methods in logistic regressions that explain the issuance of going concern opinions. The authors perform the analysis specifically on distressed firms for 2004-2013 period.

This study finds a significant and positive association between RAM and the likelihood of receiving going concern opinion in the financial distressed firm sample, suggesting that client’s abnormal business activity affects the auditor reporting conservatism.

This study provides evidence that auditors make going concern reporting decisions in consideration of the client’s abnormal operating decisions and management’s opportunism.

Recent literature argues that auditors have little recourse other than to resign if a client uses RAM to impact earnings or the financial statements, and hence the enhanced audit quality in the post-SOX period is due to the shift from using accruals management to RAM (Cohen et al., 2008; Chi et al., 2011; Kim and Park, 2014). The evidence provided in this study indicates that auditors report more conservatively (rather than simply resign) in response to the aggressive RAM.

The health and environmental hazards associated with synthetic dyes have led to a revival of natural dyes that are non-toxic, environmentally benign and coupled with various functions. The study aims to investigate and develop the potentiality of a popular herb called Chromolaena odorata (C. odorata) as a sustainable and stable dyestuff in textiles.

Natural colorant extracted from C. odorata leaves is used to dye the worsted fabric, which is one of the premier end-use of wool in fashion, via the padding method associated with pre-, simultaneous and post-mordanting with chitosan, tannic acid and copper sulfate pentahydrate. The effects of extraction, dyeing and mordanting processes on fabric’s color strength K/S and color difference ΔE_CMC are investigated via International Commission on Illumination’s L*a*b* color space, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscope, color fastness to washing, rubbing, perspiration and light.

The results obtained indicate extraction with ethanol 90% with a solid/liquid ratio of 1:5 within 1 h, and coloration with a liquor ratio of 1:5 (pH 5) within 2 h under padding pressure of 0.3 MPa are the most effective for coloring worsted fabric.

The C. odorata’s application as a highly effective dyestuff possessing good colorimetric effectiveness has expanded this herb's economic potential, contributing partly to economic growth and adding value to wool in global supply chain.

C. odorata dyestuff has prevailed over other natural colorants because of its impressive color fastness against washing, rubbing, perspiration and especially color stability for pH change.

This paper aims to examine the association between audit firm tenure and audit report lag (ARL) and the impact of auditor industry specialization on the association between audit firm tenure and ARL.

Using Habib and Bhuiyan’s (2011) method of measuring auditor industry specialization, the authors examine the sample of 7,291 firm-year observations from 2008 to 2010.

The authors find that auditor industry specialization (regardless of city-level, national-level and joint city- and national-level industry specialization) weakens the positive association between ARL and short audit firm tenure, suggesting that auditor industry specialization complements the negative effect of short audit firm tenure on ARL.

First, the authors add to the literature by answering the question of whether hiring industry auditor specialists is an effective way to shorten ARL created by short audit tenure. The authors provide some evidence that the concern of short audit tenure leading to longer ARL is reduced by hiring an industry-specialized auditor. Prior research mainly focuses on identifying the determinants of ARL without going further to find out which are the effective ways to reduce the audit delay. Second, their findings can somehow resolve the debate on whether audit firm rotation should be mandatory. A new auditor’s lack of knowledge of clients’ business operations during the early years of audit engagements results in longer ARL, which eventually influences the clients’ financial performance. The authors' result suggests the firms can reduce this adverse consequence by hiring an industry-specialized auditor. Finally, their findings may provide helpful information to firms in selecting external auditors, public accounting firms in selecting a differentiation strategy and regulators in mandating audit firm rotation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine determinants of the decision to disclose intellectual capital in annual reports.

The paper derives theoretical predictions from the previous literature and bases the study on archival data with a sample of 125 publicly listed Australian firms. The authors perform a content analysis of annual reports and complement the data with quantitative data from the sample firms.

The paper finds that industry type plays a key role as a determinant for the disclosure of intellectual property in annual reports. In addition, firm size is another determinant for intellectual disclosure of firms. In contrast with earlier studies and theoretical predictions of voluntary disclosure, however, the paper does not find any relationship between the level of information asymmetry and intellectual capital disclosure.

One limitation refers to the content analysis. Analyzing the annual reports based on the specified list of IC‐related terms may not provide the whole picture as well as the IC disclosure practices. Despite these limitations, the study helps to understand better in general what kind of firms actually disclose information on intellectual capital.

In contrast with earlier studies the study uses significantly more observations, which makes the results more reliable and generalizable. Of further significance is the finding that information asymmetry – one of the main problems between investors and firms – is not driving the decision of firms to disclose information on intellectual capital.

The purpose of this paper is to report the factors that influence Vietnamese students’ choice of university in a little researched context where the effects of globalization and education reform are changing higher education.

A quantitative survey was completed by 1,124 current or recently completed university students in Vietnam. Marketing approaches are drawn upon to inform the exploration and understanding of student choice and decision making.

The factor analysed data showed the nine key factors influencing student decisions, in order of significance, as facilities and services, programme, price, offline information, opinions, online information, ways of communication, programme additions, and advertising. There are significant correlations in the Vietnamese context between the factors of price and facilities, and services and programme, and differences between genders and types of students in choosing a university.

Whilst this paper is a starting point, more research is needed in the Vietnamese context with deeper levels of analysis including the differences between types of universities and fields/disciplines, in addition to wider sampling.

A greater understanding of the Vietnamese context helps to inform marketing practices in a country experiencing increasing competition in higher education.

Findings from studies in other contexts many not be directly transferrable to Vietnamese universities suggesting the need for a contextual understanding of these factors and a suitably nuanced marketing response.

This paper identifies the need for cultural understanding of little researched contexts and calls for further research which does not assume all cultures and contexts will have the same underlying Vietnamese model of university choice.

The intelligence in the Internet of Things (IoT) can be embedded by analyzing the huge volumes of data generated by it in an ultralow latency environment. The computational latency incurred by the cloud-only solution can be significantly brought down by the fog computing layer, which offers a computing infrastructure to minimize the latency in service delivery and execution. For this purpose, a task scheduling policy based on reinforcement learning (RL) is developed that can achieve the optimal resource utilization as well as minimum time to execute tasks and significantly reduce the communication costs during distributed execution.

To realize this, the authors proposed a two-level neural network (NN)-based task scheduling system, where the first-level NN (feed-forward neural network/convolutional neural network [FFNN/CNN]) determines whether the data stream could be analyzed (executed) in the resource-constrained environment (edge/fog) or be directly forwarded to the cloud. The second-level NN ( RL module) schedules all the tasks sent by level 1 NN to fog layer, among the available fog devices. This real-time task assignment policy is used to minimize the total computational latency (makespan) as well as communication costs.

Experimental results indicated that the RL technique works better than the computationally infeasible greedy approach for task scheduling and the combination of RL and task clustering algorithm reduces the communication costs significantly.

The proposed algorithm fundamentally solves the problem of task scheduling in real-time fog-based IoT with best resource utilization, minimum makespan and minimum communication cost between the tasks.

The research addresses the issue of elitism in international trade and the barriers in global markets arising from the elitist criteria for transitioning to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The research aims to identify criteria and pathways for achieving a favorable business climate for the transition to IFRS. Based on international statistics from the World Bank for 2019–2021, the authors identify the determinants of the adoption of IFRS using regression analysis. The authors performed econometric modeling of participation in international trade on global markets based on IFRS factors. As a result, the research selected criteria for a favorable business climate for transitioning to IFRS. The selected criteria are feasible for adherence by all countries and ensure the inclusivity of IFRS. The selected criteria include (in decreasing order of significance): improvement of the investment climate, development of public–private partnerships, overcoming the shadow economy, and strengthening the legal environment. The theoretical significance of the author's conclusions lies in the reevaluation of criteria for a favorable business climate for transitioning to IFRS in the context of new, multipolar globalization. The conclusions formulate a set of inclusive criteria that support free international trade and the openness of global markets. The practical significance of the results obtained in the research is that they outline a path to achieving a favorable business climate in Russia and propose a set of authorial recommendations for transitioning Russian businesses to IFRS.