فصلنامه پژوهش های تجربی حسابداری
سال یازدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 40، تابستان 1400)

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive model of financial, governance and the social responsibility evaluation of firms on a new perspective of performance evaluation. After reviewing the research literature, the conceptual model of the research is developed based on 6 approaches in the form of 25 components (indicators). To validate and assign weights to this comprehensive model at the level of approaches, 15 experts’ opinion are used based on the hierarchical analysis method and assigning weights to the components (indices), the Shannon Entropy method using quantitative data from a sample of 180 firms listed Tehran Stock Exchange, is applied. The results of the study show that the economic approach and the social responsibility approach have the highest and lowest weight in the comprehensive evaluation of firms based on this model, respectively. Also, among the components of the integrated approach, the ratio (P/E) has the highest weight. Also findings show that rating a firm based on this comprehensive model may provides a multilateral view and informed judgment for capital market participants.

Institutional investors’ behavior toward earnings management may be different before and after initial public offering (IPO). Institutional investors have strong incentive for earnings management before IPOs to sell their securities at a higher price than the intrinsic value, while they perform monitoring function to restrain earnings management after IPOs. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the dual roles of institutional investors in earnings management before and after IPOs. To achieve this purpose, the data is collected from 55 IPO firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange for the period of 2008 to 2015 and analyzed based on panel data regression. To measure earnings management based on discretion accruals, the Kothari model has been used. The results indicate that there is a positive and significant relation between institutional investors and earnings management before IPO, however, there is not such a relation after IPO. Accordingly, it can be claimed that institutional investors have incentive for earnings management before IPO to sell their securities at a higher price than the intrinsic value, but they have no incentive to do this after IPO.

In the framework of financial reporting quality, disclosure complexity is one of the most important issues to deal with. An important aspect of disclosure complexity is financial statements readability. Researches show that managers try to protect interests of stakeholders as well as interests of themselves by manipulating financial reporting and complicating financial statements. The purpose of this study is to examine the relation between corporate social responsibility and annual reports readability. In order to measure social responsibility, six dimensions of environmental issues, products and services, human resources, customers, social responsibilities, and energy are used, and a logarithm of total points is applied to measure social responsibility points. Also, to measure annual reports readability, the study uses the Fog index which is a combination of the words number in each sentence and the percentage of complicated terms. The research sample consists of 60 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2017 with 350 observation and the research hypotheses are tested using multivariate regression method. Findings indicate that there is a significant positive relation between corporate social responsibility and financial statement readability, thus, any increase of corporate social responsibility results in an increase of Fog index and decrease of financial statements readability.

The value of a firm is important for shareholders, investors, managers, creditors and other stakeholders in order to assess its future and to estimate the risk and return on investment and stock prices. Investors have always concerns about estimating the future value of firms and they use various financial instruments in this regard. The purpose of this research is to explain the value of a firm using performance, management system and audit committee variables and applying the Lars machine learning method, as well as to forecast the value of the firm using the Lasso linear and Gaussian process nonlinear methods to help decision makers and investors. For this purpose, data is collected from 208 years/firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the seven financial period of 2011-2017. The preliminary results of the research show that performance criteria are more capable of explaining the value of a firm than the group of criteria of the management system and the audit committee. Also other results of the research indicate the high power of machine learning methods for forecasting the value of a firm, in particular, the Gaussian process nonlinear approach as compared to the linear method of the Lasso is.

Enterprise risk management (ERM) represents a radical Paradigm shift from the traditional risk management systems to a holistic risk management. According to the theoretical framework, ERM may have effects on efficiency of audit committees and reputation of firms. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relation among ERM, characteristics of audit committees and reputation of firms, as well as to determine an interactive role among them. The sample consists of 139 firms listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) during 2013-2019, selected based on the systematic elimination method. The results show that ERM has a positive effect on reputation of firms. In Addition, the characteristics of audit committees including independence, level of education, diversity in the level of education and the number of meetings of audit committees have a positive significant effect on ERM. Finally, results indicate that ERM has a moderating effect on the relation between the aforementioned characteristics of audit committees and the reputation of firms. The results of the research are consistent with the theoretical framework and previous literature.

A firm bankruptcy prediction is one of the important challenges of investors and other stakeholders in the capital market, because timely detection of firms exposed to bankruptcy can largely prevent potential losses. Nevertheless, despite numerous efforts in this field (generally considering quantitative criteria) , a comprehensive method for predicting bankruptcy has not been developed yet. Therefore, considering qualitative criteria along with quantitative criteria in order to predict bankruptcy may be beneficial. This study attempts to investigate the effect of tone of Board activity reports as one of the qualitative criteria, on predicting a firm bankruptcy.  The present study uses data of 476 year-firm listed in Tehran Stock Exchange in the period from 2011 to 1396. In order to test the hypotheses, logistic regression method is used.Findings indicate that the qualitative criteria (negative and judicial tone) of financial reports may not predict a firm bankruptcy. In other words, tone of financial reports does not provide investors and stakeholders with a suitable tool for predicting bankruptcy. ‌

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relation between auditor characteristics and probability of bankruptcy. This study uses variables such as auditor fees, audit-firm size, audit-firm tenure, and auditor industry specialization as auditor characteristics. Also the study uses Altman (2000) and Kordestani at el (2014) as bankruptcy Indices. Data collected from 98 firms over the period 2005-2015 are analyzed using logistic regression. The results indicate that there is no significant relation between the auditor's characteristics and the probability of bankruptcy obtained through Altman's model. On the other hand, findings show that firms which have higher audit fees and are audited by large audit firms are more likely to default (calculated by the Kordestani model). In addition, firms audited by long-tenured auditor firms and industry-expert auditors are less likely to go bankrupt. ‌

Information disclosure is a multilateral concept and comprises disclosure of information in different financial, corporate governance, and more areas. The main objective of the study is providing a comprehensive disclosure framework in credit institutions through review of valid papers and localization of the disclosure components, taking into account the country's conditions and the law for usury-free banking. To do so, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is applied. First, the initial disclosure framework for credit institutions is extracted using the review of relevant literature and applying the meta-synthesis method. Then, through interviews with 16 banking experts and analyzing the obtained data, the framework derived from the previous step is completed and localized. According to the research findings, disclosure of items such as recovery and resolution plan, the amount of directed credits from the government, and so on will contribute to banking industry efficiency.

The Different ownership structure and remarkable increase of family-owned firms in recent years, necessitate doing numerous studies. Therefore, this study investigates effectiveness of audit committee in these types of firms compared to other firms. The sample of this study includes 32 family firms and 144 non-family firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange from 2015 to 2019. Data analysis and hypotheses test is based on the multivariate regression model and panel data. Effectiveness of the audit committee is measured by two criteria of return on assets (ROA) and market value added (MVA). Audit committee measurement indicators include the size of the audit committee, the financial expertise of audit committee members, and the independence of the audit committee. The results show that family involvement reduces the effectiveness of audit committee size based on the criteria of return on assets and market value added as well as the effectiveness of the financial expertise of the members of the audit committee based on return on assets. However, the results indicate that family involvement does not affect the effectiveness of the Audit Committee's independence based on the criteria of return on assets and market value added, as well as the effectiveness of the financial expertise of the members of the Audit Committee based on the Market Value Added. ‌

The global crises of the last few years have led to development of public sector reporting across public administration areas such as performance, sustainability, environmental and social reporting. In addition, it causes integrated reporting to be considered as the dominant approach. This study is aimed to examine effects of integrated reporting quality on corporate valuation and future corporate performance, focusing on complexity and external financing needs. For this purpose, data is collected from 120 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange for a period from 2011 to 2017 and hypotheses are tested using panel data regression model. Integrated reports providing transparent and comprehensive information optimize internal decision-making which results in improvement of corporate performance. Research findings show that there is a significant positive relation of firm size and growth opportunity to integrated reporting quality. Moreover, results indicate a significant negative relation between institutional ownership and integrated reporting quality. However, according to findings, there is no significant relation between corporate governance quality and integrated reporting. ‌