Benoît Pigé

Determinants of segment reporting quality: evidence from EU

Purpose This study aims to provide some empirical evidence on the determinants of segment reporting quality, and to propose a new measurement tool of segment reporting quality – segment reporting quality index (SRQI). Design/methodology/approach On the basis of hand-collected segment data for a sample of 171 European Union publicly listed companies from the 2006-2012 annual reports, the study uses multiple regression model to investigate the determinants of segment reporting quality. A new measurement of segment reporting quality is constructed. It aggregates different segment reporting practices indicators, including the number of segments, the extent of information disclosed and the geographic fineness. Additional estimations are conducted to test the robustness of the results. Findings The results suggest that there is a substantial variation in the quality of segment reporting among the sampled European Union firms. Large corporations, audited by Big 4 auditors and more internationally oriented, tend to provide a higher quality of segment reporting. In contrast, debt leverage negatively impacts the quality of segment reporting. However, the quality is not significantly related to profitability. The findings are fairly robust to a number of econometric models that control, for year fixed effects and pre- and post-International Financial Reporting Standards 8 adoption. Overall, the findings are generally consistent with the predictions of agency theory. Research limitations/implications The results imply that considerable managerial discretion exists. Despite the IFRS commitment to enhance comparability of the financial statements, segment information remains very disparate. It enables investors to get a better understanding of a firm’s activities, but it does not allow for a better assessment of a firm as compared to the other firms of the same sector. As compared with other IFRS standards, the segment reporting has more relation with corporate governance structure and specific institutions that regulate a sector or a country. Furthermore, the results show that firm characteristics are associated with the study’s aggregated measure of segment reporting quality (SRQI) consistently with theoretical and empirical evidence. SRQI can, thus, be used by researchers for replication or to study new questions on firms’ segment disclosure behavior on a much wider set of firms in the economy. While this research makes several noteworthy contributions, the authors acknowledge that SRQI considers only multisegments firms that disaggregate their primary/operating segments by line-of-business and disclose secondary/entity-wide level geographic information. Originality/value This study offers new evidence on the determinants of segment reporting quality following IFRS adoption, in the European Union context. This study contributes to the existing literature by proposing an aggregated measure of segment reporting quality (SRQI). Unlike previous measures, which were usually limited to researcher self-constructed indexes, SRQI captures different facets of segment information in terms of disaggregation and disclosure extent.

La convergence internationale des normes comptables : panoptique ou tour de babel ?

The crisis of 2002 and 2008, the firms’ financial bankruptcies, and the States’ debts justify a strong convergence of accounting and financial reporting standards. This convergence could ensure a real transparency and perfect information for investors. But is this ideal of convergence really desirable ? Through an analysis of accounting and financial standards and a discussion of the concept of active market, we indicate that the stakes are not to aim at perfect markets but instead to integrate the stakeholders’ diversity and the specificities of the territories’ institutions.

La représentation de la performance comme possibilité de modification des règles du jeu. Le cas de l’overloading au Vietnam

L’etude d’une entreprise internationale, leader dans son domaine, montre que le respect volontaire des normes sociales et environnementales peut s’expliquer par une vision strategique de long terme. Parce que les normes peuvent correspondre a une demande implicite des acteurs, leur respect entraine a court terme des surcouts economiques qui sont compenses, a long terme, a la fois par une meilleure efficience des processus et par une differenciation de l’entreprise dans le domaine du developpement durable et de la responsabilite sociale. Cette differenciation peut etre acceleree par le recours a une representation territoriale de la performance.

Les transactions entre parties liées, spoliation des actionnaires ou mécanisme relationnel complexe, le cas de la Thaïlande

Related party transactions, shareholders’ spoliation or relational mechanism, the case of ThailandRelated party transactions are usually considered as a mechanism to spoliate shareholders for the benefit of a few actors. With the development of capitalism, the key feature of social networks in South-East Asia has contributed to the proliferation of related party transactions. The financial crisis of 1997, with a very strong impact on those countries, led to a spectacular reinforcement of corporate governance regulation. From now on, Thailand public firms have to publish the amount and the nature of their related party transactions. Our research subject is to inquire whether this publication is sufficient for limiting the negative impact of related party transactions on financial performance. While this result has been confirmed, we propose a theoretical contribution on the motives that can explain this absence of impact.