Voluntary accounting disclosures by United States-listed Asian companies.

摘要

The number of foreign companies accessing the United States (U.S.) public securities markets has increased dramatically over the last ten years. Since 1997, over 600 foreign companies have registered securities with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the first time. As of December 31, 2004, more than 1200 companies from 57 countries were filing periodic reports with the SEC. Securities regulation for these companies has always been a matter of debate and a stream of research has examined the disclosure practices of foreign companies listed in the U.S. However, none of those studies have looked at the voluntary disclosure practices of U.S.-listed Asian companied in the U.S. There have been some studies which have examined the disclosure practices of companies in the individual Asian countries, but none of them have comprehensively investigated the disclosure practices of all U.S.-listed Asian companies. The study at hand contributes to the international accounting literature by specifically examining the voluntary disclosures provided by U.S.-listed Asian companies in the U.S. This study examined three research objectives. (1) The first research objective of this study was to test the Einhorn (2005) theory on U.S.-listed Asian companies. This theory indicates that the voluntary disclosures (measured by Botosan, 1997) of companies will be positively related to the strictness of their mandatory disclosure environment (measured by a survey of experts). (2) Secondly, the study examined the extent to which voluntary disclosures provided by U.S.-listed Asian companies in the U.S. are convergent, and determined the effect of culture on those disclosures [Warner (2003), Gray (1988) and Zarzeski (1996)]. (3) Lastly, the current research investigated the voluntary use of "international" standards instead of national standards by U.S.-listed Asian companies in preparation of their consolidated financial statements. This aspect of the study has extended the evidence in Tarca (2004).;Results of this study provide perhaps the first empirical evidence on the voluntary disclosures provided by U.S.-listed Asian companies in the U.S. A total of seven hypotheses were developed and statistically tested to accomplish the research objectives. The evidence produced in this study indicates that U.S.-listed Asian companies (from countries which have a stricter mandatory disclosure regime in their home country) provided significantly fewer voluntary disclosures than the U.S.-listed Asian companies (from countries which have a less strict mandatory disclosure regime). This finding is contrary to the theory developed in Einhorn, 2005. In addition, this study has documented that over 80 percent of the U.S.-listed Asian companies are voluntarily using "international" standards in preparation of their financial statements and thus contributing towards International accounting convergence. However, their choice to use "international" standards is not affected by their proportion of foreign sales or their size. An important contribution of this study is the development of a measure for strictness of mandatory disclosure regimes of Asian countries by two alternative methods by expert rankings and by using the results of Adhikari and Tondkar (1992).;The results of this study complement Cahan et al. (2005) who examine the effect of global operations and global financing on voluntary disclosures of companies from the Fortune 500 list. They report a significant association between globalized operations and voluntary disclosures of companies. However, their study does not include the strictness of mandatory disclosure regime which, according to Einhorn (2005) is a significant determinant of voluntary disclosures. The results of the current research regarding culture variables, however, are not completely consistent with Zarzeski (1996). Zarzeski shows that domestic culture is an important determinant for voluntary disclosures. However, the current research results remain inconclusive in this aspect. This study does not find strong evidence of a relation between domestic culture and the voluntary disclosures provided by U.S.-listed Asian companies in the U.S. Nonetheless, there appears to be clear consensus from this dissertation that provides evidence to reject the Einhorn (2005) theory and the results also provide support for the argument that U.S.-listed Asian companies are contributing towards International accounting convergence.