Date: 26^th April, 2019

Time: 10:30 a.m.

Venue: Room 702, The Administration Building, Zhejiang University

【Speaker Introduction】:Ava Wu is a Lecturer at the Discipline of Accounting of the University of Sydney. Ava holds a PhD and a first-class honours degree from the Australian National University. Ava’s research interests cover a range of financial accounting and auditing topics such as earnings quality, the role of financial analyst expertise and their social connections, factors affecting analysts’ forecasting properties, the role of audit quality. Her papers have been published in leading international journals, including Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Abacus and Journal of Business Ethics. Ava has been awarded competitive external research grants. She is an ad hoc reviewer for various international journals including: Journal of Business Ethics, Abacus, Accounting and Finance, International Journal of Auditing, Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, Accounting Research Journal, Australian Accounting Review, International Journal of Accounting and Finance. Ava has ten years of teaching experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. She has taught financial accounting, management accounting and taxation, and has provided research seminars to honours and MBA students. She has received teaching awards for excellence in tutoring and was nominated by students for the Wayne Lonergan Outstanding Teaching award in 2018. Ava has supervised a few research honours students to completion, and is supervising PhD students at the University of Sydney.

【Seminar Abstract】：The recent development in corporate reporting, i.e. Integrated Reporting aims to promote long-termism in capital market decision making. Management may engage in earnings manipulations to fulfil their short-term oriented objectives, which is not aligned with the long-termism objective of. We provide empirical evidence on whether firms producing higher quality corporate reports in the spirit of, exhibit lower levels of earnings management. On the one hand, the practice of encourages long-term oriented thinking and promotes a corporate culture of trust, honesty and ethics, which may reduce the firm’s incentive to manipulate earnings. Further, the practice of is considered to create a positive corporate image and improve the transparency of the reporting process on both financial and non-financial information, thereby limiting the opportunity for earnings manipulations. On the other hand, the extent to which a firm practices is a matter of degree and subjective and the practice of can be symbolic rather than substantive. Hence, the practice of may not lower the incidence of earnings management and may lead firms to use a less detectable earnings management strategy. Using multiple measures and an international sample, we document that while firms producing higher quality reports engage in less accrual-based earnings management, they have higher real activities earnings management compared to firms with lower quality reports. Further analyses reveal that this opportunistic earnings management behaviour is most pronounced in countries where the practice of is voluntary, suggesting  practice tends to be more symbolic than substantive in a voluntary setting.