Modern slavery audit disclosure is essential for corporate accountability in eliminating slavery from business operations, particularly in global supply chains. Detecting and disclosing modern slavery has become a crucial corporate transparency issue. Broader stakeholder concerns and recent modern slavery regulations create an unique research setting to explore how a particular transparency and accountability tool, the modern slavery audit (a form of social audit), is used to improve transparency in global supply chains. By employing the concept of political mediation from social movement theory, we examine the influence of protests by labour rights organizations and the political context in which these…

Key audit matters (KAM) are a primary communication channel between the auditor and financial statement users, so understanding the determinants of KAM disclosure is important. This study investigates whether and how country-specific differences explain variation in KAM disclosure. We analyze 29,103 KAMs across 12,038 firm-year observations from 30 European countries for the fiscal years 2017 to 2022. The European setting offers an ideal research environment with uniform KAM regulation and simultaneously broad institutional diversity. To address the issue of interdependencies among country-specific variables, we apply principal component analysis to examine a comprehensive set of 33 country attributes, which reduces to…

Forecasting liquidity needs is crucial for small firms. Holding too little cash can force costly emergency financing or asset sales, while holding too much cash ties up resources that could be better used for investment or dividend payments. Striking the right balance is not easy, especially for small firms that typically face greater uncertainty and have fewer internal resources for risk assessment. In our forthcoming article, “Peer Financial Reports and Corporate Cash Policy” (European Accounting Review), we study how mandatory financial reporting by industry peers helps small firms make better liquidity management decisions. We find that peer disclosures provide critical…

This study explores the intersection of target difficulty, psychological capital (PsyCap), and work engagement, contributing to management accounting research with a psychological lens. Psychological capital, comprising efficacy, optimism, hope, and resiliency, is identified as a crucial moderator in the relationship between challenging work targets and employee engagement levels. Grounded in goal-setting theory, the research hypothesizes and demonstrates that employees with higher PsyCap experience increased engagement when facing challenging targets, a finding supported by data from 1,404 employees of a Japanese firm. The study also examines the role of long-term employment by analyzing two groups of employees based on tenure. The…

My name is Nils Gimpl, and I am a PhD student in finance and accounting at Saarland University and a research assistant at Frankfurt School’s Centre for Performance Management for Controlling. I am writing this report to summarize my activities and achievements during my 8-week visiting research stay at Bayes Business School, funded by the EAA ARC International PhD Visit Scheme. During my stay, I engaged in various academic activities that significantly contributed to my doctoral research and professional development. I attended several research seminars in Finance and Accounting, both at Bayes Business School and the London School of Economics.…