This paper provides a meta‐analysis of the determinants of audit report lag, defined as the period between a company's fiscal year end and the audit report date. We group the meta‐analyzed studies into three categories: (a) audit and audit‐related determinants, (b) corporate governance‐related determinants, and (c) firm‐specific determinants. We find that audit opinion and audit season variables increase audit report lag, whereas Big 4 affiliation, nonaudit services, and auditor tenure decrease audit report lag. Among the corporate governance determinants, the existence of a financial expert member on an audit committee, and ownership concentration, reduce audit report lag. Finally, an examination of firm‐level characteristics reveals that firm complexity increases audit report lag, whereas profitability reduces it. We employ a meta‐regression technique and identify publication bias. Although we find some evidence of journal quality as a contributor to publication bias, the extent of publication bias from this source is small.

We provide a systematic literature review of the determinants and consequences of real earnings management (REM) in an international context. We provide a theoretical framework for REM, the development of REM measures, and review the determinants of REM, categorising these into financial reporting, auditing, governance and controls, capital market incentives, and regulatory determinants. We then review the empirical literature on the consequences of REM. We provide some suggestions for future research on measurement issues related to REM, and on filling gaps in the empirical research investigating its determinants and consequences.

This article examines the effects on cost stickiness of firms’ involvement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Cost stickiness represents asymmetric cost behavior whereby the magnitude of cost increases in response to an increase in the activity level is greater than the magnitude of cost decreases with a decrease in the activity level. We hypothesize that CSR involvement requires ongoing investments in value-creating activities; hence, it is difficult to scale down committed resources instantly even when the activity declines. We use two different CSR proxies and find support for the CSR-related cost stickiness hypothesis. We further decompose CSR into strategic and tactical CSR and find that cost stickiness is more pronounced for strategic CSR. Finally, we examine the CSR-related cost behavior pattern across business cycles and find some evidence of cost stickiness during an expansionary phase of the economy and cost anti-stickiness during a recessionary phase but only for the tactical CSR component.

This systematic literature review critically analyzes studies on the determinants of short selling and the implications for information distribution, real economic decisions, financial reporting, and external auditing. We select and review studies within a research framework, identifying two of the most important areas in the literature: short sellers as important information intermediaries and short sellers’ influence on accounting, auditing, and other corporate decisions as the ‘spillover effect’ of the information distribution. Of the two, the former has a strong emphasis on financial markets, whereas the latter extends this traditional topic in finance to financial economics, corporate governance, and accounting. Our review highlights that, although short sellers use both private information and public information in selecting stocks for shorting, we know little about how they use private and non-financial information to influence managerial economic decisions and firms’ financial reporting decisions. In discussing potential future research, we emphasize that penetrating the information ‘black box’ and positioning research regarding the information that short sellers use and how they use it are necessary to advance the short-selling literature.