Journal of Empirical Research in Accounting
Year:2018 | Volume:7 | Issue:28 |Papers Count:10

The goal of this paper is to study factors influencing the rate of plagiarism among accounting postgraduate students. Data is collected from students of Sistan and Baluchestan university of Iran through 73 applicable questionnaires during 2013. The results indicate that plagiarism is quite prevalent among the accounting postgraduate students; however they are not completely familiar with different types of plagiarism. In addition, no significant relation is detected between prevalence of plagiarism and demographic variables such as age and gender, as well as individual variables such as their academic performance. However, the results of correlation test show that plagiarism committing rate of the students has (a) a positive significant relation with some parameters namely educational pressure, tendency of educational system and accounting students to low level approaches of accounting education, and students' access to information technology (e. g. Internet); and (b) a negative significant relation with some other factors such as moral competence, awareness of plagiarism, organizational support, as well as students’ interest in accounting.

This paper uses the system dynamics method as a new approach in modeling of accounting events. For this purpose, firstly, by defining financial accounts in the form of state and rate variables, the effect of accounting events on each other is modeled based on the dynamics model. Then, key variables are simulated in the outlook of year 1400 using the actual data of a manufacturing company. The results of the study show that the proposed method, while modeling financial operations based on a dynamic approach, helps managers to analyze the effectiveness of variables based on dominant behavioral patterns and provides useful information for management decision making through simulating the trend of variables in future periods and simulating the future behavior of financial variables of the company, respectively. For example, the behavioral pattern of the variable Doubtful Debts is not instantaneous but is a delay element and has an exponential distribution function. Also its variations has a significant relation with sales price, return of investment and receivables variables. Therefore, any changes in receivables trend may result in changes in future behavioral pattern of sale.

Understanding firms' attitude towards environmental issues is the first and perhaps the most important step in the environmental reporting research area. This is achieved through the content analysis of listed firms' board of directors' reports of environmental activities. The current study is aimed to extract key words and indicators and investigate the difference of disclosure in different industries. To do this, the environmental section of listed firms' board of directors' reports of environmental activities from 2011 to 2015 is examined using the induction approach in qualitative content analysis method and by MAXQDA 12 Analytical Pro software. The results represent 15 parent codes and 55 subcodes indicating the scenarios ruling on these reports. Also, results from evaluating impacts of industry on providing environmental reports confirm the research hypothesis, which indicates a significant difference in disclosures of different industries. In order to understand and compare more deeply, different interpretations of the software outcomes are represented and also the characteristics of the firms with similar reports, have been analyzed.

Related party transaction is one of the factors devaluating the capital market. Although all related party transactions aren’t opportunistic, but it is believed that they significantly affect risk and are very important to investors. This research is aimed to identify the relation of related party transactions to disclosure quality, earning management, and profitability. Based on the representation problem, related party transactions, due to the owner's lack of control and the conflict of interest, can lower disclosure quality and stakeholders’ wealth and thus result in earning management. Therefore this study uses related party transactions as an independent variable and discretionary accruals as the dependant variable. The sample includes 112 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period from 2012 to 2016. To test the hypotheses, multiple linear regression model has been used. Research findings show a negative significant relation, a positive significant relation and no significant relation of related party transactions to disclosure quality, earnings management and profitability, respectively.

As the international auditing standard no. 700 is revised and the International Auditing Standard 701 is set by the International Auditing Standards Board and both of them are executed since 15 December 2016, this research is aimed to examine the viewpoints of auditors on the current as well as the new audit report subject to recent changes in audit reports. This is a survey type research and data is collected through questionnaire. The statistical population includes audit managers and top level supervisors, partners in audit organizations and certified auditor members of the Auditing Organization and Certified Accounting Society. The statistical sample consists of 400 members of the statistical population that participated in the "Recent Changes in Auditing Reports" forum held in Feb-March 2018. From the 400 questionnaires distributed among the sample, 72 ones are considered as applicable. In order to analyze data, the one-sample t-test is applied. Research findings indicate that auditors have different opinions about advantages and disadvantages of the current audit report and believe in some necessary changes in the current report. Moreover, auditors confirm the new audit report and its partial and simultaneous execution in all economic units and accounting entities, as well as the disclosure of auditor tenure in the audit report. The research findings can convince standard setting authorities and Securities and Exchange organization to accept new auditing standards. Moreover, the research provides evidence of Iranian auditors' attitude toward new changes made in the auditing report.

This study is aimed to investigate the effect of the board of director's independence on the relation between ownership structure and the tax gap. The sample includes 62 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period from 2007-2013. To test the hypothesis, regression analysis method based on panel data is used. Independent variables are ownership structure including family ownership and corporate ownership and the dependent variable is tax gap which is equal to the difference between determined tax and declared tax. Also the adjusting variable is the board of directors' independence which is equal to the nonexecutive members to the total members ratio of the board of directors. The control variables are firms size, financial leverage and asset return. The findings show that there is a negative significant relation between family ownership and tax gap and a positive significant relation between corporate ownership and tax gap and also the board of directors' independence has no moderating effect on the relations.

One of the main missions of financial reporting is a proper disclosure of information in order to meet the needs of financial statement users. This study is aimed to investigate whether the company's disclosure quality can be discovered by Machine learning-based models. In this study, disclosure level rating of listed firms is predicted by Securities and Exchange Organization using the ant colony algorithm and differential evolution model. The sample consists of 171 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period from 2010 to 2014. This study uses MATLAB software to predict a firm's disclosure quality. The algorithms fitting results show that the two algorithms have ability to predict earnings management with high accuracy of 95%. In fact, the results indicate that the ant colony algorithm has more ability (error 3.316 percent) of predicting earnings management than the differential evolution algorithm (4. 139 percent error).

A firm's profitability prediction provides valuable information that helps investors to make optimal decisions. Like other information, the value of these predictions depends on the reliability of information they provide. This research examines the effect of the auditor's rating and its quality control points as criteria of audit quality, on earning forecast error rate. The sample consists of 119 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period from 2012 to 2015. The results indicate that there is a significant negative relation between audit firms A and the earning forecast error. The results also show a significant positive relation of earnings forecast error to the returns on asset rate and financial leverage and also no significant relation of earnings forecast error to the auditor's rating and the type of auditor's opinion variables.

The Stock market is one of the markets from which investors try to earn interests. Stock returns are the most important measures for decision making of investors in this market. This study develops a model for predicting stock returns using financial statements, disclosure quality, corporate governance mechanisms, audit quality, stock market qualification and macroeconomic items. Data is collected from disclosures of firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during a period from 2004 to 2012. Based on this model, net income, price index for consumer goods and services, dividend, oil price index and gold coin price index are the most important variables effective on predicting stock returns. To determine the developed model’s accuracy and validity, stock returns are predicted for sample firms (86 firms) for years from 2013 to 2017 and then errors of predicted returns as compared to real returns for those periods are determined. Furthermore, other prior valid predicting models (capital assets pricing model (CAPM), Fama and French three factors model and arbitrage pricing model) errors are calculated for that period. Comparing developed predicting model errors with other predicting models errors shows that this model has significantly fewer errors in predicting future stock returns than the prior models.

Economy has changed evaluation methods of the firms. The major gap between market value and book value of firms is a motivation of extensive research on unexplained value or reserve savings. Empirical studies in developed markets show that intangible assets are strategic and important. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of intangible assets on fiscal and governance policy in firms listed in the Stock Exchange in Tehran. The sample consists of 78 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period from 2007 to 2013. Data is analyzed using correlation analysis method, multiple regression and Wald test. Regression analysis is tested based on panel data and using random effects models. This study is aimed to investigate the relation of intangible assets to fiscal and governance policy variables such as financial structure, the dividend ratio, management ownership, and board structure. The results show that intangible assets have a significant negative relation to financial structure, a significant positive relation to board independence, and no significant relation to dividend. In general, the results indicate that intangible assets have effects on governance policies and they should be more considered.