We examine how managerial discretion under ASC 606 affects the reporting of revenue and related accounts for complex transactions. We find that firms most affected by the standard exhibit higher revenue growth and smaller changes in unearned revenue in the post-implementation period relative to control firms. Furthermore, earnings for these firms show a stronger positive association with concurrent annual returns, suggesting that the standard yields more informative financial reporting. However, we also document that when firms most affected by ASC 606 face analyst forecast pressure, they are more likely to meet or beat earnings and revenue targets, consistent with opportunistic use of discretion allowed in the standard. Our results highlight the trade-offs of principle-based standards, demonstrating that while discretion can enhance informativeness, it can also facilitate opportunistic reporting under certain incentives. These findings offer critical insights for practitioners, investors, and standard-setters, and underscore the need for researchers to account for such discretion in future empirical designs.
This study explores the divergence between Islamic banking's ethical ideals and their implementation in Saudi Arabia, where global capitalist pressures and neo-imperial logics reshape local practices. Mobilising postcolonial theory, we extend its conventional focus on former colonies to a context never formally colonised. Saudi Arabia illustrates how coloniality persists beyond territorial conquest: through the adoption of Western regulatory frameworks, financial standards, and epistemic norms. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, we identify how international standards and local perceptions of Western superiority displace authentic Sharia-based financial practices, such as profit-and-loss sharing, in favour of debt-based products that mimic conventional banking. These dynamics institutionalise mimicry and erode the social and ethical distinctiveness of Islamic finance. Our analysis reveals displaced local practices to capture how indigenous modes of banking are marginalised within global financial architectures. The study contributes to the accounting and business ethics literature by demonstrating that postcolonial theorisation is analytically powerful even in non-colonised settings, and by highlighting the structural and ideological challenges that Islamic banks face in pursuing authenticity within a globalised financial system.
Drawing on dialogic accounting and accountability literature, we present a new approach for teaching and practicing sustainability accounting and reporting (SAR) that integrates a fully implemented praxis (action) element in a high school context. Based on a critical dialogic accounting and accountability education action research methodology, we explore how students with no prior accounting background can develop their school's sustainability report. Our findings highlight that a dialogic action component exposes participants to multiple perspectives, supports their critical understanding of organizational sustainability, and illustrates how sustainability reporting can be operationalised in practice. This study is unique in that it examines a SAR educational program featuring an embedded dialogic action process, an area thus far underexplored due to the difficulties of extending dialogic accounting (DA) outside the classroom with real-world implications. We offer an adaptable model for educational institutions, capable of cultivating participants' competencies and promoting a critical, socially responsible approach to understanding proper SAR. Furthermore, we explore the potential of this approach not only as a way to teach SAR but also as a means to use SAR education as a practical context for developing a conscious understanding of sustainability issues, as well as discussing possible avenues for expanding SAR education to include learners from diverse backgrounds. Finally, drawing on our case insights, we suggest avenues for embedding dialogic and action-oriented principles into SAR practices, promoting more participatory forms of sustainability reporting.
Using a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology, this study examines how the expansion of China's medium-term lending facility (MLF) policy to include green assets affects corporate environmental information disclosure. We construct a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2015 to 2020, including a treatment group of firms with potential green credit projects and a control group of other firms. We find that after the June 2018 MLF collateral expansion, environmental disclosure significantly increases for the treatment firms relative to the control firms. This effect is robust to a variety of specifications and additional checks. Further analyses based on difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) models identify two mechanisms, financing and investment, through which green monetary policy may ease financing constraints and encourage green investment, which in turn increases environmental information disclosure. We also find that the policy has stronger effects on firms in more developed regions, areas with weaker prior environmental regulation, non-state-owned enterprises, and those with less transparent information. Our findings underscore the potential of green monetary policy as a tool to incentivize corporate sustainability practices and contribute to the literature by providing micro-level evidence of monetary policy's environmental impact.
