Advocates suggest that firms receiving their financial outcomes earlier can enjoy better financial performance since the timely feedback on financial outcomes enables managers to take quick actions to enhance the financial performance. Academic research, however, has not investigated well whether early filers enjoy better financial performance. Using the number of days that firms take to issue their consolidated financial statements, this paper studies its impact on ROA. The empirical findings of this study indicate that early filers achieve better financial performance, suggesting the importance of timely feedback on financial outcomes.

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　In recent years, the governance of Japanese nonprofit organizations, especially public interest corporations which are Japan’s leading nonprofits, have been attracting attention. This study focuses on the members / councilors from the perspective of nonprofit governance and investigates empirically its role from the perspective of its relevance to performance. This study is based on the theory and evidence of Aggarwal et al. (2012), who conducted an empirical analysis of the board of directors as the highest decision-making body in the US nonprofit organization. Japanese public interest corporations have members / council that has a role similar to that of the board of directors in a US nonprofit organization, and is expected to have the same effect on the performance of public interest corporations as the board of directors in the United States. As a result of using 25,370 public interest corporation data from 2013 to 2017, the size of members / councils of the public interest corporation had a positive relationship with their performance. On the other hand, given the size of the members / councilors, the size of the board of directors was not related to the performance of public interest corporations. This paper provides insights to the owners and regulators of non-profit organizations, by presenting evidence that the members / councilors can be an effective monitoring mechanism in an environment where major monitoring entities such as donors are lacking.

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　This study investigates the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the lossavoidance behavior of managers. Given that loss avoidance behavior is motivated by the stock market, the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and loss avoidance is predicted to be both positive and negative. Thus, this study examines which type of relationship is observed on average. Using the Nikkei Stock Average Volatility Index as a proxy for macroeconomic uncertainty, the study compares the difference in the frequency distributions of ordinary income (i.e., income before special items and taxes) and pre-managed earnings (i.e., ordinary income after deducting discretionary accruals) between low- and high-uncertainty subsamples. Additionally, this study estimates fixed-effect logit models. These results reveal that lower probability of firms engage in loss avoidance behavior under high macroeconomic uncertainty.

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　This paper focuses on the boundary spanners in buyer–supplier transactional relationships, and investigates which antecedents influence inter-firm control and how intra- and inter-firm control practices affect the role conflict and role ambiguity perceived by the supplier’s boundary spanners. Supplier boundary spanners are often required to respond to and coordinate with buyers regarding various requirements. However, they are also required to fulfil accounting responsibilities of their own departments within their firms. That is, supplier boundary spanners are often subject to overlapping plural management control within and between firms. Such duality of control might lead to boundary spanners being caught in a double-bind, and cause role stress.

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　This study examines the change in the accounting discretionary behavior after the restatement caused by fraudulent accounting in Japan. I analyzed the difference-in-differences in the abnormal accruals, which presents the accounting discretionary behavior, for firms that restated due to fraud and non-fraud firms. As a result, I find that firms restated due to fraudulent accounting experience the significant income-decrease difference of abnormal accruals in the initial reports’ announcement period and the following periods. The results mean that the disclosure of fraudulent accounting, which has a material misstatement, is a turning point for firms to settle their past accounting discretionary behavior and reduce income-increase accounting discretionary behavior after that. It suggests that firms take actions to signal improvement of financial reporting quality, restoring their trust after the restatement of fraudulent accounting.

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　This study explores (1) how much firms invest in and spend on information technology (IT)-enabled business process improvements, such as robotic process automation (RPA), (2) whether the headquarters or the business units should be the decision-making authority for such investments, and (3) how to implement a performance evaluation system. To this end, the study conducts theoretical research on IT investment and spending from the perspectives of individual attributes, organizational management, and the business environment. It uses mathematical model based on the contract theory and focuses on the business risk and IT literacy of the organizational members. The analysis finds that firms need to consider introducing RPA and a performance evaluation system in an integrated manner and according to the nature and its characteristics of the business. Additionally, in certain cases, the headquarters should reserve the right to decide on introduction RPA and other systems even if it has lower IT literacy than the business units; this becomes more significant as business risks grow.

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