Accounting Enforcement’s Determinants—A Global Study

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the national characteristics of culture, religion and political factionalization are associated with the strength of accounting enforcement. The study uses data on percentages of religious adherents in a sample nation, the Hofstede cultural dimensions and political factionalization as key independent variables. This study also controls for national legal code (e.g., Common Law or Civic Code) and market liquidity. It uses factor analysis to generate factor scores from the data. These factor scores are then used as the independent variables. The dependent variable, accounting enforcement, is drawn from Brown, Preiato and Tarca (2014). The findings demonstrate that these national characteristics are strongly associated with national accounting regulatory enforcement. The implications of this research are that national characteristics should be taken into account in considering the impact of accounting standards on accounting comparability across nations. The limitation of this study is that, like much international research, the sample size is limited, here to 42 nations. This study provides an important contribution to the literature by helping establish that national characteristics do affect accounting enforcement efforts cross-nationally. This helps researchers and regulators better understand whether international standards can provide the link in comparability across nations that proponents are seeking. It does so by focusing on the variation in enforcement across nations rather than on the standards themselves.