Accounting for Transparency: a Framework and Three Applications in Tax, Managerial, and Financial Accounting

Year: 2024

Type: Journal Publication

Journal: Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research

This article presents how the Collaborative Research Center TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency understands and studies transparency in organizations and markets. Starting from our transparency definition, which is rooted in a sender/receiver framework, we discuss how accounting, taxation, and their regulation affect transparency and illustrate selected economic consequences of transparency. We use three analyses to exemplify our research approach. These analyses illustrate that (i) firms use tax literacy and tax advice as substitutes in their strategies to cope with signals sent by tax regulators about complex tax regulations, (ii) trade-offs between tighter management controls and employee motivation lead firms to design hybrid work environments that facilitate information exchange within the firm, and (iii) managers’ understanding of how financial statement users benefit from firm disclosures affects the managers’ assessments of disclosure regulation. Overall we argue that transparency is context-specific, hard to achieve, and often has ambiguous consequences. We conclude by highlighting selected transparency-related questions that interdisciplinary work with a particular emphasis on institutional details can meaningfully address.

Publication Information

TRR 266 researchers

Jannis Bischof University of Mannheim

Jannis Bischof is Professor of Accounting at University of Mannheim. His research addresses the role of disclosure and transparency in the financial sector and other settings, the regulation of financial institutions, and managerial discretion in reporting decisions. His research is published in journals such as Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Business, Finance & Accounting, or Schmalenbach Business Review. He is Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute für Financial Research (SAFE) and is member of the EFRAG’s Financial Instruments Working Group. He is member of the Editorial Board of several international journals (Accounting and Business Research, Business Research, European Accounting Review, Journal of Business Economics).

Joachim Gassen Humboldt University of Berlin

Joachim Gassen is Professor for Accounting at Humboldt University of Berlin and distinguished affiliate professor at ESMT Berlin. His research focuses on the role of accounting information in markets and contracts. He is currently acting as the departmental editor for accounting at the German business association journal “Business Research” and is co-chairing the Doctoral Colloquium of the European Accounting Association. In addition, he is member of the Academic Panel of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG).

Anna Rohlfing-Bastian Goethe University Frankfurt

Anna Rohlfing-Bastian is Professor for Accounting, especially Management Accounting at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests include incentive contracts and performance measurement, task assignment in firms, organizational structures and relevant costs for decision-making. She is member of the Scientific Committee of the European Accounting Association (EAA) as well as member of the working group “transfer prices” of the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft. In addition, she is chairwoman of the German Economic Association of Business Administration (GEABA). She has published in renowned international journals such as The Accounting Review, the Review of Accounting Studies and the Journal of Management Accounting Research. She holds responsibility for reviewer activities of several leading journals such as the Review of Accounting Studies, Management Accounting Review and Review of Managerial Science. She is also member of the editorial review board of the Journal of Management Accounting Research.

Davud Rostam-Afschar University of Mannheim

Prof. Dr. Davud Rostam-Afschar is academic director of the German Business Panel at the University of Mannheim. Previously, he was visiting researcher at UC Berkeley and Harvard University. He worked at the University of Hohenheim, the Freie Universität of Berlin, and as a consultant to the European Commission and the OECD. His research focuses on taxation and accounting, public economics, labor economics, and industrial economics.

Caren Sureth-Sloane Paderborn University

Prof. Caren Sureth-Sloane is Professor of Business Administration, especially Business Taxation at Paderborn University and is the spokesperson of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency. She studies the effects of taxation on corporate decisions, especially on risky investments, as well as international business taxation and tax complexity. Since 2010, she has been Guest Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and Principal Investigator of the FWF Doctoral Program in International Business Taxation (DIBT). She received offers from the University of Graz, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Goethe University of Frankfurt, and the University of Cologne. She is a member of the working group “taxes” and “transfer prices” of the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft, of which she has been vice president since 2019. In 2013 Caren Sureth-Sloane was appointed a full member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. She is also a member of the DFG-Senate since 2021. Sureth-Sloane received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Graz in 2021 and an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics at the University of Bremen in 2022.

DOI

DOI Link

To cite this article

Bischof, J., Gassen, J., Rohlfing-Bastian, A. et al. Accounting for Transparency: a Framework and Three Applications in Tax, Managerial, and Financial Accounting. Schmalenbach J Bus Res (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41471-024-00200-7

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