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In this paper, I investigate the impact of secrecy, ownership dispersion and profitability on the readability of annual reports of U.S.-listed Asian companies. This is perhaps the first paper to examine the effect on readability of cross-listed Asian companies. I use a measure of secrecy developed in Hope at al. (2008) to study its effect on readability. The sample of this paper consists of all 68 Asian companies from nine countries listed on NYSE/NASDAQ, that are registered and reporting with the SEC. The univariate and multivariate analyses show that companies whose domestic culture is more secretive are providing less readable financial statements. This result is robust to sensitivity tests. This is an interesting and important result in line with the efforts being made to have convergence in the International accounting area. This is despite the fact that a large number of these companies are using IFRS and U.S. GAAP to prepare their financial statements. The results also show that companies with higher ownership dispersion are providing more readable annual reports. The results fail to reject the hypothesis related to the effect of profitability. Finally, the results show that larger sample companies are providing more difficult to read financial statements. These results have important implications for international investors and global standard-setting bodies.

This paper has three objectives. First, we investigate the effects of perceived stress on the academic performance of accounting students. Second, we examine the association of Facebook use with perceived stress. Third, we investigate the effect of Facebook usage on accounting students' academic performance. To measure the perceived stress we used the Perceived Stress Scale developed in the prior research for the shorter version and used it to collect data from accounting students at two universities. We found that female accounting students reported higher stress scores than their male counterparts. In addition, the results indicated that this phenomenon affected their academic performance negatively. African American accounting students were more likely to report higher stress scores than their non-African American counterparts. Further investigation showed that African American students are more likely to live alone or to live in the dorm. They are also more likely to be working while going to school. Our analysis shows that higher Facebook use is associated with stress and the respondents in our sample, who used Facebook while studying, reported higher levels of stress and were less in control of things. Finally, our results show that accounting students who use Facebook while studying experienced lower academic performance after controlling for stress.

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