New regulation in the European Union has introduced the mandatory disclosure of key audit matters (KAMs) to audit reports. The EU has identified KAMs as significant risks, significant transactions or events, or significant judgments by auditors. This paper aims to determine the factors that influence the number of KAMs that auditors disclose in the main European countries under the new regulation. We predict that the litigation risk, reputation loss, auditor-client relationship, precision of accounting standards, and the effect of regulators and supervisors' activities affect the number of KAMs that auditors disclose.The sample consists of firms on the FTSE 100, CAC 40, or AEX 25 that have disclosed KAMs at the 2016 fiscal yearend. In line with our hypotheses, the findings show that a higher number of business segments (complexity) and more precise accounting standards lead to the disclosure of a higher number of KAMs. Contrary to our expectations, the results indicate that a positive association exists between the audit fee and the number of KAMs disclosed.As audit fees can be related to higher client risk, this finding could indicate that litigation risk dominates any auditor-client dependence. Further, although auditors often view their audits of banks as complex, the findings show a 146 | PINTO aNd MORaIS

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Since the early seventies, several studies have suggested that the age at which words are acquired (age of acquisition, or AoA) is an important predictor of the speed and accuracy with which those words can subsequently be processed in adulthood, with words acquired early in life being processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later (e.g., Carroll & White, 1973b).This effect, referred to in the literature as the "age of acquisition" effect (AoA effect), has been reported in many lexical processing tasks including: oral and written picture naming (e.g., Barry, Morrison, & Ellis, 1997;Bonin, Fayol, & Chalard, 2001;Ellis & Morrison, 1998;Morrison, Chappell, & Ellis, 1997;Severens, Van Lommel, Ratinckx, & Hartsuiker, 2005), face naming (e.g., Moore & Valentine, 1998), word naming (e.g., Gilhooly & Logie, 1981Morrison & Ellis, 1995, category instance fluency (Catling & Johnston, 2005;Forbes-McKay, Ellis, Shanks, & Venneri, 2005;Loftus & Suppes, 1972), word completion (Gilhooly & Gilhooly, 1979), visual and auditory lexical decision (e.g., Morrison & Ellis, 1995Turner, Valentine, & Ellis, 1998), naming from definition (Sartori, Lombardi, & Matiuzzi, 2005) or perceptual identification (Lyons, Teer, & Rubenstein, 1978). Moreover, although AoA measures are related to other lexical variables, at least in word naming and lexical decision tasks, AoA effects have been found to be independent of different measures of word frequency, familiarity, imageability and word length (Morrison & Ellis, 2000).The measurement of AoA has been operationalized in two different ways: a "subjective" measure, corresponding to adult ratings of the AoA of different words; and an "objective" measure based on the performance of children of different ages in object naming tasks. Several studies have shown that both measures of AoA are strongly correlated in different languages (e.g., Carroll & White, 1973a; De Moor, Ghyselink, & Brysbaert, 2000;Jorm, 1991;Lyons et al., 1978;Morrison et al., 1997;Pérez & Navalón, 2005;Pind, Jonsdottir, Gissurardottir, & Jonsson, 2000) providing validation for the rating method. Moreover, Bonin, Barry, Méot, and Chalard (2004) showed that the two measures were still significantly correlated when other lexical variables associated with AoA (including conceptual familiarity, word frequency trajectory, cumulative word frequency, imageability and phonological length) were partialled out.All this evidence would seem to suggest that AoA is an important lexical dimension on its own that can be measured in (at least) two different ways and that influences performance on a very diverse set of tasks. However, both of these contentions are still a matter of ongoing theoretical and methodological debate. On one hand, several criticisms have been pointed out to the two AoA measures and a new measure, "frequency trajectory", has been proposed to examine age-limited learning effects (Bonin et al., 2004;Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002). On the other hand, the independence of AoA and of AoA effects have been contested, esp...

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of corporate governance mechanisms and foreign direct investment (FDI) to restrain or stimulate the use of loan loss provisions (LLPs) by managers to smooth earnings in African banks. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a sample of 112 listed and non-listed banks from 20 African countries, covering the period 2011–2017. Models are estimated using the pooled ordinary least squares regression, as well as Blundell and Bond (1998) system GMM. Findings The results suggest that bank managers use LLPs to reduce income volatility and that ownership concentration increases income smoothing. The findings also show that FDI plays a fundamental role to restrain managerial discretion in developing countries, increasing corporate governance practices in the host country. Practical implications These findings are relevant for banking regulators and supervisors in order to determine which corporate governance mechanisms can be used in developing countries to increase the quality of financial reporting. A policy model that promotes FDI boosts financial reporting transparency, contributing to greater financial markets development. Originality/value The authors extend the existing literature on the influence of corporate governance mechanisms in limiting managerial discretion by focusing on the role that foreign shareholders may have in disciplining banks financial reporting quality in countries with weak institutional quality.