Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between regional institution and accounting quality. Design/methodology/approach This study investigates whether and to what extent the convergence to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) improves Chinese firms’ accounting quality. It also examines the role regional institutions play in this process. The focus is on two aspects of accounting quality: the accrual aggressiveness and the timely loss recognition. Specifically, the study tests: whether the convergence to IFRS significantly lowers the accrual aggressiveness proxied by the magnitude of discretionary accruals (DA); whether the convergence to IFRS significantly enhances the timely loss recognition proxied by the likelihood of reporting large negative net income; and whether the effects of convergence to IFRS on accounting quality vary with the quality of regional institutions. Findings The findings show that convergence to IFRS generally was accompanied by increases in DA and decreases in timely loss recognition for Chinese firms. Further analysis on the development of regional institutions reveals that both changes in accrual aggressiveness and timely loss recognition are more pronounced for firms located in regions with a lower level of development in the legal environment. Originality/value This study contributes to the accounting literature in several ways. First, it extends the accounting literature regarding institutional factors by examining the association between regional institutions and accounting quality. Second, by adopting a within-country setting, the study avoids such problems of cross-country comparisons as confounding factors caused by country-specific accounting rules and regulations, differences in infrastructure and culture, and other potential endogeneity problems (Chan et al., 2010). Third, the attention paid to the European and US application of IFRS overshadows the application and effects of IFRS in emerging markets. By examining China, the world largest emerging economy in the process of economic transition, this study sheds light on the effect of convergence to IFRS on accounting quality for emerging or transitional economies.

To solve the problem of baseline drift in the detection of soil samples by x-ray fluorescence spectrum, an improved adaptive iterative weighted penalized least squares ( IairPLS ) method is proposed to estimate the baseline of x-ray fluorescence spectrum signals. We improved the original exponential weight function to solve the problem of baseline underestimation caused by adaptive iterative weighted penalized least squares. The improved function effectively reduces the risk of baseline underestimation and speeds up the weighting process, achieving good results. In this paper, the MC simulation spectrum and soil real analysis spectrum are used to verify the performance of the algorithm. Finally, the algorithm is compared with previous penalized least squares methods (asymmetric least squares, adaptive iterative reweighted penalized least squares, and multiple constrained reweighted penalized least squares), with the results showing that the proposed method has the least root-mean-square error after baseline correction for optimal smoothing parameters λ and the best relative error of baseline estimation accuracy. Meanwhile, the IairPLS method can effectively improve the quantitative analysis ability of the x-ray fluorescence spectrum. The proposed method can be successfully applied to the actual x-ray fluorescence spectrum, which provides a powerful basis for quantitative analysis.

Fiber-fed etalons are widely employed in advanced interferometric instruments such as gravitationalwave detectors, ultrastable lasers and calibration reference for high-precision spectrographs. We demonstrate that variation in near-field distribution of the feeding fiber would deteriorate the spectrum precision of the fiber-fed Fabry-Perot etalon, especially when precision at the order of 3 × 10 −10 or higher is required. The octagonal fiber reinforced with double scrambler could greatly improve the steadiness and uniformness of the near-field distribution. When building wavelength calibrators for sub-m s −1 precision radial-velocity instruments, the double scrambler should be considered meticulously.