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Based on data collected from 616 experienced financial officers who use U.S. GAAP or IFRS and are domiciled in the U.S., Europe, or Asia, we examine how reporting standards (U.S. GAAP versus IFRS) and domicile (U.S. versus non-U.S.) affect earnings management (real versus accrual). U.S. firms using U.S. GAAP rely more heavily on real methods than non-U.S. firms that use either IFRS or U.S. GAAP and U.S. firms using IFRS. U.S. firms using U.S. GAAP operate in an environment that encourages real over accruals methods; specifically, U.S. GAAP facilitates detection of earnings management, and enforcement is more effective in the U.S. Further, the likelihood and amount of earnings management do not differ across conditions, suggesting that firms using less accruals earnings management tend to fully compensate by increasing real methods. So stronger reporting environments do not necessarily reduce total earnings management, but instead encourage substitution of real for accruals methods.

In this paper, I examine the relation between disclosure commitment and cost of equity capital using accelerated earnings announcement disclosures as a measure of commitment. In settings characterized by imperfect market competition, I find that firms which consistently disclose balance sheet detail in relatively timely earnings announcements have lower costs of capital compared to other firms. This result is statistically significant and economically meaningful, and is robust to various alternative measurements for cost of capital, and alternative designs addressing endogeneity and underlying information quality. Overall, this result is important because it highlights additional dimensions of disclosure commitment (consistency and timeliness), while incorporating important features from theoretical models (information quality and market competition). In particular, my results suggest that consistency and timeliness are salient features of firms' disclosure behavior that have predictable and robust relations with capital market outcomes. This result is robust to controlling for underlying information quality; however, consistent with theory, it is conditional on low levels of market competition. * Accepted by Partha Mohanram. This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation completed at Duke University. I appreciate the guidance of my dissertation committee: Katherine Schipper (chair), Bob Ashton, Rick Hoyle, Bill Mayew, and Dhananjay Nanda. I have also received helpful comments from Partha Mohanram, Patricia O'Brien, two anonymous reviewers, par l'auteur semblent notamment indiquer que l'uniformit e et la rapidit e sont des aspects marquants du comportement des soci et es, en mati ere de communication d'information, ayant des liens pr evisibles et solides avec les r esultats obtenus sur les march es financiers.Cette conclusion r esiste au contrôle de la qualit e sous-jacente de l'information; toutefois, conform ement a la th eorie, elle est tributaire de faibles niveaux de concurrence sur le march e.