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Purpose This paper aims to examine the association between busy directors on corporate boards and accounting conservatism. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a sample of 500 firms listed on the Australian Security Exchange from 2004 to 2019. The busyness of non-executive directors is proxied by three indicators. For accounting conservatism, the authors use both conditional and unconditional accounting conservatism via asymmetric timeliness of earnings, accrual-based loss recognition, cumulative total accruals and book-to-market ratio. The authors cluster the standard errors at the firm level to compensate for potential residuals’ dependency and heteroscedasticity, in addition to analysing the main models using year and industry fixed effects (Petersen, 2009). Separately, the authors look at the impact of female busy directors on firms’ adoption of conservative accounting methods. Both propensity score matching analyses and Heckman (1979) two-stage approach systematically address endogeneity issues. Findings The presence of busy directors on boards leads to greater unconditional conservatism and less conditional conservatism. The relationships between busy female directors with both conditional and unconditional conservatism remain consistent with the main findings. Practical implications This paper provides useful insights for shareholders, regulators and accounting standards setters to better evaluate busy directors’ effectiveness in monitoring firms’ financial reporting quality. Directors and the companies themselves can refer to the authors’ findings to decide the best structure for their boards and committees, considering their specific monitoring requirements. Given that no mandatory restriction has been legislated, improved policies or new ones will ensure that busy directors can effectively fulfil their duties. Originality/value This research contributes to the broader research theme by examining the influence of directors’ quality on financial reporting conservatism. It also contributes to the ongoing debate in the corporate finance literature regarding the experience and busyness hypotheses of directors with multiple directorships. Additionally, this research adds value to gender diversity research by finding evidence that female busy directors follow the same pattern of reporting conservatism as male busy directors.

Learners in the contemporary digital world tend to move from space to space during their learning process. However, transforming such spaces to effective learning places is not simple. This study aims to investigate Vietnamese EFL students’ appreciation for various learning spaces and their willingness in turning those spaces into places for learning purposes. The factors associated with this process are also explored. Employing a short questionnaire distributed to 226 undergraduate students and several follow up individual interviews, the study shows that most students travel across some spaces in their daily learning activities, but they do not try to control those spaces. They only appreciate their teacher-created and self-created solo learning spaces and accept these spaces as their learning places. They also agree that these are the spaces where they can best control their learning. These findings present a complex picture of students’ exercise of taking control in their learning. It appears that the initiation of their learning must start with trust and convenience in a learning space. The attempt to control a learning space does not start with careful considerations as often seen in autonomous learners. This emphasises the role of trust in nurturing and shaping learners’ capacity of space control for learning purposes.