Los documentos de trabajo del Ivie ofrecen un avance de los resultados de las investigaciones económicas en curso, con objeto de generar un proceso de discusión previo a su remisión a las revistas científicas. Al publicar este documento de trabajo, el Ivie no asume responsabilidad sobre su contenido.Ivie working papers offer in advance the results of economic research under way in order to encourage a discussion process before sending them to scientific journals for their final publication. Ivie's decision to publish this working paper does not imply any responsibility for its content.La Serie EC, coordinada por Matilde Mas, está orientada a la aplicación de distintos instrumentos de análisis al estudio de problemas económicos concretos.Coordinated by Matilde Mas, the EC Series mainly includes applications of different analytical tools to the study of specific economic problems.Todos los documentos de trabajo están disponibles de forma gratuita en la web del Ivie http://www.ivie.es, así como las instrucciones para los autores que desean publicar en nuestras series.Working papers can be downloaded free of charge from the Ivie website AbstractIn a sample of large private Spanish subsidiaries, we find that the magnitude of discretionary accruals is significantly higher when the parent company is foreign than when it is local. Our tests support the thesis of recent research on earnings management strategies within multinational corporations (MNCs), suggesting that the parent company's incentives underlie the observed negative relation between foreign ownership and financial reporting quality at the subsidiary level. In particular, we observe that: (1) the tenure of the controlling shareholder has a negative incremental effect on financial reporting quality in firms under foreign control, but not in subsidiaries of local groups; and (2) the negative association between foreign ownership and financial reporting quality is mainly driven by the subsample of subsidiaries with parent companies located in countries with higher institutional quality than Spain.H3: the relation between foreign ownership and financial reporting quality is sensitive to the institutional quality in the parent company's country of origin.

Corporate spinoffs are important events that are accompanied by valuation and credit‐risk implications for the parent firm. Among other benefits, spinoffs can improve corporate focus and enhance valuation transparency. In the debt‐contracting context, however, spinoffs can also be associated with negative outcomes for the divesting firms. We examine whether banks, due to their timely access to material private information, are able to ascertain the likelihood and the implications of impending spinoffs for the parent firm before a formal public announcement of the spinoff. Our empirical analyses indicate that, in the 365‐day pre‐spinoff announcement period, banks charge incrementally higher (lower) spreads to borrowers with increased (decreased) post‐spinoff riskiness relative to nondivesting firms. This suggests that, while lenders recognize the value‐ and transparency‐enhancing effects of spinoffs, they are also able to foresee potentially negative implications of these divestitures. Cross‐sectional analyses indicate that banks charge incrementally lower loan spreads if spinoffs result in high‐risk borrowers having either higher reporting quality or lower reporting or operational complexity. These results suggest that the post‐spinoff increase in riskiness is compensated by the divestiture benefits typically associated with spinoffs. Similarly, high‐risk borrowers incur larger spreads if they do not undergo “focus‐increasing” spinoffs. Overall, our findings suggest that banks are able to ex ante determine the implications of important corporate events such as spinoffs.

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Los documentos de trabajo del Ivie ofrecen un avance de los resultados de las investigaciones económicas en curso, con objeto de generar un proceso de discusión previo a su remisión a las revistas científicas. Al publicar este documento de trabajo, el Ivie no asume responsabilidad sobre su contenido. Ivie working papers offer in advance the results of economic research under way in order to encourage a discussion process before sending them to scientific journals for their final publication. Ivie's decision to publish this working paper does not imply any responsibility for its content. La Serie EC, coordinada por Matilde Mas, está orientada a la aplicación de distintos instrumentos de análisis al estudio de problemas económicos concretos. Coordinated by Matilde Mas, the EC Series mainly includes applications of different analytical tools to the study of specific economic problems. Todos los documentos de trabajo están disponibles de forma gratuita en la web del Ivie http://www.ivie.es, así como las instrucciones para los autores que desean publicar en nuestras series. Working papers can be downloaded free of charge from the Ivie website http://www.ivie.es, as well as the instructions for authors who are interested in publishing in our series.

Employing Lennox's (2000) methodology on a uniquely long time series of Spanish companies' data, we find evidence of successful audit opinion-shopping through the firm switching decision. However, in contrast to Chen et al. (2016) in the Chinese setting, we find no evidence of successful opinion-shopping at the partner level. This supports the thesis that the audit market characteristics that are key to promote or deter opinion shopping might differ at the firm and partner level within a country, with consequences for audit quality. In addition, we provide evidence on the strategies that companies use to secure more favourable opinions. The results suggest that companies may prefer to opinion shop at the partner level, which is consistent with the argument that the costs and benefits associated with opinion-shopping are different at these two levels, and lead to different outcomes.