Estimating firm-level and country-level effects in cross-sectional analyses: An application of hierarchical modeling in corporate disclosure studies

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_02CA040AA30D
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Estimating firm-level and country-level effects in cross-sectional analyses: An application of hierarchical modeling in corporate disclosure studies
Journal
The International Journal of Accounting
Author(s)
Dong M., Stettler A.
ISSN
0020-7063
Publication state
Published
Issued date
09/2011
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
46
Number
3
Pages
271-303
Language
english
Abstract
Researchers in the field of international accounting are often confronted with observations of firms clustered into higher-level units such as countries. Using data from a corporate disclosure study including 797 firm observations from 34 countries, we demonstrate that the inferences obtained from the most commonly used Ordinary Least Square (OLS) test, which pools the firm and country data either under the disaggregation or aggregation approach, are problematic and misleading. To overcome the methodological limitation, we subsequently employ hierarchical modeling to simultaneously estimate both firm-level (within-country) and country-level (cross-country) disclosure determinants. We find that the clustering effects are significant in almost all firm-level variables. Once such effects are adjusted, only three firm-specific variables are significantly associated with corporate disclosure. Evidence provided by this study has important implications for most international accounting studies conducted in cross-level contexts.
Keywords
disaggregation, aggregation, disclosure, hierarchical modeling
Create date
27/11/2012 16:51
Last modification date
21/08/2019 5:14
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