Matthias Höltken, Germar Ebner

• The main objective of financial reporting is to provide useful information to a firm’s stakeholders. However, it is questionable whether this goal can be fully realized without effective enforcement, which ensures faithful and consistent application of the relevant accounting standards. Within the multiplicity of studies iestigating enforcement mechanisms and consequences to enforcement actions, this paper provides an overview on the current state of research on enforcement from a corporate governance perspective. We therefore analyze enforcement literature from both internal and external corporate governance perspectives in order to show interactions between enforcement and other mechanisms of financial reporting oversight. In addition, it becomes evident that most preceding research addresses neither efficiency nor efficacy of enforcement systems due to missing effect variables or data accessibility. Furthermore, we deduce further research opportunities with respect to enforcement consequences and their determinants. This HHL Working Paper 150 is a revised version of the HHL Working Paper 142.