This study examines whether and how top management internationalization is associated with accounting quality. We combine upper echelons perspectives, agency theory, human capital theory and accounting research, and demonstrate that top management internationalization mitigates the level of managerial discretion in financial reporting. By decomposing the top management team, our analysis reveals that higher levels of accounting quality are associated with the internationalization of the CFO, not the internationalization of the CEO. In particular, we find that CFO’s international education and international work experience are important factors in higher accounting quality.

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We find no evidence that comprehensive income has a superior predictive power for future firm operating performance than net income. Further, we fail to find significant incremental predictive power of aggregated or individual components of other comprehensive income for subsequent period’s firm operating performance. The actuarial gains and losses on defined benefit pension obligations even seem to merely add noise for the prediction of subsequent period’s net income and of subsequent period’s comprehensive income. In contrast, our analyses indicate that other comprehensive income components seem to have incremental predictive power beyond one period. Finally, we find that the predictive power of net income and comprehensive for future firm operating performance has deteriorated as a consequence of the IASB’s recent initiatives and actions.