Winning the Australasian Reporting Awards: an analysis of accounting and economic outcomes

Despite the intuition that winning reporting awards should be primarily based on reporting quality, we find no evidence that Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed firms winning the Australasian Reporting Awards (ARA) over the period 2003–2016 exhibit higher financial reporting quality. However, we find that winning reporting awards is associated with higher annual report readability. Next, firms winning the ARA neither show superior future accounting performance nor higher market valuation. We also find that investors are not compensated with higher stock returns. Taken together, our findings suggest that the criteria applied to decide the ARA winners capture higher levels of readability but do not correlate with common academic signals of financial reporting quality. Users of the ARA outcomes should also be cautious with the immediate interpretation that the ARA are reliable signals of superior corporate performance. JEL Classification: D82, L15, M41