Corporate Scandals and Regulation: Appendix on Data Collection for Historical Time-Series from 1800 to 2015

Abstract

In this appendix, we provide the following for each of the 26 sample countries in Hail, Tahoun, and Wang (2018), Corporate Scandals and Regulation, Journal of Accounting Research 56(2): 617–671: a brief overview of the country’s historical background and the major developments affecting the regulatory environment, country-specific details regarding our data collection procedure (e.g., time period covered, newspaper selection for keyword search, data sources, keywords for search of electronic archives in local language, secondary literature, local country experts, etc.), as well as descriptive information on the episodes of corporate scandals and (accounting) regulation that we identified (including a few illustrative examples for each country). When data is available, we also plot the time-series of media mentions of the terms “scandal” and “regulator” (or the local equivalents) in the business press, and tabulate the number of different types of corporate scandals and regulations by decade over the period 1800 to 2015.

Keywords: Accounting fraud, Corporate scandals, Capital market regulation, Economics of regulation, Law and finance, International accounting

JEL Classification: F30, G18, G38, K22, L51, M48