This study examines the effect of financial reporting opacity and audit quality on stock price crash risk using listed firms in Japan. This study is the first research to examine the effect of financial reporting opacity on crash risk using a Japanese listed company. Furthermore, the effect of audit quality on crash risk is verified. High level auditors can mitigate crash risk by playing a role as a corporate governance device mechanism to reduce agency costs. We use a logistic regression and linear regression model to test whether financial reporting opacity and audit quality affect crash risk using listed firms in the Japanese stock exchange market during the fiscal years 2015 January through 2017 February. The results of this study suggest that the financial reporting opacity variable shows a positive relationship with CRASH, which states that a firm with more opaque financial reporting increases crash risk. The results suggest also that the firms audited by Big4 auditors experience less crash risk, implying that the audit quality in Japan can be one of the factors mitigating firm's crash risk. This study provides implications for financial reporting and audit quality to external stakeholders who wants to avoid losses.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relation between conservative loan loss accounting practice of banks, defined as accounting behavior that increases loan loss allowances against expected credit losses, and bank lending. Furthermore, we specify the macroeconomic conditions reflecting debtors’ borrowing environments and analyze how these conditions affect the relation between conservative loan loss allowances and bank lending. Although existing literature reports that accounting conservatism has a direct effect on non-financial firms’ investment behavior, there is little evidence about an effect of conservatism on banks’ lending behavior. By exploiting data showing the links between individual Japanese firms and their individual lenders to control both loan demand and supply, we estimate OLS regressions to test the relationships among conservative loan loss allowance, bank lending, and macroeconomic conditions using a unique dataset containing bank–firm–year observations between 2001 and 2013. We find banks that have conservative loan loss allowances tend to provide fewer loans to firms with financing needs when macroeconomic conditions are good and these conservative banks are likely to provide more loans to firms when macroeconomic conditions are bad. Our findings suggest that reflecting expected credit loss into loan loss allowances can mitigate the procyclical behavior of banks.