A Study on Relationships among Accounting Transparency, Accounting Information Transparency, and XBRL

In response to successive accounting frauds such as Enron scandal, corporate accounting transparency has been at issue all over the world. After the United States and many European countries introduced XBRL that has been developed as a tool to improve accounting transparency, XBRL is being used as a standard of financial reporting worldwide. The purpose of this paper is to present how XBRL affects corporate accounting transparency. We investigated the meaning of accounting transparency and indices to measure it. We also presented the factors for measuring accounting information transparency, and established a research model and hypotheses to analyze the relationships among accounting transparency, accounting information transparency and XBRL. Last, we carried out confirmatory factor analysis to verify the research model and analyzed the research hypotheses through LISREL.