This article examines the nature of disclosure standards, under the assumption that (i) standards preferred by more firms are collectively chosen and (ii) privately informed firms prefer standards that increase market perceptions about the value of their assets. A standard is stable if it is...

This paper examines how financial reporting regulations affect, and respond to, macroeconomic cycles by exploring a positive framework in which regulators subject to political pressures respond to cyclical demands by borrowers and lenders. We establish that, as economic conditions initially...

Professor Lambert provides a very useful synthesis of the major issues in managerial accounting and the insights that agency theory has provided on those issues. In this discussion, I highlight some of the limitations of these models in examining accounting measurement questions. Lambert calls...

During the spring of 2000, the market values of internet companies declined 61% in 10 weeks. Using a sample of internet direct and support (infrastructure) firms, this paper investigates whether the stock market decline could be attributed to new disclosures over the period (buy/sell...

This article examines the demand for disclosure rules by informed managers interested in increasing the market price of their firms. Within a model of political influence, a majority of managers chooses disclosure rules with which all firms must comply. In equilibrium, disclosure rules are...

This paper presents a model in which asset/liability recognition is a means for a risk-neutral entrepreneur to communicate with risk-averse investors about the riskiness of investments or the uncertainty of future obligations. The model shows that more conservative accounting may produce less...

This paper articulates the arguments for and against introducing competition into the accounting standard-setting process in the U.S. by allowing individual corporations to issue financial reports prepared in accordance with either FASB or IASB rules. The paper examines several arguments...

Finally, we show that, in a setting where the firm's initial owner sells his stake in the firm over the course of two periods, with disclosures of estimates of the firm's value occurring prior to each sale of shares, if the precisions of the estimates are public, the equilibrium precisions of...

In this paper, managers differ from each other in terms of the probability that they are "forthcoming" (and disclose all the earnings forecasts they receive) or "strategic" (and disclose the earnings forecasts they receive only when it is in their self-interest to do so). Strategic managers...