Purpose – The aim of this paper is to document the author's keynote address in Accounting at the 16th Annual Conference on Pacific Basin Finance, Economics, Accounting and Management “Innovation for a Sustainable Future: Visions for 2020”, July 3‐4, 2008, Brisbane, Australia....

Lev and Zarowin (1999) argue that the there has been a decline in the usefulness of financial information in the U.S. resulting from the inability of the current financial reporting system to contemporaneously capture changes in firms' operations and economic conditions. As a result, it appears...