Standard setters and most academics maintain that accounting standards ought to rest on a set of guiding principles stated explicitly in a “conceptual framework.” The FASB and IASB are currently involved in a project to refine conceptual framework documents developed earlier. At this point,...

The European Union decided that IFRS would be effective as of the beginning of 2005. Consequently, the IMF, the World Bank, IOSCO as well as other similar organizations have established policies to support the adoption of IFRS. Similarly, since January 1, 2005, banks and firms in Turkey...

This study investigates the effectiveness of changes in the regulatory environment on the quality of compliance to mandatory disclosure requirements in Bangladesh. Statistical analysis of the Mandatory Disclosure Index, as developed in this paper using annual reports of the exchange-listed firms...

One of the goals of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (hereafter SOX) was to restore confidence in financial reporting by providing incentive for firms to report financial results that reflect the underlying economic performance. Early findings are inconclusive on the success of the Act. Cohen, Dey and Lys...

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 158 significantly changes how firms report the financial position of their defined-benefit pension plans. Under this new standard, firms must report the funded status, equal to the net of the projected benefit obligation and the fair value of their...

In the moment of China's new Standard for Asset Impairment change of no permission for the reversal of four items of impairment provisions, this paper studies that in the transitional years of 2005 and 2006, how loss and profit-turning listed companies choose their earnings manipulation...

This research examines the valuation effect and the factors associated with firms' decisions to expense executive stock options, as well as determinants of market reaction to expensing announcements. The likelihood of expensing is found to be higher for firms subject to fewer agency problems and...

Properties of many important valuation rules can be quantified, examined and compared in a unified framework to assist policy decisions. Valuation rules can be viewed as econometric estimators of unobserved values of aggregates. Which valuation rule has minimum mean squared error (relative to...

I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the...

Using publicly available data from annual reports, we find that SEC rule changes (33-8128 and 33-8644) that impose time pressure on the audits of registered firms have a negative impact on earnings quality, which we interpret as evidence of lower audit quality. Consistent with our predictions,...