Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad vs. good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings...

Financial accounting is rooted in national thoughts, traditions and institutional settings. As a consequence, accounting has developed heterogeneously over time and fulfilled contracting purposes in divergent national environments. Against this background, we argue that the ongoing process of...

The separation of leases into operating and finance leases for accounting purposes can result in incentives to favor operating lease contracts, since they avoid on-balance-sheet debt. the IASB and FAsB are conducting a long-term joint project on leasing, following the G4+1 group’s research on...

We examine German financial accounting research between 1950 and 2005 by analyzing articles from leading academic journals. Our analysis documents increases in articles in academic journals, multi-authorship, pages, and references per article. Our citation analysis reveals major German...

We review the academic literature on the use of financial reporting information by capital providers. We classify our findings by investor type and by information objective. While most capital providers use accounting information, our survey indicates that they do so in a variety of ways with...

This study discusses the challenges and opportunities of establishing causal inference in empirical archival financial accounting research. Causal inference requires identification of a theoretically predicted causal mechanism in a research setting optimized to avoid endogenous causes and using...

This paper analyzes the role of financial accounting and reporting in the current financial crisis. Starting outlining the objectives of financial accounting and giving a brief overview over the relevant accounting standards for financial instruments, it highlights the potentially pro-cyclical...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

The mandatory adoption of IFRS by many countries worldwide fuels the expectation that financial accounting information might become more comparable across countries. This expectation is opposed to an alternative view that stresses the importance of incentives in shaping accounting information....