Analyzing 20 interviews with CFOs of German non-listed family firms, I report how the firms' financial reporting is organised, who are the financial statement addressees, how the CFOs define accounting quality, whether they manage earnings, and how owner families influence reporting. I also...

In Hedonic Adaptation and the Settlement of Civil Lawsuits, John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan Masur offer an interesting application of the nascent research on hedonic psychology to a mature economic model of litigation. Informed by empirical research on individual happiness...

In Incomprehensible!, Wendy Wagner highlights a blind spot in the design of many legal programs: they demand that market players share as much information as possible, but neglect to demand that the information be conveyed comprehensibly. Wagner shows how the neglect of comprehensibility...

Sovereign wealth funds – state-controlled transnational portfolio investment vehicles – began as an externally imposed category in search of a definition. SWFs from different countries had little in common and no particular desire to collaborate. But SWFs as a group implicated the triple...

The European Commission’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) encompasses perhaps the most monumental pan-European regulation in the last decade and may well become a de facto world standard. The regulation is described as a means to regulate the processing of personal data, the...

In July 2021, a sweeping executive order committed the entire U.S federal government to reining in big business. Dozens of proposed bills at the state level similarly target big business for stricter regulatory treatment. But unlike in past decades, today’s calls to break up and intensely...

We explore the accounting view on KVA for derivatives, where KVA is defined as the lifetime cost of capital, i.e. the Capital Valuation Adjustment. Accounting uses ‘fair value' in most circumstances. IFRS 13 (Fair Value Measurement) defines fair value and it explicitly replaces previous...

We examine annual report text for over 15,000 non-US companies from 42 countries over the period 1998-2011, focusing on the length of disclosure, presence of boilerplate, comparability with US and non-US firms and complexity. We find that textual attributes are predictably associated with...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the cyclical behavior of various credit impairment accounting regimes, namely IAS 39, IFRS 9 and US GAAP. We model the impact of credit impairments on the Prot and Loss (P&L) account under all three regimes. Our results suggest that although IFRS 9 is less...