The provision of examples as implementation guidance is pervasive in accounting standards. Prior research has established that preparers engage in “example-based reasoning,” a tendency to favor the accounting treatment in an example, even when the example does not exactly match the...

Financial statement preparers often make accounting judgments with considerable uncertainty about what future accounting standards will require. We conduct a study in the experimental economics tradition to investigate how such uncertainty affects preparers’ current period accounting...

We test whether an impending change in the accounting for goodwill mitigates bias in the initial values that acquirers assign to intangible assets. Results of two experiments with experienced professional participants suggest that the new accounting alters, but does not eliminate, bias in...