This paper studies how an accountant's method of aggregating information in a financial report is affected by differences in the reliability and relevance of components of the report. We study a firm that hires an accountant to produce a report that reveals information to investors regarding the...

This study tests the agency cost hypothesis in the context of geographic earnings disclosures. The agency cost hypothesis predicts that managers, when not monitored by shareholders, will make self-maximizing decisions which may not necessarily be in the best interest of shareholders. These...

The adoption of IFRS based reporting in Australia for all reporting periods commencing 1 January 2005 onwards resulted in substantial variations to prior accepted reporting practices. One area in which change was particularly profound was in the shift to an impairment testing based regime for...

This is Professor Cunningham's Introduction to his renowned edited collection of Warren Buffett's famous letters to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The collection was originally prepared for a symposium held in New York City in 1997 and has been regularly updated through five editions,...

This paper examines the disclosure of intangible assets by 'high user' industrial firms in the Australian market subsequent to the introduction in 2005 of AASB 136 and AASB 138. Using a sample of ten large industrial firms with combined intangible assets of $37,758 million as at 2006, the paper...

I document a large and significant diversification discount in multi-division firms that are diversified neither industrially nor geographically. All divisions of these firms, which are called quot;pseudo-conglomeratesquot;, operate in the same finely defined industry. Since divisions of...

This Professor Cunningham's Introduction to his edited collection of Warren Buffett's noted letters to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. The collection was prepared for a symposium held at Cardozo Law School in New York City in 1997 and originally published in the Cardozo Law Review. The...

This study tests the agency cost hypothesis in the context of geographic earnings disclosures. The agency cost hypothesis predicts that managers, when not monitored by shareholders, will make self-maximizing decisions which may not necessarily be in the best interest of shareholders. These...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the question of whether the sole focus of standard setters developing accounting standards that are useful to external users for making decisions about providing resources to the entity result in useful accounting information. To answer this question, we...

In the light of IASB's statement to drop stewardship as a separate objective of financial accounting and the ongoing debate about increasing the disclosure of soft information, we investigate the economic consequences of publicly reported soft information from a stewardship perspective. In a LEN...