Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

Just a reminder that Wednesday, April 1, 11am ET,  Christine Botosan (Univ of Utah) will lead a discussion about her recent research on segment reporting, with Susan McMahon and Marry Harris Stanford—with particular emphasis on the role of managerial discretion and standards that require preparers to disclose information that is consistent with management’s own views.  [...] Read more > >

You know that comprehensive be-all-and-end-all literature review you always wanted to write on fair value accounting (or revenue recognition or principles-based accounting standards, etc.)?  You’ve put it off because it was simply too much work for too little benefit to your research program and reputation.  Well, FASRI is here to encourage you to do just [...] Read more > >

The FASB has recently issued an exposure draft of a standard that would replace the current GAAP hierarchy (as dictated by SFAS  162).  The new hierarchy would simply consist of two levels:authoritative and non-authoritative guidance. In effect, the FASB’s new Accounting Standards Codification would become the sole source of authoritative accounting and reporting standards in the [...] Read more > >

A few weeks ago FASB Board member Leslie Seidman joined us for office hours.  We covered a lot of ground, and Ray has already written on some of her ideas for research.  I thought I would summarize her rather cautionary views on fair value accounting for financial instruments.  Playing to the academic audience, Ms. Seidman [...] Read more > >

In response to popular demand, we have a number of research-oriented office hours sessions coming up. (Most of these will include standard-setters as participants, who can weigh in on the topics, much as Kim Petrone, Financial Statement Presentation Project Manager, did for Bob Lipe’s recent presentation.)  The schedule is: Wednesday, April 1, 11am ET: Christine Botosan [...] Read more > >

Should standard setters care about potential judgment biases introduced by implementation guidance? I was recently reading through a paper by Shana Clor-Proell and Mark Nelson (Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 45, Iss. 4, September 2006) entitled, “Accounting Standards, Implementation Guidance, and Example-Based Reasoning.”  In this paper, Shana and Mark examine how the type of example [...] Read more > >

Leslie Hodder led a discussion of fair value accounting at Office Hours.  We had over 30 avatars present, some of them acting as the eyes and ears of a roomful of faculty and doctoral students.  A number of attendees wanted a copy of  Leslie’s  fair-value slides. Leslie started off the discussion with a review of the [...] Read more > >

The FASB wrote a comment letter to the SEC on the roadmap to  international convergence, accompanied by a tour-de-force literature review by Luzi Hail, Christian Leuz and Peter Wysocki. The upshot of the research is that the US is unlikely to to see strong benefits to a formal convergence process, in part because our accounting [...] Read more > >

Leslie Hodder (Indiana University) will be joining us for FASRI Office Hours at 4pm ET, March 24th, to talk about recent research on Fair Value Accounting. No doubt we will talk a fair bit about FASB’s recent proposals to clarify FAS 157’s discussion on ‘active markets’ and to alter reporting of impairment (see here [...] Read more > >

The FASB just released a Proposed FASB Staff Position that would amend the other-than-temporary (OTT) impairment guidance in two FASB Statements (SFAS 115 and SFAS 124) and in EITF 99-20.  This Proposed FSP seems to make two big changes.  The first relates to the conditions under which management can avoid considering an impairment to be OTT.  Currently, [...] Read more > >

At today’s office hours, Bob Lipe presented this working paper with Lail and Yi.  The upshot of the paper is that we need to be very careful when we think about the standard-setting implications of the accrual anomaly.  It is tempting to say that accrual standards must be a problem because (as the Richardson, Sloan, [...] Read more > >

A new FASB Staff Position proposes a 2-step test to determine whether a market is not active. This will hardly satisfy those who think firms shouldn’t have to use fair value accounting for the assets in question in the first place.  But for those who are simply complaining that market prices are ‘fire sale’ prices, [...] Read more > >

During FASB Research Office Hours on Tuesday, March 10, Leslie Seidman, FASB Board member, suggested the following questions as being of interest to the FASB regarding fair value measurement for liabilities. I believe that these questions are interesting and potentially addressable from multiple research perspectives. Moreover, I believe that work on these questions has the [...] Read more > >