Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

Anup Srivastava (Northwestern) presented a research paper at today’s FASRI Office Hours. In this post, I briefly recap the takeaways from the paper and some of the questions that were asked by participants in today’s office hours. Anup’s paper examines how the constraints on revenue recognition imposed by SOP 97-2 Software Revenue Recognition affect the informativeness [...] Read more > >

Anup Srivastava (Northwestern) will join us to lead a discussion on revenue recognition on Wednesday, April 29th at 11am ET. Anup has a working paper that looks at firms who can exercise discretion over intertemporal allocations of revenue recognition, and in examining reactions to SOP 97-2, finds that firms use discretion to convey information, rather than [...] Read more > >

Christian Leuz sent me this thought piece today (with Christian Laux, forthcoming in Accounting, Organizations and Society), which provides a nice cool splash of realism on the often-overheated debate on fair value accounting. Perfect timing, given that later today Haresh Sapra presents his own views that fair-value accounting poses some serious risks to the stability [...] Read more > >

The last time we had an entire session focused on fair value accounting, our stated intent was primarily to discuss recent evidence on the value relevance of fair value accounting.  It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn toward questions of whether fair value accounting was destabilizing and/or pro-cyclical. This week, University of Chicago’s Haresh [...] Read more > >

Today’s session pertained to the Conceptual Framework Project. Ray Pfeiffer led the discussion. Ron Bossio, Senior Project Manager from the FASB and Kevin McBeth, Project Manager also from the FASB spoke to us about the progress on the conceptual framework project. Although we covered a lot of bases (including the infamous fair value topic), I think [...] Read more > >

As you might know from this call for survey participants, Regenia Cafini of the FASB is collecting data on several facets of “field test” she is conducting as part of the Financial Statement Presentation project.  As Regenia pointed out to me today, she is an accountant, not a statistician, and she would be “very keen” [...] Read more > >

For our Wednesday, April 15th session (11am ET), Office Hours will focus on the Conceptual Framework Project.  Leading the discussion will be Ron Bossio, Senior Project Manager, and Kevin McBeth, Project Manager, from the Conceptual Framework Project Team.  You can read about the project itself on the FASB’s Conceptual Framework Project Page. Information on [...] Read more > >

This week in Research Office Hours, Christian Leuz (Chicago) presented a paper that he wrote with Luzi Hail (Penn) and Peter Wysocki (MIT), entitled “Global Accounting Convergence and the Potential Adoption of IFRS by the United States: An Analysis of Economic and Policy Factors.” The paper is a comprehensive review of the literature on international [...] Read more > >

On the heels of this week’s excellent presentation by Christian Leuz and related discussion about the factors related to potential IFRS adoption in the U.S., I was reminded of a very interesting and related article written by George T. Tsakumis, David R. Campbell, Sr., and Timothy S. Doupnik that appeared in the Journal of Accountancy [...] Read more > >

My guess is that most doctoral students in accounting are still being taught the same history I have been:  In the beginning, accounting research was shapeless and without form.  Wait, I meant normative and qualitative.  Then, with the publication of Ball and Brown’s 1968 paper, the literature has taken a sharp turn toward positivism (drawing [...] Read more > >

The FASB is conducting tests of its proposed new financial statement presentation Discussion Paper, and they would like accounting faculty members to provide feedback on the new financial statement format and related reconciliation. To participate, click here; note that this is not a trivial commitment:  you will need to analyze financial statements and then make [...] Read more > >

Office hours tomorrow (4pm ET April 7), University of Chicago Prof. Christian Leuz will be leading a discussion on international convergence.  Christian is in an excellent position to do this:  as I mentioned in this posting on research by Ramanna and Sletten, Christian is one of the authors of a literature review on international convergence–the [...] Read more > >

Rob Bloomfield sent me an interesting article in the Washington Post, Friday March 27th.  It describes a dispute between the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and Freddie Mac’s executives over the extent of its disclosures in it’s annual 10-k.  As a company that continues to be publicly traded on the NYSE, executives felt compelled to [...] Read more > >

During today’s Research Office Hours, Christine Botosan, Susan McMahon, and Mary Stanford shared insights from their recent working paper “Representationally Faithful Disclosures, Organizational Design, and Managers’ Segment Reporting Decisions.”  In their paper, they investigate whether SFAS 131 had its intended effect — providing users with better information about segment disclosures by encouraging more disaggregated segment [...] Read more > >