Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

I have been in residence at the FASB for one week and I must admit that my head is spinning with all the opportunities to get involved. I want to do them all! It’s been quite a first week. The day after I arrived Bob Herz announced his retirement effective September 30th — I hope [...] Read more > >

I’ve got a research question I’m hoping someone can help with. I’m looking for prior research where a single agent reports to multiple principals. For example, a single employee reports to his direct boss and to his product manager or a CFO reports to the Board and to the CEO, etc. How does the multiple principal/multiple [...] Read more > >

A few weeks ago I posted a link to an interview with William Isaac where he calls some of the FASB board members “Religious Zealots.” Since then I’ve been pointed to a rebuttal article I enjoyed reading (these fair value arguments can be so much fun). To prove his point (and ours, unwittingly), he made this prodigious [...] Read more > >

Certain transactions are inherently difficult to account for. Investments in illiquid financial instruments may be impossible to value without heavy reliance on unverifiable assumptions from management. Transactions that include explicit or implicit rights of return must be recorded as sales or as a bundle of options, neither of which is quite accurate. [...] Read more > >

Could AAA publications do this?  Submit to The Accounting Review, get rejected, but have your reports forwarded to a Section journal or Horizons for a decision there.  Read more about what the field of economics is doing here. Read more > >

Over the course of the past few months, I’ve reviewed a number of books and papers that were nominated for the 2010 AAA Wildman Medal Award, which seeks to recognize papers that use rigorous research methods to deal with current issues in accounting practice. One of the nominated papers was entitled, “Consequences of GAAP disclosure [...] Read more > >

In class yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting apparent inconsistency between accounting for pensions and the accounting for compensated employee absences, which I had taught several weeks ago. When teaching my students about accruing for vacation pay, I observed that it seemed that if we knew for certain that employees were likely to get a raise [...] Read more > >

Those of you who view this site on Internet Explorer are probably finding the posts largely unreadable.  I am hoping to get this fixed in the next day or so.  If you have access to Mozilla Firefox, Chrome or another browser, you should be able to see the site. Sorry! Read more > >

You are probably aware that someone has (apparently illegally) published email correspondence involving climate scientists at the University of East Anglia.  This prompts me to think of writing two posts.  Later on, if I get the courage, I will write a post about how we deal with messy data — the emails discussing the matter [...] Read more > >

For most of this decade, the Financial Reporting Issues Conference has been my favorite accounting event of the year.  Taking a Bayesian perspective, I also view it as the most informative:  every year, what I learn changes my beliefs more than any other conference. I will be writing some posts about the substance of the conference, [...] Read more > >

I was asked to write two chapters for a Wiley book called Behavioral Finance, and for some reason I said yes.  Neither chapter is a typical review paper.  Behavioral vs. Traditional Finance will be Chapter 2 of the book, and sets the stage by viewing the conflict between the subfields in light of the philosophy [...] Read more > >

Just in case anyone is interested, I just received the following announcement from the University of Michigan.  If you have Second Life installed, you can attend by clicking this link. Today  .. Oct 2nd at Noon ET -  Join Perplexity Peccable for a most interesting and relevant discussion event ::: on how to use Second Life [...] Read more > >

This weekend is the JAE conference.  Even if you weren’t invited, you can download the papers from the conference website.   These will undoubtedly be highly cited papers, and form the basis for PhD seminars comprehensive exams for years to come…but they are LONG! I am printing them out as I write this.  The six papers total [...] Read more > >

We have a strong University of Texas presence at FASRI Round Tables (Lisa Koonce and Nick Seybert are UT faculty and regulars at FASRI; Jeffrey Hales, FASB research fellow, is a former faculty member at UT; and this week’s presentation is by the UT faculty trio of Dain Donelson, Ross Jennings, and John McInnis).  However, [...] Read more > >

The FASB has approved an Editorial Assistant position for FASRI.net.  This highly visible job provides an excellent opportunity for someone who likes writing and is interested in policy-oriented accounting research.   While the details of the position will be open to modification, based on the interests of the applicant and the changing needs of FASRI, [...] Read more > >

These are tough times for academic departments around the world.  Hiring is down, budgets are tight, many faculty are already teaching overloads, and workshop series and PhD seminars are often the first to come under the Dean’s scrutiny when looking for places to trim costs. So as the FASRI Editorial Board prepares for the AAA Annual [...] Read more > >

I have been reading another academic economics blog, Overcoming Bias.  The author, Robin Hansen, is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. According to the tag line, “Overcoming Bias is economist Robin Hanson’s blog, on honesty, signaling, disagreement, forecasting, and the far future.” Robin has written a number of posts arguing that many decisions [...] Read more > >

This week for office hours (Tue, May 19th, 4pm ET) I will be leading an open discussion about the uses of new media for accounting researchers. You may already know that a number of high-profile academics have blogs and websites, particularly in Econ and Law.  Some examples: Marginal Revolution Grasping Reality with Both Hands Volokh Conspiracy Overcoming Bias The [...] 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 > >

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 > >

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 > >