Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

I recently read a paper in The Accounting Review (Vol 85, No. 2) titled “Correcting for Cross-Sectional and Time-Series Dependence in Accounting Research” by Ian Gow, Gaizka Ormazabal, and Daniel Taylor. The paper deals with how to adjust for clustering across two dimensions (normally firm and year). After reading the paper I was was curious how [...] Read more > >

Just this morning, a team of researchers went live with a website that ranks accounting programs’ research by topic and methodology. If you’ve ever wondered which accounting programs are the strongest in analytical methodology, based on published research in the past 6, 12, or 20 years by faculty currently in the program, this site can [...] Read more > >

The paradoxical title of this post is quoted from this article in Science News about the inconsistent and often inappropriate use of statistics in academic research.  I would strongly recommend every accounting researcher read the article, make sure they understand the criticisms, and then promptly ignore most of them. The article emphasizes that statistical significance is [...] Read more > >

Stephen Ryan (NYU) joins FASRI to talk about his recent research on the fair value option in the banking industry.  Stephen is one of the most respected accounting academics studying banking and financial instruments these days, so I expect people will have plenty of questions beyond the research study that will form the heart of [...] Read more > >

As posted here, FASRI is issuing a call for research consultants to conduct revenue recognition studies.  This call is a little different from the usual 'call for proposals' because applicants must be willing to work closely with FASRI and FASB staff to identify research topics that will be most helpful in staff and Board deliberations.   [...] Read more > >

The Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative (FASRI) is issuing an open call for academic researchers to serve as Research Consultants for a Revenue Recognition Research Project.  Research consultants will work with members of FASRI to develop rigorous research studies likely to be helpful with the FASB and IASB deliberations on revenue recognition and related topics.  [...] 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 > >

You may know Columbia Business School Professor Stephen Penman as the 14th-most downloaded author on SSRN.  Or you might know him as a Director of the Center for Excellence in Accounting and Security Analysis. Or perhaps as author of Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation. More recently, Stephen has been visible as a critic of the [...] Read more > >

We had a great discussion about Reg FD and foreign filers on Tuesday.  If you were not able to attend, I encourage you to view the archive.  When you do so, you will notice several text comments from me (Accounting Footman) that may at first seem very critical of the study.  I want to clarify [...] Read more > >

A student of mine brought to my attention an article in the Wall Street Journal September 24, 2009, “Investors Should Focus on Apple’s Core.”  In that article, Martin Peers points out that existing guidance for firms who have products that combine hardware and software, like Apple’s iPhone, required firms to obtain specific evidence about the [...] Read more > >

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } On Wednesday, September 16th, 11 am ET, Dain Donelson, Ross Jennings, and John McInnis, all of the University of Texas at Austin, will join us to discuss their recent paper entitled “Changes over Time in the Revenue-Expense Relation: Accounting [...] Read more > >

What industries have the largest percentage of their assets measured under fair value standards?  Whisper your answer to the person sitting next to you before clicking to see the answer, courtesy of this paper by Gartenberg and Serafeim of HBS. Click on the graph to enlarge it.  I was surprised to see the high proportions in [...] Read more > >

The AAA Financial Accounting Standards Committee (FASC) recently submitted a comment letter in response to the FASB/IASB’s discussion paper on revenue recognition. This letter is unusual because it is one of few (if any others) that draw on existing academic research to support its arguments. In that regard, the FASC has provided a useful service [...] Read more > >

Kathy Petroni (Michigan State) will be joining us June 10th, 11am ET, to talk about her paper “Comprehensive Income:  Who’s Afraid of Performance Reporting?”. The paper, co-authored with Linda Bamber, John Jiang and Isabel Wang, now forthcoming in The Accounting Review, touches on some timely and controversial topics. For starters, let me say that the [...] Read more > >

Another blog piece from a Doctoral Consortium Student (Dina F El-Mahdy from Virginia Commonwealth University).  Enjoy!–RJB I came across Holthausen and Watts’s (2000) working paper on SSRN and I find it a good starting point to open a discussion on the usefulness of value relevance research to the standards’ setters. This working paper was prepared for [...] Read more > >

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 > >

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 > >

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 > >

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 > >

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 > >