As Japan emerges from a lost decade of economic stagnation, attention is also focusing on its corporate governance system. Shareholders are gaining ground vis--vis other stakeholders. This is also evident in a plethora of legislative reforms culminating in the consolidated Company Law of 2005,...

The objective of this paper is to illustrate that the change in shareholders' attitude towards firms (from stakeholder model to shareholder model) influences the accounting treatments of goodwill. Our study is based on four countries (Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and France) and...