Accounting for research and development (R&D) costs is an open issue. SFAS n°2 mandates that all R&D costs are immediately expensed. International standards prescribe a capitalization of R&D costs if they meet certain criteria (IAS 38). The cost method is perfectly objective and verifiable. The...

The paper sets out to analyse the effects of the financial crisis on the international standard-setter in 2008 and the attempts made to shoot the messenger - to blame IAS 39 for creating the crisis for reporting unrealised losses, rather than the cause being bankers making bad investment...

The crux of New Public Management (NPM) is to use both externalization and private management criteria to evaluate the efficiency of public action and investments (Rouillard, 2003; Hood and Peters, 2004). Thus the efficiency of NPM is presented as depending on the willingness and capacity of public...

Is earnings management affecting (driving) the measures of earnings conservatism? If discretionary accruals were on average negative, earnings management practices would be enhancing the association between bad news periods earnings and returns, whilst the opposite would occur in good news...

This working paper presents a review of the main criticisms to positive accounting theory (henceforth, PAT). Three levels of criticisms are distinguished: (1) on epistemology, (2) on the valitidy of the theoritical framework and (3) about the methods to test empirical predictions....

This article presents and evaluates the most popular discretionary accruals models both conceptually and empirically on French firms data. The internal consistency of those measures is appreciated as well as its consistency with the accounting framework.

Dans cet article, nous étudions la méthodologie des programmes de recherche de Lakatos (1978) et ses apports aux sciences sociales et en particulier à la recherche en gestion. Notre objectif est triple. Il s'agit d’abord de préciser la nature des programmes de recherche, de les critiquer...