Financial crises and scandals have focused attention on received systems of corporate governance and disclosure in a way many may never have imagined and few welcomed. Not only do reforms deems to be necessary to protect stakeholders, including shareholders, but also a different understanding of...

Since the nineties, UK has been progressively adopting a Governmental accounting reform purporting to interpret and mimic accounting standards and practices from the private sector. Since 2009, the UK set of accounting standards applicable to the whole of central government entities is based...

This paper develops an agent-based model to examine the emergent dynamic properties of share market price formation over time, with a view on financial market stability under alternative accounting regimes. In the model, individual heterogeneous investors interact with each other and with...

The financial crisis of 2007 was unanimously declared a liquidity crisis, and governments and central banks worldwide reacted by injecting massive amounts of fresh money to rescue the financial system. Whilst this response succeeded in effectively restoring ordinary interbank credit, it did not...

A conceptual framework of accounting for the economics of non-business entities is developed and applied to the new French "accounting constitution" of governmental accounting. The concept of non-business entity is used to investigate the nature and role of non lucrative organizations within the...

In 1960, Ronald H. Coase famously addressed the problem of externalities - actions of business firms that have harmful effects on others - or, as he renamed it, “the problem of social cost.” This problem occurs under every joint economic activity (including business firms) having reciprocal...

Different approaches to accounting involve different, often implicit, assumptions as to the functioning of the monetary and financial system. In particular, fair value accounting, unlike historical cost accounting, relies on the assumption of asset (and liability) market liquidity, and may...

We examine four key conceptual tensions that are at the heart of many financial reporting dilemmas: stocks vs. flows, ex-ante vs. ex post, conventions vs. economic substance, and top-down design vs. bottom-up evolution as sources of accounting practice. Associated with each of these conceptual...