Prior research documents that US firms write off large in-process research and development charges (IPRD) for acquisitions, possibly overstating the current period expense to inflate future earnings. Consequently, in 1998, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began scrutinizing IPRD...

In this paper we show that the FASB Conceptual Framework stipulates two mutually conflicting definitions of relevance. Both the original FASB Concepts Statement No. 2 of May 1980 and the IASB/FASB Exposure Draft of May 2008 define relevance as the pertinence of the selected economic phenomenon...