This paper studies how an accountant's method of aggregating information in a financial report is affected by differences in the reliability and relevance of components of the report. We study a firm that hires an accountant to produce a report that reveals information to investors regarding the...

This article analyzes several problems and psychological issues pertaining to the enforcement and efficiency of the US Goodwill and Intangibles accounting regulations (SFAS #141RR, Business Combinations, and SFAS #142, Accounting for Goodwill and Intangible Assets). These regulations are likely...

We analyze how, in the absence of capital market incentives, the influence of existing competition on voluntary disclosure is an evolving process which has a non-monotonic design. The progressive capability of rivals to forecast significant information and the increasing losses of abnormal...

In this research, we investigated (1) whether corporate CO2 emissions have a negative impact on market value, (2) whether disclosure of CO2-related information alleviates the negative impact on market value, and (3) whether participation in emissions trading schemes alleviates the negative...

I show that, consistent with theory, the volume of business transactions increases during good economic states relative to bad (Veldkamp 2005). As more transactions are aggregated in financial reports, the precision of the macroeconomic signal in aggregated accounting information increases, so...

This paper investigates the design of recognition thresholds in accounting standards. In statistics, a threshold classi.es evidence to balance two types of recognition errors weighted by their respective costs to a decision maker. In accounting recognition standards, a threshold induces firms to...

Several recent empirical papers assert that the decision to disclose an earnings forecast shortly before the actual earnings announcement reveals only short-term information and is therefore unlikely to entail proprietary costs. Using a simple dynamic model of voluntary disclosure, we show that...

Finally, we show that, in a setting where the firm's initial owner sells his stake in the firm over the course of two periods, with disclosures of estimates of the firm's value occurring prior to each sale of shares, if the precisions of the estimates are public, the equilibrium precisions of...

The decision to disclose information concerning a firm's environmental liabilities is modeled as a sequential game involving the firm, a capital market and outside stakeholders who can impose proprietary (political) costs on the firm. A partial disclosure equilibrium is derived in which firms...

In this paper I attempt a taxonomy of the extant accounting literature on disclosure and suggest as categories: "association-based disclosure," work that studies the effects of disclosure on asset equilibrium prices and trading volume; "discretionary-based disclosure," work that examines...