We regard accounting regulation as a politico-economic institution and analyze its evolution in the presence of changing investor sentiment. When the market sentiment is moderate, if most of the business projects in the economy are successful, the economy will enter a stable high-disclosure...

Residual income valuation is based on the assumption that the clean surplus relation holds. As pointed out by Ohlson (2000), among others, the standard clean surplus relation is frequently violated. Moreover, standard residual income valuation models rest on the implicit assumption that future...

We investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting: We examine how certain professional and political characteristics of FASB members and SEC commissioners predict the accounting “reliability” and “relevance” of proposed standards. Notably, we find FASB members with...

The aim of this paper is to trace the principal ideas in Paton and Littleton's influential 1940 monograph to their previous and contemporaneous writings, and thus to uncover the ideas' origins in the literature

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...

We examine whether managers convey more information via voluntary disclosure channels when standard-setters limit managers' discretion in GAAP. We estimate the extent to which standard setters limit managers' discretion by counting the number of times obligatory modal verbs are mentioned in the...

We suggest that the failure of investors to distinguish between an earnings component's autocorrelation coefficient (unconditional persistence) and the marginal contribution of that component's persistence to the persistence of earnings (conditional persistence) provides a partial explanation to...

SEC rules require managers to reconcile their non-GAAP forecasts with the most directly comparable GAAP measure unless doing so would entail ‘unreasonable effort'. A significant and growing number of managers invoke the unreasonable efforts exception to justify the omission of comparable GAAP...