As U.S. accounting standard setters increasingly favor a fair value based regime, critics claim that the abandonment of a historical cost based system may produce unintended consequences, such as increased bias and manipulation in financial reports. In this paper, we present exploratory evidence...

Our study examines the tax reporting behaviors of firms just before they file for bankruptcy (“prebankruptcy firms”). Specifically, we investigate whether pre-bankruptcy firms engage in more aggressive tax reporting, in comparison to non-bankruptcy firms. We also investigate whether the...

This study examines practitioners' perceptions of uses of stock option compensation expense. Specifically, Statement of Financial Accounting Standard (SFAS) No. 123(R) requires firms to report the estimated fair value of stock option compensation as an expense over the employees' required...

SFAS No. 123(R) requires firms to recognize the fair value of stock options as compensation expense over the vesting period of the options. Thus, SFAS No. 123(R) leads to an overall increase in financial statement conservatism. However, it is not known whether SFAS No. 123(R) increases...