This paper assesses current regulatory and accounting developments in the OECD area against their purported goals. It specifically considers the different approaches to valuing pension liabilities and questions the possibility of convergence between funding and business accountants' valuation...

Insurance contracts often - or even regularly - contain both an insurance component and a so-called deposit component, i.e., they combine insurance coverage with a certain kind of saving process. Due to this feature insurance contracts are difficult to report on in financial statements and...

Ernstberger and Vogler (2007) employ the concurrent use of three distinct accounting standard regimes (German GAAP; U.S. GAAP; and IAS/IFRS GAAP) in Germany as a foundation for evaluating the relation between accounting standard regime and equity return attributes. They find that firms using...

We complement recent research (Ball et al. 2003) which suggests that country-level incentives (i.e. legal origin and the level of capital market development) are the main determinants of the quality of financial reporting. Using a newly developed Brazilian Corporate Governance Index (BCGI) we...

In their joint framework project, the FASB and the IASB recently proposed dropping stewardship as one of the objectives of financial accounting, because the Boards view stewardship and valuation usefulness as compatible sub-objectives ranking under an overall objective of decision usefulness....

We investigate the market valuation of accounting information in the European banking industry before and after the adoption of IFRS, the latest version of International Accounting Standards (IAS). Building on Ohlson (1995), we apply panel methods to a multiplicative interaction model in which...

Is Accounting Standard 22 (AS 22) on 'Accounting for taxes on income', insofar as it relates to deferred taxation, inconsistent with and ultra vires the provisions of the Companies Act, 1956, the Income-tax Act, 1961 and the Constitution of India? This was the question before the Apex Court of...

We examine the characteristics of accounting numbers using a sample of German companies reporting under IAS (2000-2002), and IFRS (2003-2004) and (2005-2006). We investigate the change in accounting quality during these time periods as IASB revises and issues new standards. Contrary to...

In February 2007 the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) published its draft International Financial Reporting Standard for Small and Medium-sized Entities ('IFRS for SMEs'). It aims to provide a simplified, self-contained set of rules based on the present set of IFRS but adapted for...

This study evaluates the extent to which the FASB and IASB convergence projects and the EU-wide adoption of IFRS have impacted the differences between firms' financial results under U.S. GAAP and IFRS. Using 2004 to 2006 reconciliation disclosures of 75 EU cross-listed firms, we find that the...