We report results of a field investigation of the process by which clients and prospective auditors acquire information about each other and enter an engagement. Often we assume that knowledge required for contracting is readily known by contracting agents, while in fact it must be acquired...

The Canadian Accounting Standards Board (AcSB) recently issued an exposure draft to adopt separate GAAP for private enterprises. This new GAAP is justified as being consistent with the current FASB/IASB conceptual framework, but is sensitive to the different cost/benefit considerations facing...

The FASB and the IASB recently issued a joint discussion paper entitled, Preliminary Views on Revenue Recognition in Contracts with Customers. The Boards requested comments on whether their proposed model for revenue recognition would improve the usefulness of the financial statement information...

Approach to accounting, and the world in which it operates has changed over half-a-millennium since Luca Pacioli. The past century has seen a great expansion of investment and trade across national boundaries. If financial reporting were standardized in all or most national jurisdictions,...

We present a model in which an outside bank and a default penalty support the value of fiat money, and experimental evidence that the theoretical predictions about the behavior of such economies, based on the Fisher-condition, work reasonably well in a laboratory setting. The import of this...

Improving financial reporting calls for achieving a fine balance between codification of accounting rules, and development of norms whose enforcement depends on judgment about shared values and expectations in society. Over the past century, financial reporting has pursued codification in excess...

We use computer simulation to examine three asset markets with imperfect information. In processing imperfect information, traders in the three markets are bayesian, empirical bayesian, and heuristic (representativeness and anchor-and-adjust) respectively. All three converge to the same bayesian...

The Financial Accounting Standards Committee of the American Accounting Association (the Committee) is charged with responding to requests for comments from standard-setters on issues related to financial reporting. The Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) released for public comment on...

In seeking to replace accounting ‘conventions' by ‘concepts' in the pursuit of principles-based standards, the FASB/IASB joint project on the conceptual framework has grounded its approach on a well-known definition of ‘income' by Hicks. We welcome the use of theories by accounting...

The properties of many important valuation rules can be quantified, examined, and compared in a unified framework to assist policy decisions. Valuation rules can be viewed as econometric estimators of unobserved values of aggregates. Which valuation rule has minimum mean squared error (relative...