The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fair-value accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters' push to extend FVA into other areas. In this article, we highlight four important issues as an...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

Dem Eigenkapital von Unternehmen kommt eine herausragende Bedeutung zu, weil es den Unternehmen Verfügungsmacht über Haftungspotentiale verschafft. Insbesondere gilt dies für Banken, da sie eine zentrale Stellung in den Zahlungs- und Haftungsbeziehungen einer Volkswirtschaft einnehmen und die...

We analyse to what extent the accrual anomaly is related to the choice of the accounting system as well as firm-level heterogeneity in corporate governance mechanisms. Using a unique dataset of listed German firms over the period 1995 to 2005 we first corroborate former results indicating that...

Previous empirical evidence which evaluated the accuracy of management earnings or sales forecasts consistently revealed these forecasts to be on average significantly overoptimistic. However, all studies analyzed forecasts from public disclosures, which are an important signal to investors and...

Standard equity valuation approaches (i.e., DDM, RIM, and DCF model) are derived under the assumption of ideal conditions, such as infinite payoffs and clean surplus accounting. Because these conditions are hardly ever met, we extend the standard approaches, based on the fundamental principle of...

Previous empirical evidence which evaluated the accuracy of management earnings or sales forecasts consistently revealed these forecasts to be on average signi cantly overoptimistic. However, all studies analyzed forecasts from public disclosures, which are an important signal to investors and...

This paper explored the empirical research investigating the relationship between Accounting Information Systems (AIS) alignment and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) performance. Literature shows that AIS alignment is influenced by organizational characteristics, individual characteristics...

The German Accounting Law Modernization Act (BilMoG) represents a change in paradigm with regard to the traditionally close relationship between financial and tax accounting in Germany. At the same time, requirements on the disclosure of deferred taxes were revised considerably. We make use of...

This article analyzes the extent to which accounting standards adequately re ects the value of intangible assets as well as its usefulness for financial agents in the process of buying and selling companies. Based on a sample that includes price of private transactions and listed companies from...