Accounting Perspectives最新文献

This commentary considers stakeholder perspectives of Canada's Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA). In 2015, ESTMA was enacted under Canada's corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy as a mandatory CSR reporting initiative requiring the financial disclosure of all payments relating to the commercial development of oil, gas, or minerals around the globe. Despite ESTMA's intended purpose to improve transparency and deter corruption within the global extractive sector, little remains known about the acceptance of this mandatory CSR initiative by extractive sector stakeholders. Success of this government initiative likely hinges upon stakeholder acceptance of ESTMA. This study reports the results of a survey of industry stakeholders, including managers, practitioners, and academics, on whether ESTMA positively or negatively affects transparency, financial performance, reputation, decision making, and the ability of firms to do business abroad. Findings indicate stakeholders in Canada believe ESTMA has improved transparency and has had a positive effect on the reputation of Canadian firms in the extractive sector with minimal costs to financial performance, changes to decision making, or effect on ability to conduct business abroad. Using a Canadian context, the findings provide important insights for regulators and practitioners, among other stakeholders, to better understand the effects of mandatory CSR initiatives, as well as the use of legislated financial disclosures as a CSR mechanism.

This fictional case is based on the real-world events when a Canadian public electric utility company adopted IFRS. Many of these firms previously used US GAAP. In this context, the case gives students the opportunity to research key differences between IFRS and US GAAP relevant to utility industries, discuss the impact of IFRS standards on a firm's performance, and make recommendations on important business decisions. Specifically, this case exposes students to (i) the rate-regulated electric utility industry and complex regulatory deferral accounts; (ii) the impact of IFRS adoption on key financial ratios and bond issuance decisions; and (iii) a what-if analysis in making business decisions under the new IFRS 16 standard. This case is suitable for use in undergraduate or graduate intermediate level financial accounting courses. It can also be explored in an advanced level or public sector accounting class.

This study's objective is to examine the role of resilience in the dynamic between academic burnout and psychological distress using a sample of US undergraduate accounting majors. It extends prior research—that is, García-Izquierdo et al. (2018), who examine these relationships using a sample of Spanish nursing students. For this study, a survey instrument was concurrently administered to 443 accounting majors at four geographically dispersed universities. Two alternative models are tested. The first model positions resilience as an exogenous predictor, and dimensions of academic burnout antecedent to psychological distress. The results indicate a significant negative association between resilience, psychological distress, and each of the three academic burnout dimensions. In addition, emotional exhaustion and academic inefficacy have a significant positive association with psychological distress. The alternative model positions psychological distress antecedent to each of the academic burnout dimensions. The results indicate that resilience has a significant negative association with psychological distress, cynicism, and academic inefficacy, but not emotional exhaustion. Moreover, psychological distress has significant positive associations with each academic burnout dimension. In the alternative model specification, resilience is also found to moderate the association between psychological distress and academic inefficacy. This single moderating effect notwithstanding, the findings suggest that the primary role of resilience is that of a compensatory mechanism by acting as an independent exogenous predictor of distress and burnout.

Salterio (2012) hypothesized that adaptations of an audit efficiency measure, audit report lag (the length of time between the financial statement year-end date and the auditor's report date), could provide measures of underlying auditor–client management (ACM) negotiation likelihood. Salterio argued that these measures would enable archival researchers to examine issues that heretofore were the exclusive domain of experimental and field researchers. Using an audit report lag measure and a measure of abnormal audit report lag lags (the residual based on audit report lag determinants model), we show that a larger lag is associated with higher audit fees after controlling for other known determinants of audit fees. We also show that larger lags are associated with higher levels of discretionary accruals—that is, lower accrual quality. Based on our findings, we suggest that there is support for Salterio's hypothesis that audit report lags and abnormal audit report provide valid archival proxies for the differences in year-end ACM negotiation likelihood. We suggest that this proxy will allow researchers to study issues related to published accounting numbers in light of whether negotiations are likely to have occurred in addition to providing regulators and others the means to determine what clients of audit firms are more likely to have different types of ACM relationships.

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the association of financial reporting quality and investors' divergence of opinion. We focus on UK firms listed on the London Stock Exchange. Divergence of opinion is measured by two proxies based on unexpected trading volume and by dispersion in analysts' forecasts made one and two years ahead. Previous literature shows that the amount of firms' disclosure is negatively associated with the dispersion in analysts' forecasts. The results obtained in our study show that the quality of the disclosure is negatively associated with divergence of opinion, whether it is proxied by measures of unexpected trading volume or dispersion in analysts' forecasts. Financial reporting quality affects divergence of opinion not only in the months that immediately follow the disclosure of the reports but in the whole year that follows.

This teaching case requires students to generate performance evaluation reports for a short-term rental property. The case demonstrates the need to analyze variances and think critically about the potential causes of these variances and assess management performance. Students are also required to make forward-looking recommendations based on the local business environment for short-term rental properties.

We conduct a field study at a performing arts theater offering pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing as one of several pricing options to purchase tickets. While offering PWYW in this setting introduces multiple layers of self-selection, we find PWYW attendees are not a homogeneous group. Rather, attendees have distinct identities that vary in the extent to which they view PWYW as an economic transaction or a social exchange. We also find the effect of PWYW on subsequent consumption behavior is asymmetric. PWYW attendees do not subsequently become season subscribers. However, when the PWYW option was offered for a different performance, some season subscribers to that performance canceled their season ticket subscriptions with plans to use PWYW in the future, resulting in potentially lost revenues and a smaller season subscriber base. Thus, using PWYW as part of multiple pricing strategy may be especially costly when firms rely on dedicated patronage by consumers.

Corporate governance is a new and emerging discipline in academia. The discipline of corporate governance has increased in importance, driven mostly by multiple financial scandals. These scandals have motivated regulators and the business community to require business professionals who are properly trained in various aspects of corporate governance. The problem, however, is that corporate governance covers many different subjects, such as finance, strategy, and law. This problem of multidimensionality of corporate governance is coupled with the fact that it is a field of study that has rapidly changed to keep up with changing regulations and the changing needs of the business community. These problems make the task of teaching corporate governance challenging for educators. Notwithstanding these challenges, business programs for MBA and CPA students are incorporating corporate governance into their programs. Therefore, our objective is to provide reflections on our three-year experience of teaching corporate governance. We highlight the challenges that we experienced, such as the diversity of the clientele and the multidisciplinarity of corporate governance, and we discuss how we addressed these challenges. We also identity opportunities we used to develop our teaching approach, such as team teaching and using data from real companies. We present our reflections with the help of education frameworks that should help the community of educators if faced with challenges similar to ours.