Accounting Perspectives最新文献

This paper comprehensively reviews the determinants and consequences of SEC comment letters and provides an up-to-date synthesis of the research in this area. The review identifies the accounting standards, firm characteristics, and management attributes that influence the likelihood of receiving a comment letter and highlights significant gaps in the literature. The study reveals that SEC comment letters can lead to improved financial reporting and disclosure quality by reducing information asymmetry and enhancing stakeholders' decision-making. However, the review also identifies some unintended consequences, including increased insider trading and audit fees. The findings have significant implications for various stakeholders. Regulators can use the insights to conduct more effective and efficient reviews, while practitioners can develop best practices to navigate the SEC comment letter process. The paper identifies future research areas and emphasizes the importance of developing precise measurement instruments to better understand the effects of different types of SEC reviews.

This case describes the circumstances surrounding the fall of Carillion plc, a large UK construction company. Carillion issued a series of write-downs that hurt investor confidence and led to debt covenant violations. Students assume the role of a fictional investor, Holly Chapman, who has lost money investing in Carillion. Chapman is seeking to understand what went wrong with the company that led to its demise. To do so, she needs to analyze the company's risky contracts, governance structure, auditors, and accounting choices. The case allows students to explore a rich and complex scenario of business failure. It is set in the United Kingdom, but Carillion reports under IFRS and faces business and governance challenges that translate easily to the Canadian context and elsewhere. The case is best suited to MBA, Executive MBA, and upper-year undergraduate classes in accounting or governance. It provides an opportunity to explore (1) risk management, (2) governance, auditor, and regulator failures, and (3) accounting for construction projects, goodwill impairment, early payment facilities, and pensions.

This study uses an experiment to investigate the influence of investors' irrelevant feelings (e.g., positive vs. negative) on their financial judgments, with a specific focus on the role that emotion-understanding ability plays in mitigating their biases. The participants in the experiment were exposed to emotionally charged social media posts before a positive earnings announcement was made by a company in which they had invested. The results indicate that investors with lower emotion-understanding ability displayed biased judgments influenced by their feelings that were evoked by irrelevant content. Notably, the findings show that the negative and positive feelings elicited by irrelevant information led to lower investor judgments. Conversely, those with higher emotion-understanding ability were able to resist these biases, focusing on the relevant information. This research underscores the critical role of emotional intelligence in financial decision-making and highlights how investors' feelings can inadvertently distort their perceptions, particularly in environments saturated with irrelevant, emotionally charged information, such as social media.

This instructional case explores strategic decision-making at CarCompany (CarCo), a large automaker that is transitioning to battery electric vehicles. CarCo aims to reduce the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions at their own sites and at suppliers' sites. The challenge is to select a group of CO₂ reduction initiatives that achieves the objectives set by CarCo's management while staying within budgetary restrictions. Another challenge is renegotiating some CO₂ reduction initiatives with suppliers so that greater overall CO₂ reductions can be achieved. Finally, decentralization of objectives and budgets for CO₂ reductions needs to be considered. CarCo's Sustainability Manager, Julia Neumann, has been asked to select from the list of proposed projects and present her recommendations to CarCo's board. In this case, students need to apply rigorous analyses on the basis of cost-benefit analysis, justify their decisions, and think outside the box. They are asked to assess how existing evaluation techniques can be used and adapted to CO₂ emissions. The case delves into the complexities of the transition to cleaner production processes and the expanding network of suppliers, employees, and other stakeholders that need to be involved in the process.

The focus of this teaching case is an actual instance of management control (MC) dysfunction that was prompted by ongoing crises at Wells Fargo Bank. MC is an interdisciplinary field of learning that integrates a variety of management disciplines, such as leadership, accounting, performance measurement, governance, and ethics. The case uses the official transcript of questioning of the then-CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, by Senator Elizabeth Warren during a US Senate hearing entitled “An Examination of Wells Fargo's Unauthorized Accounts and the Regulatory Response.” Exposure of the “unauthorized accounts” was a forerunner to the highlighting of several Wells Fargo scandals in following years. At times, the questioning of Stumpf was adversarial, and it provides an opportunity to examine leadership-in-action from an MC (and related) perspective. By employing real company events, we demonstrate how to develop an understanding by students that MC is a multifaceted, interdisciplinary area of learning. The case enhances students' opportunities to critically evaluate MC-in-action.

Even though fair value accounting (FVA) enjoys widespread support from standard setters around the world, the practice of marking assets and liabilities to market remains controversial. While FVA affects all firms to a certain extent, financial institutions are most affected due to the nature of the assets that they hold. In this paper, we first discuss fair value measurement and its application before exploring the consequences of FVA, including its impact on regulatory capital. We then discuss key benefits and challenges of FVA. Standard setters believe that FVA provides the most relevant information to financial statement users; however, the increased relevance comes with a cost of reduced reliability due to the estimation involved. More recently, concerns have been raised about FVA leading to procyclicality and contagion that can cause or exacerbate boom and bust cycles. After summarizing the literature, we identify opportunities for additional research.

The principal eligibility criterion for the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) during the COVID-19 pandemic was a reduction of at least a prespecified percentage in monthly revenues compared to the same months in the prior year, or compared to January and February 2020 (just prior to the launch of CEWS in March 2020). The revenues could be measured using accrual or the cash basis of accounting. Since subsidy applicants could choose the cash method of accounting and use January and February 2020 as reference periods, seasonal businesses that generated most of their revenues in January and February could claim subsidies without experiencing any reductions in revenue. We illustrate how a seasonal business with higher monthly accrued revenues compared to the pre-pandemic year could be eligible for CEWS by using the cash basis of accounting in the subsidy application even though it would not qualify using the accrual accounting method. It seems inequitable for business or wage subsidies to be based on the choice of accounting methods. There is no sound public policy reason to subsidize (or tax) one firm more than another just because they use a different method of accounting. Evaluating accounting methods embedded within government subsidy programs is an important endeavor to ensure neutrality and effectiveness of public spending programs.

This literature review provides an overview of sociological perspectives on budgeting. The organizational relevance of budgeting has made it the subject of many perspectives and comprehensive reviews. However, the “niche” of sociological budgeting research deserves more attention as it helps us understand how and why budgets thrive—not necessarily by providing direction, but precisely because they offer faulty roadmaps that evoke conflict, human interaction, individual reflection, power struggles, and change. The study reviews 115 publications concerned with these social dynamics of budgeting. The analysis is structured along Czarniawska-Joerges and Jacobsson's (1989, Accounting, Organizations and Society 14(1), 29–39) discussion of three interrelated social functions of budgeting: a symbolic performance, a means of communication, and an expression of values. Based on this analysis, the study endorses sociological perspectives as a fruitful and often underrepresented resource to advance the discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of budgeting, identifying promising areas for future research that remain largely underexplored.