Should More Internally Generated Intangible Assets Be Recognized? A Commentary

This study analyzes whether financial statements should recognize more internally generated intangible assets with particular reference to China. This issue is significant because of the increasing importance of the ‘new economy’ and R&D investment, including in China. We present the current accounting requirements for intangible assets and illustrate that the failure to recognize internally generated intangible assets leads to a high ratio of unrecognized value to market capitalization, known as the asset light phenomenon among firms. We discuss and compare international and Chinese views supporting and opposing the recognition of more internally generated intangible assets. We identify and analyze the major issues in general, and in China particularly, that standard setters and their stakeholders have to consider if more internally generated intangible assets are recognized. We focus on areas of recognition, initial and subsequent measurement, and user reaction. We find that the most critical issues are the separability and measurability of internally generated intangible assets. Based on the issues identified, we discuss initiatives on non-financial disclosure in relation to unrecognized intangible assets and firms’ value creation. The study elucidates the consequences of current accounting standards on internally generated intangible assets and, by identifying the critical issues, contributes to the debate on whether it is best to adopt recognition of internally generated intangible assets or a disclosure-only approach.     

Management incentives to recognise intangible assets

The paper examines whether the introduction of the international financial reporting standards (IFRS) in Australia changed management incentives to recognise intangible assets. We examine post‐IFRS changes in managerial opportunism and economic benefits associated with the recognition of intangible assets. We find evidence after IFRS of significant change in intangible asset recognition concurrent with share issues. We also find that the association between economic benefits and intangible assets changed following IFRS. Evidence is provided that the economic benefits associated with goodwill were enhanced by IFRS, whereas IIA and E&E asset information became less useful to financial report users.     

高校国有资产管理现状及对策

随着国家对高等教育投入的不断增加,高校积累了大量的国有资产,但国有资产管理改革的步伐没有同步跟进,在国有资产管理体制、制度建设、固定资产管理、经营性资产管理及无形资产管理方面出现诸多问题。论文分析了国有资产配置、使用、处置等各个环节中存在的问题,提出国有资产管理应该进一步完善国有资产管理体系,健全国有资产内控制度,建设先进的信息化管理平台,建立国有资产绩效考核机制。     

Intangible Assets: Diversity of Practices and Potential Impacts from AIFRS Adoption

The adoption of Australian equivalents of International Financial Reporting Standards (AIFRS) radically alters Australian accounting practices for intangible assets. Under AIFRS, goodwill amortisation expense is replaced by goodwill impairment loss based on frequent tests of the value of goodwill, and Australian firms are no longer permitted to recognise certain internally generated intangibles. This paper provides statistics regarding intangible asset reporting by 476 firms listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2002. We find significant diversity in reporting practices relating to both goodwill and identifiable intangible assets. Accordingly, the new accounting rules will potentially reshape ASX-listed firms' financial statements by significant amounts.     

The Relation Between Patent Citations and Tobin's Q in the Semiconductor Industry

The market value of a firm is largely determined by the expected returns to the firm's tangible and intangible assets. However, accounting data generally excludes intangible assets. Financial variables which are constructed in part from accounting data, such as Tobin's Q, are thus biased. If measures of intangible capital are successful in explaining variation in Q, then a case can be made for incorporating such measures into future research. In high technology industries, such as the semiconductor industry, valuing a firm's intangible assets requires the valuation of its technological capital. Past studies have relied heavily on simple patent counts and research and development expenditures to quantify the technological component of a firm's intangible assets. This paper examines the ability of measures of intangible capital to explain variation in Q and considers an additional data source, patent citations. We find that stock variables created from citation data contain relevant information about the market's valuation of intangible assets.     

Intangible Assets and Firm Asset Risk Taking: An Analysis of Property and Liability Insurance Firms

Intangible assets facilitate insurers' capacity to retain existing business and attract new clients. In this study we analyze how the incentives to protect intangible assets affect asset risk-taking behavior of property and liability insurers. The result supports the view that insurers' incentives to protect their intangible assets lead to an inverse relation between intangible assets and asset risk. Consistent with the view that highly levered firms may go for broke, asset risk of highly levered insurers is less elastic to intangible assets than that of lower-levered insurers. An additional notable finding of our article is that tangible factors like firm size and capitalization increase insurers' appetites for asset risk taking.     

Condition-Based Depreciation — The Engineering Perspective

Condition-based depreciation (CBD) is a method of accounting for the combined maintenance and renewal effort required to ensure infrastructure asset networks retain their service potential. CBD methods entail the calculation of an annuity based on detailed asset management plans, which forecast works programs over the foreseeable lifecycle of the network and link them to service need projections. CBD has not gained wide acceptance by the accounting profession, because of concerns about the methos underlying assumptions and potential problems with its application. These concerns are analysed from the perspective of the engineering profession (which is frequently the custodian of such assets), and the feasibility of the method demonstrated in a number of case studies.     

高校无形资产的来源、特征及管理研究

高校无形资产的含义有广义与狭义之分,其管理包括权属管理和价值管理两个方面。高校无形资产有其独有的来源和特征。目前无形资产管理是高校资产管理的一个薄弱环节,存在着诸多问题。在权属管理方面,应加大宣传力度,理顺管理体制,建立健全管理机制,规范无形资产使用、处置管理,加强产权管理,建立激励机制。在价值管理方面,应修订会计制度,补充完善核算规定,规范核算方法和报表披露办法,完善会计核算和评估体系。     

The value-relevance of adopting IFRS: Evidence from 145 NGAAP restatements

Firms listed on stock exchanges within the European Economic Area are required to report consolidated financial statements according to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) since 2005. The firms that adopted IFRS in 2005 were also required to restate their 2004 financial statements from national GAAP to provide comparable accounting figures. These two sets of financial statements for 2004 are thus based on identical underlying economic activities and are fully specified according to two different reporting regimes. Our sample consists of 145 restatements from Norwegian Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (NGAAP) to IFRS for firms listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in Norway. We test whether the IFRS accounting figures correlate more strongly with stock market values than the corresponding NGAAP figures. We find little evidence of increased value-relevance after adopting IFRS when comparing and evaluating the two regimes unconditionally. On the other hand, when evaluating the change in the accounting figures from NGAAP to IFRS, we find evidence that the reconcilement adjustments to IFRS are marginally value-relevant due to increased relevance of the balance sheet and the normalized net operating income. By weighting our sample by firm size, intangible asset intensity and profitability, we learn that the increased value-relevance of the net operating income stems from different reporting of intangible assets. Since more intangible assets are capitalized according to IFRS than NGAAP, our finding is consistent with the view that capitalizing intangible assets is more value-relevant than expensing them as incurred or through goodwill amortization.     

Measuring Intangible Capital: A Review of Current Practice

This paper examines international practices that measure firm-level investments into intangible capital. The issues motivating the paper are the need for a standardised framework for measuring intangible capital and the possibility for standardised applications of these measures into the future. The paper analyses the differences and problems associated with the properties of the "official" (accounting) and "non-official" measurement approaches. We propose that the way to a standardised, more comparable approach to measuring intangible capital is to employ a back-to-basics "costs" approach which classifies investments in intangible capital as assets based on management intent at the time.     

Intangible Assets and Corporate Signaling

Research and development (R&D) and advertising expenditures often result in patents, technologies and brand names which are difficult to accurately value. Under current generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) these intangible assets are generally not recognized in the financial statements, but instead are expensed in the period that they occur. Prior studies note that the market-to-book ratios of firms with significant levels of R&D and advertising expenditures suggest that investors, at least partially, value these assets. Researchers and practitioners argue that current GAAP, by not recognizing these intangible assets, reduces the usefulness and relevance of accounting reports.We investigate whether companies with significant levels of intangible assets are more likely to emphasize dividend increases and stock repurchases (which are generally perceived as signaling favorable investment opportunities), instead of traditional accounting disclosures, as a means of overcoming adverse selection. Because these assets are difficult to measure, cash distributions may be viewed as a more credible means of signaling firm value to investors. Using analysts' ratings of firms' accounting disclosures, we find that companies with higher levels of R&D and advertising expenditures are less likely to provide extensive accounting disclosures and instead tend to employ dividend and stock repurchase signals. We obtain these results even after controlling for other firm attributes, such as size, stock returns performance, leverage, liquidity and investors' expectations of growth opportunities. We also find that the market reaction to dividend increase and stock repurchase announcements is greater for firms with higher levels of R&D and advertising expenditures, indicating that these announcements are more informative for such firms.     

Dynamic performance measurement with intangible assets

The increasing importance of intangible assets in modern economies is driving companies to include measures of intangible assets in managerial performance evaluations. For the multiperiod principal-agent model analyzed in this paper, a manager must be motivated to invest in intangible assets like customer satisfaction or product quality. The intangible asset is not verifiable for contracting purposes, but the parties can rely on a noisy indicator of the current asset value. I derive a class of value added performance measures, which effectively aggregate the current cash flow and consecutive realizations of the noisy indicator of the intangible asset. This class of performance measures is shown to be optimal for different scenarios regarding contract commitment and observability of the actual investment decisions. Long-term contracts are examined as a baseline. However, in practice firms usually adopt shorter medium-term contracts that are periodically renegotiated. I show that this more realistic contracting scenario yields the same investment patterns and efficiency levels as those obtained under long-term commitment.     

Capitalized intangibles and financial analysts

We examine whether firms that capitalize a higher proportion of their underlying intangible assets have higher analyst following, lower dispersion of analysts’ earnings forecasts and more accurate earnings forecasts relative to firms that capitalize a lower proportion. Under Australian generally accepted accounting principles, capitalization of intangible assets has become increasingly ‘routine’ since the late 1980s. It is predicted that this experience leads Australian analysts to expect firms with relatively more certain intangible investments to signal this fact by capitalizing intangible assets. Our results are consistent with this. We find that capitalization of intangible assets is associated with higher analyst following and lower absolute earnings forecast error for firms with a stock of underlying intangible assets. Our tests suggest a weaker association between capitalization and lower earnings forecast dispersion. We conclude that there are benefits for analysts, for management to have the option to capitalize intangible assets. These findings suggest that IAS 38 Intangible Assets and AASB 138 Intangible Assets reduce the usefulness of financial statements.     

Accounting for Intangible Assets: Thinking It Through

With the modern corporation investing more in intangible assets, the issue of appropriate accounting for these assets is very much at the fore and formally on the agendas of accounting standards boards. Some commentators advocate that internally generated intangible assets should be booked to the balance sheet, just like tangible assets. This paper explains that this apparently straightforward solution is not so simple. There are subtleties that, when recognised, indicate that such accounting would often make both balance sheets and income statements less informative. In response, the paper outlines an accounting for intangible assets that preserves, indeed enhances, the information conveyed by both the balance sheet and the income statement and satisfies the financial reporting objective of providing information to investors about ‘the amount, timing, and uncertainty of future cash flows’.     

THE APPLICATION OF INTANGIBLE ASSET ACCOUNTING AND DISCRETIONARY POLICY CHOICES IN THE UK FOOTBALL INDUSTRY

This paper investigates the use of intangible asset accounting and the selection of accounting policies in the football industry, an environment where discretionary choices were available concerning accounting for transfer fees. Additionally, companies in this dynamic and socially influential industry are unique in recognising investments in human resources on the balance sheet. Proxies representing the level of tax costs, equity depletion, underwriter pressure and auditors used are found to have significant associations with policy selection. This contributes to the debate over the role of discretionary choices, particularly regarding the accounting treatment available for intangible assets, in financial reporting.     

The association of identifiable intangible assets acquired and recognised in business acquisitions with postacquisition firm performance

This paper extends the literature evaluating accounting practices for identifiable intangible assets and considers whether the application of these accounting practices changed on transition to IFRS. It finds no evidence of identifiable intangible assets acquired and recognised in business acquisitions being associated with postacquisition firm performance or changes in postacquisition firm performance, either before or after transition to IFRS. This is inconsistent with the requirements of regulations such as IFRS 3 Business Combinations and IAS 38 Intangible Assets, and there is no empirical evidence supporting the present regulatory distinction between acquired and internally generated and revalued identifiable intangible assets.     

Accounting for Intangible Investments

The traditional categorisation of expenditures evident in many firms' charts of accounts and financial statements does not identify and measure expenditures on intangible investment separately from tangible investment and operating expenditures. This contrasts with the accounting for tangible investment, which separately accounts for all expenditures as assets unless the future benefits are consumed in a single accounting period. Further, in searching for better ways to account for intangibles, regulators and researchers have focused on the accounting choice problem relating to the existence and recognisability of intangible assets. In this paper, we argue that identifying and separately reporting the expenditures on intangible investment is the logical first step in accounting for intangible investments. Learning about the firm's categories of value driving (and sometimes potentially value destroying) expenditures has important implications for understanding aspects of the value chain, performance measurement, valuation, corporate governance and the external audit.     

Intangible Assets and Firms' Disclosures: An Empirical Investigation

This study examines how research and development (R&38;D) and advertising expenditures affect firms' disclosures. Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) mandate that these expenditures be immediately expensed in financial reports, despite the fact that they often benefit the firm for longer periods. Prior studies find, however, that investors consider intangible assets in their valuation of firms. These studies argue that current GAAP, by not recognizing the value generated by these assets, severely impairs the usefulness of accounting reports. I investigate if firms with higher levels of R&38;D and advertising expenditures place greater reliance on voluntary, and therefore more flexible, disclosures such as voluntary publications and investor relations. Using analysts' ratings of firms' disclosures, I find that firms with higher levels of intangible assets are more likely to receive significantly higher ratings for their investor relations programs or voluntary publications than for their annual reports. These findings suggest that firms with higher levels of intangible assets emphasize supplemental disclosures because mandated accounting disclosures inadequately present their financial performance. These results have important policy implications for regulators and investors since they indicate that voluntary disclosures, which are unregulated and unaudited, are an important means of disclosure for these firms.     

无形资产会计问题探讨

在经济全球化和知识经济的时代背景下,现有的无形资产会计实操与理论已经不能完全适应知识经济的要求。所以改进现行无形资产会计的缺陷与不足,寻求与知识经济时代相吻合的无形资产会计处理方法成为当务之急。本文分析、总结了我国无形资产的确定、划分、计量和摊销,在此基础上提出了完善我国无形资产确认、计量、信息披露的改进策略。     

新会计准则下银行资产分类会计选择的理论建模

2007年1月1日起实施的新会计准则对商业银行最重要的影响在于资产分类方面的新规定。新准则规定基于管理者持有该证券的动机和是否具有持有到期的能力对金融资产分类。资产分类的不同决定着市场价值变化对盈利水平和银行权益的影响。本文考虑新会计准则对银行资产分类的可能影响,设计了一个债券类产品和贷款,根据投资者效用和动机研究银行的资产分类决策,对银行考虑新会计准则对其影响时的资产分类决策建模。模型的解表明,风险中性的银行权衡流动性需求、权益稳定、资产收益几个方面决定其金融资产的分类,而银行收益和股东价值仍主要取决于银行的投资战略和对市场的预期,对资产分类规定的变化不会影响银行的实际收益,但短期银行会考虑其流动性需求和监管资本的稳定性,来决定银行的分类决策。