From Accounting to “Forecounting”*

Using Ross Skinner's 1995 CA Magazine article, “Judgment in Jeopardy", as a stepping stone, we revisit the meaning of professional judgment in accounting in light of developments in standard setting, financial markets, and business operations that have taken place over the past two decades. We argue that it is time to change the view that accountants' professional judgment is the application of accounting‐based knowledge and experience in the selection of an appropriate accounting method. Accountants now face a standard‐setting context that emphasizes the estimation of future cash flows as well as new business and financial realities. This context implies that, in exercising their professional judgment to choose between forecast alternatives, accountants must rely on knowledge and experience from other disciplines (even though this is not well integrated into accounting). Hence, accounting must evolve from its traditional stewardship role to the new role of “forecount‐ing” (the estimation of future cash flows). The implications as well as the challenges of that evolution are discussed.     

Disclosure “Bunching”

This paper studies managers' preferences among information acquisition and disclosure policies when their firms are required to engage in “real‐time” or “continuous” financial reporting. The paper predicts that for many, but not all, processes describing the distribution of their firms' cash flows, when subject to such reporting requirements, managers will engage in disclosure “bunching,” that is, they will bunch the discretionary component of the information they acquire and disclose into a single point in time rather than spread the acquisition and disclosure of that information over time. We show that managers' preferred bunching period depends on managers' strategy for trading in their firms' shares, managers' risk aversion, the risk premium the capital market attaches to firms' shares, and the size of managers' initial ownership stakes in their firms. We also study and characterize how the equilibrium prices of firms' shares vary over time and also how managers' optimal trading strategies vary with their most preferred “bunching” strategies. Several extensions confirm the robustness of the optimality of disclosure “bunching.”     

Population decline and the new nature: Towards experimental “refactoring” in landscape development of post-industrial regions

From an everyday perspective, a consequence of population decline and de-industrialization is the growth of natural areas: less industry and less people means more nature in the future. In the real word, the situation is more complicated. Using the development of a new lake district as a successor of brown coal industry and strip mining in the southern parts of the city of Leipzig (Germany) as a touchstone, this paper will explore some of the challenges and future opportunities for the design of ‘new nature’ in post-industrial landscapes. To discuss how fields such as ecology and engineering can fulfill their role as innovative players in times of population decline, two seemingly contrasting strategies for making decisions under conditions of depopulation in landscape development—called here scientific non-knowledge—are introduced: refactoring and public experiments.     

Skinner's “Interpretation Panel”— A Means to Balance “Power”

The rules versus principles debate and the vital importance of context ‐ the circumstances‐specific nature of judgment ‐ are at the heart of Ross Skinner's suggestion for an “interpretation panel". International considerations and developments involving governance and regulation have created imbalances in power, expertise, and impartiality, increasing the importance of and need for such a panel. This analysis considers the nature of the problem, how professional judgment has been characterized, and why a panel would be appropriate to address, among other concerns, the audit committee's dilemma when accounting disputes arise. Evidence is provided that management turnover is higher in cases involving multiple restatements, governance problems, or regulators' sanctions. Although, intuitively, management turnover is likely to be associated with widely publicized restatements, some patterns suggest that it is a function of entity size, scope of management changes considered, and the manner in which the restatement was identified. Specifically, an identifiable source of discovery, as well as external involvement, is associated with a greater propensity for management change. In contrast, restatements linked to changes in available guidance from regulators are less likely to result in such turnover. One implication is that effective control design and monitoring to facilitate internal discovery of errors can decrease the likelihood of multiple restatements and reduce fault finding that leads to management change. The judgmental nature of restatements suggests that an infrastructure supporting “right‐mindedness” does have merit. An interpretation panel would increase the feasibility of principles‐based standards, facilitating timely resolution of accounting‐associated disputes and thereby enhancing the information environment underlying the allocation of capital.     

Management by the Numbers: A Formal Approach to Deriving Informational and Distributional Properties of “Unmanaged” Earnings

We explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings truthfully, with the market pricing the firm based on those reported earnings. We generate benchmarks against which empirically observed earnings‐returns relations and aggregate earnings distributions can be evaluated. This parsimonious model shows a coherent set of results: reported losses are less persistent than reported gains, decision making diminishes the S‐shaped market response to earnings and earnings relate to returns asymmetrically in the way documented by Basu [1997]. Furthermore, the implied frequency distribution of aggregate earnings is neither symmetric nor necessarily single‐peaked. Instead, it may exhibit a kink at zero and look similar to the plots reported by Burgstahler and Dichev [1997]. However, within our model, none of these phenomena are due to reporting noise, bias, or some undesirable strategic managerial behavior. They are the natural consequences of using past earnings as the basis for value increasing managerial decision making that in turn generates the future earnings on which future decisions will be based.     

The Effects of Monetary Policy “News” and “Surprises”

There is substantial agreement in the monetary policy literature over the effects of exogenous monetary policy shocks. The shocks that are investigated, however, almost exclusively represent unanticipated changes in policy, which surprise the private sector and which are typically found to have a delayed and sluggish effect on output. In this paper, we estimate a New Keynesian model that incorporates news about future policies to try to disentangle the anticipated and unanticipated components of policy shocks. The paper shows that the conventional estimates confound two distinct effects on output: an effect due to unanticipated or “surprise” shocks, which is smaller and more short‐lived than the response usually obtained in the literature, and a large, delayed, and persistent effect due to anticipated policy shocks or “news.” News shocks play a larger role in influencing the business cycle than unanticipated policy shocks, although the overall fraction of economic fluctuations that can be attributed to monetary policy remains limited.     

Slow track, fast track, and the “Galactic Club”

Discoveries in the physical and biological sciences suggest that intelligence is widely distributed throughout the universe. Before long, either we will decide that these discoveries have pointed us towards a false conclusion, or we will obtain undeniable evidence of extraterrestrial life. After finding one extraterrestrial society, we are likely to discover others and, in this manner, become a part of the “Galactic Club”. Following the “slow track”, an initial encounter will lead to accelerated search efforts that will put us in touch, one by one, with additional societies. Following the “fast track”, our initial contact will be with an affiliate of the Galactic Club, and this society will give us instant access to other members. The physical constraints imposed by interstellar distances, coupled with our understanding of large social systems, suggest that the Galactic Club will be large, stable, slow-paced, and exert only loose control over its members. The two tracks have different implications for managing initial contact, protecting our security, knowledge transfer, handling culture change, and preserving our identity.     

“De‐risking” Corporate Pension Plans: Options for CFOs

Until the stock market bubble burst in 2000–2002, most CFOs viewed their defined benefit pension plans as profit centers and relatively risk‐free sources of income. Since neither pension assets nor liabilities were reported on corporate balance sheets, and expected returns on pension stocks could be substituted for actual returns when reporting net income, the risks associated with DB plans were masked by GAAP accounting and thus assumed to have no bearing on corporate capital structure. But when stock prices and corporate profits fell together, the risks associated with conventional stock‐heavy pension plans showed up first in reduced pension surpluses (or, in many cases, deficits) and then later in higher required cash contributions and lower reported earnings. As a consequence, today's investors (and rating agencies) are viewing pension and other legacy liabilities as corporate debt, and demands for transparency and increased funding have triggered accounting changes and proposed legislative reforms that will further unmask the economics. This article aims to provide both private‐sector and public‐sector CFOs with suggestions for reducing and controlling the cost of providing for the retirement of their employees. Profitable, tax‐paying companies with DB plans should consider (1) funding any unfunded liabilities (if necessary, by issuing debt) and (2) reducing pension equity and interest rate exposures by shifting some (if not all) pension assets into bonds and defeasing the pension liability (achieving a tax arbitrage in the process). And in cases where the expected costs of maintaining DB plans outweigh the benefits, companies should consider freezing or terminating their plans and switching to a defined contribution (DC) or some form of hybrid plan. The authors also propose similar changes for public pension plans, where underfunding and mismatch problems are greater, less transparent, and in some ways less tractable than those of corporate DB plans.     

The Effect of “Private” and “Public” Risks on Oilfield Asset Pricing: Empirical Insights into the Georgetown Real Option Debate

The Spring 2005 issue of this journal featured a “debate” over the best way of applying real options. In “Real Options Analysis: Where Are the Emperor's Clothes?,” Adam B orison criticized most practices that go under the name real options and recommended an “integrated” approach that combines real options techniques with a traditional approach known as “decision tree analysis.” This approach breaks valuation problems into two components—“market” risks (say, oil price changes) and “private” risks (the possibility that actual reserves fall well short of estimated) — and then uses option pricing models to evaluate the market risks and decision trees for the private risks. In response to Borison's article, Tom Copeland and Vladimir Antikarov argued that these two components can be evaluated in a single analysis that uses both DCF (to calculate the value of the “underlying asset”) and Monte Carlo simulation (to estimate the volatility of the underlying), thereby expanding the range of real options applications. In this article, the authors attempt to shed light on this debate with the findings of their extensive empirical analysis of U.K. oilfield expansion options. The bottom line of their study is that size matters in the context of oilfields, presumably because it offers a reliable guide to the kind and size of risks associated with the project. In the case of the larger oilfields, where market risks are likely to outweigh the private risks, the author's findings suggest that both approaches are reasonably effective and provide roughly the same degree of accuracy. In the case of smaller fields, however, where private risks are proportionally larger, the authors conclude that Borison's approach is likely to be more reliable.     

WHAT IS “INSURANCE”? LESSONS FROM THE CAPTIVE INSURANCE TAX CONTROVERSY

Abstract: Over the past 30 years, the tax treatment of insurance premiums paid to captive (i.e., subsidiary) insurance companies has generated considerable controversy and litigation. In this article, we propose a new definition of insurance that is motivated by a careful analysis of the issues raised in the captive insurance tax controversy. Emphasizing the fundamental roles played by market forces and the efficiency of risk transfers, this new definition both broadens and refines traditional definitions of insurance.     

Can “Big Bath” and Earnings Smoothing Co‐exist as Equilibrium Financial Reporting Strategies?

We study a model of financial reporting where investors infer the precision of reported earnings. Reporting a larger earnings surprise reduces the inferred earnings precision, dampening the impact on firm value of reporting higher earnings, and providing a natural demand for smoother earnings. We show that for sufficiently "bad" news, the manager under-reports earnings by the maximum, preferring to take a "big bath" in the current period in order to report higher future earnings. If the news is "good," the manager smoothes earnings, with the amount of smoothing depending on the level of cashflows observed. He either over-reports or partially under-reports for slightly good news, and gradually increases his under-reporting as the news gets better, until he is under-reporting the maximum amount for sufficiently good news. This result holds both when investors are "naïve" and ignore management's ability to manipulate earnings, or "sophisticated" and correctly infer management's disclosure strategy.     

Accounting, “economic citizenship” and the spatial reordering of manufacture

This paper addresses the roles of accounting within one of the most extensive programs of advanced manufacture undertaken by an American corporation. Three distinct levels of analysis are pursued: firstly, the profound alterations that were to be effected in the identity and mode of operation of a key assembly plant, and in the ordering of its manufacturing spaces, as diverse calculative and managerial expertises were brought into complex and tentative alignments within a factory modernization process; secondly, the hopes and ideals for advanced manufacture and for American competitiveness that were to be constituted and made operable within this process; and thirdly, the links formed between this ambitious program of plant renewal and the various appeals to a “new economic citizenship” that have become prevalent in debates on advanced manufacture. By focusing on the relays and interconnections between these three levels of analysis, and the shifting ensembles thus formed, we are able to explore the dynamics of a specific attempt to govern the economic and personal dimensions of an enterprise. The concern is with all of those programs and technologies, including accounting, which seek to act upon and to transform the conduct of manufacture and the conduct of persons in a certain way. For it is, we argue, through such interventions that a new mode of seeking to govern economic life is set in place. And it is through such means that a novel type of economic citizen is called upon to play a new set of roles within the enterprise and within the nation.     

Examining “The quantified customer”

Accounting has not escaped The Customer's influence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting, a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces first the introduction of this quantitative knowledge. The paper examines the order of “The Quantified Customer”, its effects on organizational action, and its disciplinary implications. But this enquiry also uncovers a rival knowledge of The Customer. The resistant local knowledge is mobilized against the new calculable space—changing the trajectory of events.     

Accounting for “negative salvage”

Many businesses are overlooking a current cost of operation which should be matched against current revenues. This cost, really a bundle of related cost items, is incurred at the end of an asset's useful life. In the public utility sector the general term ascribed to this cost element is “negative salvage”. In this note some current examples of negative salvage are identified and some of the causes of negative salvage are discussed. The introduction of negative salvage into the classroom discussion of depreciation provides an interesting new example of the matching/allocation problem.     

Productivity in “Top‐Ten” Academic Accounting Journals by Researchers at Canadian Universities*

We examine the research productivity of academic accountants at Canadian universities for the 11‐year period 1990‐2000. Our analysis is based on the “top‐ten” ranked refereed journals in accounting, auditing, and taxation, as documented by Brown and Huefner (1994). We first provide an overview of the importance of publishing in highly ranked accounting journals for individual academics, departments, and business faculties. We then provide details of the proportion of articles published in each of these journals by academics from Canadian universities; the type of research published in each journal (auditing, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and taxation); and details of editorial board service. Our results indicate that even at the most productive Canadian university (in terms of “top‐ten” publications), faculty members publish (on average) approximately one article every seven years. Six Canadian universities have faculty members with, on average, more than one article in “top‐ten” journals every 10 years. We also provide results of analyses that rank each Canadian university, after controlling for the relative quality of each journal, using impact factors published by the Social Science Citation Index. In addition, statistics are provided with regard to the 15 most productive researchers, in terms of “top‐ten” publications, in the 11‐year period. Finally, in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association, we examine the productivity of academic accountants at Canadian universities over the past 25 years by combining our results with those reported by Richardson and Williams (1990).     

Futures Manipulation with “Cash Settlement”

This paper investigates the susceptibility of futures markets to price manipulation in a two-period model with asymmetric information and “cash settlement” futures contracts. Without “physical delivery,” strategies based on “corners” or “squeezes” are infeasible. However, uninformed investors still earn positive expected profits by establishing a futures position and then trading in the spot market to manipulate the spot price used to compute the cash settlement at delivery. We also show that as the number of manipulators grows, profits from manipulation fall to zero. However, even in the limit, manipulation still has a nontrivial impact on market liquidity. More broadly, we interpret manipulation as a form of endogenous “noise trading” which can arise in multiperiod security markets.     

Discussion of “Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence”

Li [2008. Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence. Journal of Accounting and Economics, this issue, doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2008.02.003] finds that firms with losses, or with transient income, write annual reports with long sentences and big words. I begin by discussing some explanations for Li's primary results, using his more detailed results, along with the results of related papers, to assess the plausibility of those explanations. I then briefly discuss the 10-K's of a single company over the course of 3 years, to provide more detailed insight into what might drive the length and readability of annual reports. Finally, I present some possible directions for future research.     

Can Mutual Fund “Stars” Really Pick Stocks? New Evidence from a Bootstrap Analysis

We apply a new bootstrap statistical technique to examine the performance of the U.S. open‐end, domestic equity mutual fund industry over the 1975 to 2002 period. A bootstrap approach is necessary because the cross section of mutual fund alphas has a complex nonnormal distribution due to heterogeneous risk‐taking by funds as well as nonnormalities in individual fund alpha distributions. Our bootstrap approach uncovers findings that differ from many past studies. Specifically, we find that a sizable minority of managers pick stocks well enough to more than cover their costs. Moreover, the superior alphas of these managers persist.     

Are specialist funds “special”?

In this paper, I explore the relation between portfolio overlap and performance diversity. Using data on actively managed U.S. equity mutual funds, I find that the pairwise portfolio overlap between individual funds has increased over time and is significant compared to various randomized benchmarks. These findings motivate the main question of this paper, namely whether specialist funds (those with low levels of portfolio overlap with other funds) differ significantly from funds with high levels of overlap. Here, I find that these specialists differ with regard to certain portfolio‐ and fund‐specific characteristics, but they do not appear to outperform other funds.