Standard-setting in Australia: Implications of Recent Radical Reform Proposals

We examine the implications of the Howard government's Corporate Law Economic Reform Program as they relate to accounting standard-setting in Australia. A luck of systematic and compelling evidence for wholesale changes to the existing standard-setting process is identified, as is a fundamental shift in the rationale for standard-setting which underlies the proposed changes. We disagree with the main plank of the proposals, that is, that international accounting standards should be adopted in Australia.     

THE VALUE-RELEVANCE OF UK DIRTY SURPLUS ACCOUNTING FLOWS

Misgivings about dirty surplus accounting practices derive, in part, from two related concerns. Firstly, it has been argued that dirty surplus accounting might result in value-relevant items being reported within ‘dirty surplus flows’ rather than within earnings. Secondly, it has been suggested that the low transparency of dirty surplus flows might reduce investors' ability to recognize value-relevant items in a timely fashion. In this study, we address the first of these concerns. We examine UK stock returns and accounting flows accumulated over intervals of up to 20 years. We report evidence on the value-relevance of accounting flows which were excluded from ‘ordinary profit’ (i.e. accounting profit exclusive of extraordinary items) in the UK over the period from 1972 to 1992. Our tests provide strong evidence that UK ordinary profit is value-relevant and provide some evidence, on the basis of long-interval tests, that extraordinary items are value-relevant. There is little evidence that other flows excluded from ordinary profit are value-relevant, however. These finding may allay concerns that, by allowing value-relevant flows to bypass reported earnings, dirty surplus accounting practices have promoted undesirable ‘creative accounting’ activity by UK firms.     

Canonical Correlation Analysis and Wiener-Granger Causality Tests: Useful Tools for the Specification of VAR Models

Dynamic multivariate models have become popular in analyzing the behavior of competitive marketing systems because they are capable of incorporating all the relationships in a competitive marketing environment. In this paper we consider VAR models, the most frequently used dynamic multivariate models. The drawback of VAR models is that a large number of parameters have to be estimated. The problem has been addressed in several articles and the usual solution is to treat only the variables of interest as endogenous while the other variables are usually included exogenously without dynamic effects. This treatment imposes restrictions on the marketing system, which requires preliminary analysis. We propose to use canonical correlation for this purpose. Canonical correlation analysis and its associated Wiener-Granger causality testing based on the canonical correlation coefficients are useful tools to test the existence of structural relationships between (lagged) consumer response and (lagged) marketing instruments. The tools are applied on data of market shares and marketing instruments in a market of a frequently purchased consumer goods.     

Tests for Price Effects of New Issues of Seasoned Securities

Do new issues of seasoned securities cause significant price movements in the neighborhood of the issue day? This paper presents an empirical comparison of three competing hypotheses: the SEC view that a new issue causes a permanent price decline; the underwriter view that there is only a temporary price decline during the distribution period; and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) that implies the absence of any price effects. Several empirical tests of the competing hypotheses using data on new issues of utility stocks traded on the NYSE reject the SEC and underwriter views in favor of the EMH.