Have IFRS made a difference to intra-country financial reporting diversity?

According to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are intended to provide a common set of globally applicable accounting standards, having the ultimate aim of reducing international financial reporting diversity. Much previous research on standards harmonisation has been conducted on relatively small samples and in periods which pre-date the introduction of mandatory IFRS in the EU and Australia. Most of these studies have also relied on some form of indexing technique to measure harmonisation (such as the modified C-index) which have since been challenged in the literature. Based on a sample of 81,560 firm years, this study examines whether the mandatory IFRS regime has led to any significant reductions in overall financial reporting diversity by companies within the EU and Australia. Financial reporting diversity is proxied by the variability of several balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement ratios measured over the pre-IFRS and post-IFRS periods. Variability is measured by the coefficient of variation (CV), a scale neutral measure of dispersion of a probability distribution. This measure avoids many of the methodological problems associated with index techniques. Notwithstanding some mixed findings, the group mean comparisons and multiple regression results indicate some statistically significant reductions in the variability of ratio measures in the post-IFRS period, even after controlling for factors such as firm size, industry and adoption status (whether a country is an IFRS adopter or not). While the results should be viewed as preliminary, they provide some tentative support for IASB’s current policy direction towards global accounting standards convergence (for instance, the IASB-FASB convergence project). The results also have implications for other countries contemplating a shift to IFRS, such as the United States and several Asian nations, including Japan and India. A useful direction for future research is to determine whether the same results hold using a more extensive post-IFRS sample.     

Power enactment through language and ritual

Organization designers give too little attention to how structures emerge through processes of social interaction. They often implicitly presume that what is designed can be implemented through imposition or “organizational development.” Power relationships can emerge, in part, through statements and rituals which effectively create subordination. Rituals and speech events which can enact this relationship may provide supervisors with access to power when other avenues such as expertise and legitimatized social expectations fail. When effectively executed, language based rituals can also help thwart the intentions of system designers and others who seek to implement significant organizational change.     

The Goal Project: A Group Assignment to Encourage Creative Thinking,Leadership Abilities and Communication Skills

Abstract

The classroom assignment described in this paper, The Goal Project, gives students an opportunity to develop four of the skills and abilities required to be a successful accountant. In 1990, the Accounting Education Change Commission issued Position Statement Number One, Objectives of Education for Accountants. Appendix B of that statement contains eight categories of knowledge, skills, personal capacities and attitudes that are needed by accounting graduates. The Institute of Management Accountants has outlined the work of a management accountant to include working in small business teams and participating in strategic decision making. The project described in this paper replicates the work an accountant would perform when working in problem-solving teams. Data was collected and results are included from a questionnaire completed by 166 students who participated in The Goal Project. The results of perceived improvement in creative problem solving, leadership skills, and oral and written communication skills are presented.     

Variety-seeking as an emotional coping strategy for chronically indecisive consumers

The present research provides evidence that variety-seeking is a generalized emotional coping strategy for chronically indecisive consumers. Recent research reveals that (1) chronic indecisiveness is associated with increased variety-seeking behavior and (2) chronically indecisive consumers (vs. not) feel more positive after choosing a mix of products. The present research demonstrates that chronically indecisive consumers’ increased tendency to seek variety can be further inflated by inducing them to experience negative emotion unrelated to the choice task. This finding is directly at odds with past research that has repeatedly found an increasing effect of positive emotion on variety-seeking behavior. The present research shows that this effect does not hold for chronically indecisive consumers, who variety-seek even more when made to feel negative.     

Urban growth and change in 1940s Southeast Asia

This article analyses demographic change in Southeast Asia's main cities during and soon after the Second World War Japanese occupation. We argue that two main patterns of population movements are evident. In food‐deficit areas, a search for food security typically led to large net inflows to main urban centres. By contrast, an urban exodus dominated in food surplus regions because the chief risk was to personal safety, especially from Japanese and Allied bombing. Black markets were ubiquitous, and essential to sustaining livelihoods in cities with food‐deficit hinterlands. In Rangoon and Manila, wartime population fluctuations were enormous. Famines in Java and northern Indochina severely impacted Jakarta and Hanoi through inflows of people from rural areas. In most countries, the war's aftermath of refugees, revolution, and political disruption generated major rural–urban population relocations. Turmoil in the 1940s had the permanent consequences of augmenting the primacy of Southeast Asia's main cities and promoting squatter settlement.