Brand value accounting: an international comparison of perceived managerial implications

Data concerned with the managerial implications of brand value accounting were collected from accountants and marketing managers working in strongly branded companies in New Zealand (N.Z.), the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the United States (U.S.). Since the external reporting climate in the U.S. prohibits the inclusion of brand value as a separate asset in the published balance sheet, it was anticipated that U.S. managers would be the least positively disposed to the potential of beneficial managerial implications deriving from brand valuation. Contrary to this expectation, managers in the U.K are the least positively disposed to potential managerial implications associated with brand value accounting. This result is particularly interesting as brand value accounting has commanded considerable attention from the U.K. accounting profession since the late 1980s when several large U.K. companies elected to capitalize brand values in their external financial statements. In addition to the international differences noted, the degree of commonality of findings across the three countries is also noteworthy. The data reported provide strong support for the view that there is considerable potential for positive managerial implications from brand value accounting.     

THE COUPON EFFECT ON TERM PREMIUMS

Monthly holding period returns for U.S. Treasury bills and notes of identical maturity indicate a significant coupon effect upon term premiums. Hotelling's T² test of the vectors of mean term premiums indicates that term premiums are not statistically significant for notes but are significant for bills. Mean-variance and stochastic dominance criteria indicate an investment preference for bills over notes on a pretax basis. Because the data set is Treasury bills and notes, which are identical except for coupon level, these results are evidence of a coupon effect on term premiums.     

Temporary immigration visas

This paper deals with recent proposals concerning temporary immigration visas as a means to combat the problem of illegal immigration. We set up a simple two-period model of international migration between a poor South and a rich North with temporary visas issued for one period. Because of capital market imperfections, immigrants from the South face additional capital costs when financing the visa fee. In this model, we find that temporary visas can improve welfare in the North if capital costs of the immigrants are sufficiently low. For high capital costs, however, a welfare reduction cannot be ruled out. We extend the model to the case of heterogeneous immigrants and asymmetric information. In this setting, we show that the government in the North may have an incentive to issue temporary visas for those with low capital costs and to tolerate illegal immigration of the others.     

Gender gaps across the earnings distribution for full-time employees in Britain: Allowing for sample selection

This paper investigates gender differences across the log wage distributions of British employees working full-time in 2005. The raw gender wage gap shows a tendency to increase across the distribution with a glass ceiling effect indicated. A strong relationship between high skilled, white-collar occupations and carrying out managerial duties with the glass ceiling effect is indicated in the data. After allowing for positive selection into full-time employment by British women, a substantially larger gender earning gap is found: the selection corrected gender wage gap is close to twice the raw gap across most of the earnings distribution. This selection corrected gap is found to be predominantly related to women receiving lower rewards for their characteristics than men. Indeed, the results suggest the gender earnings gap would all but disappear across the earnings distribution if women working full-time received the same returns to their characteristics as men working full-time in Britain do.     

Disclosure of contingent legal liabilities

There has long been user dissatisfaction with firm’s disclosure of contingent legal liabilities, and the FASB, IASB, and SEC have all considered compliance issues and standard amendments on this topic in recent years. This study uses a sample of employment discrimination cases to provide evidence on the extent to which current contingent legal liability disclosures provide useful contingency evaluations. Consistent with legal concerns influencing reporting decisions, I find that current disclosure practices provide limited quantitative detail regarding the magnitude of the expected loss. However, the text of the disclosures does provide qualitative indicators of the probability of loss. I find evidence that statements about the inestimable nature of the loss and statements about the firm’s willingness to consider a settlement are related to higher probabilities of loss and higher loss amounts. I also find evidence that statements regarding an existing accrual for losses and warnings about materiality reflect a higher likelihood of a nontrivial loss. These results emphasize firms’ strong resistance to quantitative disclosures of legal contingencies but suggest that existing SFAS 5 disclosures do contain qualitative information useful for evaluating the loss contingency.