Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2005.

Dissertation Universität zu Köln, 2007.

Zugl.: Passau, Universiẗat, Diss., 2004.

Many corporate managers elect to adopt a new Statement of Financial Accounting Standard (SFAS) early instead of waiting until the mandatory adoption date. This study tests for evidence that managers use early adoption as an earnings management tool in a manner consistent with one or more positive accounting theories.

This study aims broadly to explore the legal and practical problems of winding up and insolvency for charities that are, or ought to be, registered with the Charity Commissioners for England and Wales and to explore possible 'rescue mechanisms.' It seeks to identify common underlying factors or trends associated with charities becoming insolvent or being wound up. The methodology consisted of book work and practical research in which a detailed study was made of 130 charitable companies and the experiences of legal and accountancy practitioners were sought. Twenty case studies were put together from information provided by the practitioners and from the author's own experience. The areas of legal complexity explored include problems associated with land and endowments, and the augmentation principle in respect of bequests to a corporate charity that has been dissolved. Some issues such as property holding and personal liability are more complex in an unincorporated association. Practical difficulties such as disputes between trustees, between staff and trustees, or between members are significant as are the legal and practical complexities associated with the contract culture. Charities represent an important sector of the economy, collectively being worth £19.7bn in 1998, and their success or failure is of public concern. The research indicates that charities are affected by societal changes, legislative change and changes in the attitudes of beneficiaries. Their dissolution or winding up is often a result of a combination of factors, both internal and external and service providing charities appear to be particularly vulnerable. The quality, cost, and availability of professional advice is considered. It is suggested that the role of local intermediary bodies could be enhanced and that a means be found for accrediting the competence of charity advisors, whether professional or lay.

Very little accounting research exists which investigates specific decision tasks performed by audit committee members. More specifically, little research exists regarding the one decision task which appears to be a primary duty of all audit committees--the decision task of selecting and/or evaluating the external auditor. Since the auditor selection decision is basically an assessment of the tradeoffs between audit quality and audit fees and the determination of audit fees is straightforward, the current study focuses on the assessment of audit quality. The primary objectives of this research project were (1) to identify those factors which affect audit quality, (2) to investigate how those audit-quality factors correlate with audit committee chairpersons' assessments of audit quality, and (3) to determine whether audit committee chairpersons exhibit expert judgment in their audit-quality assessments. To meet these objectives of two-phase study was conducted. In the first phase of the study audit committee chairpersons were asked to rate the impact various factors have on the quality of auditing services. Those factors identified in the first phase to have the strongest impact on audit quality were then utilized in the second phase to develop audit-quality scenarios. The second phase of the study consisted of requesting each audit committee respondent to assess audit quality for 32 individual audit-quality scenarios. Regression analysis was employed in the second phase to represent the cognitive models of the respondents. The Judgmental Analysis (JAN) technique also was used in the second phase to cluster the decision makers into the various decision-making groups which exist. The results of this two-phase study provided data regarding the perceived impact of 15 audit-quality factors on audit quality and how the most important of these audit-quality factors correlate with audit committee chairpersons' audit-quality assessments. The main conclusions of the study were (1) team-specific factors have a stronger perceived impact on audit quality than do firm-specific factors, (2) audit team composition factors are perceived to be the most important determinants of audit quality, and (3) consensus is not obtained regarding audit-quality assessments.

Accounting guidance often contains examples which provide practitioners with a description of a hypothetical transaction and its appropriate accounting treatment. Despite this potential to influence accounting judgments, our understanding of how practitioners use such examples when making these judgments is limited. Relying on psychology theory, I propose that practitioners must first assess the level of similarity between the transaction and the example. I predict that when doing this, practitioners unknowingly use a biased cognitive process where they overweight shared aspects between the transactions. Using an experiment, I confirm this prediction and show that this bias causes practitioners to systematically assess similarity between a transaction and example as too high. Results also show that this causes practitioners to consistently overestimate the likelihood that their transaction also qualifies for the same treatment as any example they are given. My study provides insights on how and why examples can systematically affect accounting judgments and has implications for both standard setters and practitioners. / text

published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Business / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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