Did the goodwill accounting standard impose material economic consequences on Australian acquirers?

Has Goodwill Accounting Gone Bad?

Economic Consequences of Public Pension Accounting Rules

A growing stream of accounting research suggests that managers use the data reported in a company’s financial reports to make real investment decisions. We extend this idea to the public sector, investigating whether the employment decisions made by governmental entities are influenced by the reporting rules for public pensions and the discretion pension managers use in implementing these rules...

ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF ACCOUNTING STANDARDS The Lease Disclosure Rule Change*

We examine capital structure changes to investigate the impact of SFAS No. 13 on lessees. While this accounting standard essentially rearranged capital lease disclosures (from footnotes to the balance sheet), mandated capitalization substantially altered key accounting ratios. Our results document a systematic substitution from capital leases to operating leases and nonlease sources of financin...

Is Amortization Good Enough? Evidence from the U.K. Goodwill Accounting

Before 2001, the accounting practitioners generally amortize the cost of intangibles over an arbitrary decided period of time. The accounting treatment lies in two perspectives: first, the value of goodwill will eventually decline; second, the recognition of amortization expenses is to meet the requirement of matching principle. However, later research indicates that the value of goodwill does ...

Accounting Discretion

This study investigates the factors affecting acquirers’ allocation of purchase price between goodwill and identifiable intangible assets with finite lives. SFAS 142 replaces goodwill amortization with periodic impairment tests that are based on fair value estimates, while most identifiable intangible assets are still amortized over finite useful lives. As a result of the differential accountin...