Accounting from the Perspective of Regulatory History, Private Standard Setting and Family Firm Research

This dissertation presents three studies on German accounting history, on the internal sphere of private accounting standard setting of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), and on the state of the art of financial accounting and reporting research on family firms. After a brief introduction in chapter 1, chapter 2 explores the impact of accounting internationalisation on the contracting-oriented German accounting system. Accounting plays a distinct role in a firm’s governance system and has evolved in a specific institutional setting over time to meet the contractual demands of various stakeholders. Against this backdrop, we argue that accounting internationalisation affects the contracting system when formal rules from other settings are introduced. To support our argument and to substantiate the interplay of accounting as a contractual device and country-specific institutions, we provide an in-depth case study of one European code-law country, Germany. Here, we place the recent phenomenon of accounting internationalisation into historical-institutional perspective and illustrate how accounting internationalisation has triggered a balancing act between a path-dependent preservation of the traditional contracting role and a moderate move towards valuation-based international benchmarks. Chapter 3 provides evidence on the little-researched internal sphere of private IASB standard setting, more specifically, on the dynamics of board discussions and the respective impact of individual board and staff members, the array of arguments evoked in IASB debates and board-staff relations. We conduct a content analysis of audio recordings of 14 IASB meetings on the amendment of IAS 19 Employee Benefits (2011) between November 2008 and February 2010. We identify a framework of 205 categories that is arranged by four main categories: project elements, arguments, references and governance. Our main findings are that IASB members, in particular, engaged heterogeneously in the meetings and differed in their individual impact on (tentative) decisions. Arguments that were brought forth were largely conceptual and revolved around focal project elements (disclosure, presentation and recognition). Agenda papers (conveying staff proposals) were the dominant source of information for the board. Moreover, technical staff members played a key role in structuring board discussions and acted as intermediaries between constituents and board. To outline the current state of knowledge and to provide some suggestions for future research, chapter 4 reviews 36 studies that explore financial accounting and reporting issues in a family firm context with respect to subject, method, empirical models, setting, family firm definition, theory, and main findings. I find that prior research has largely focused on earnings management, earnings properties and disclosures of listed family firms from an agency perspective. Evidence on earnings management and disclosures of family firms is mixed, whereas family firms generally seem to report higher quality earnings than non-family firms. Finally, several suggestions for future research that encourage a broader inclusion of subjects, settings, definitions, theoretical perspectives, and methods are provided. Chapter 5 provides several concluding remarks.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Bayreuth

Year

2015

Author dc:creator

• Klein, Malte

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fülbier, Rolf Uwe

Repository record source_url

https://epub.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/2656/

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:epub.uni-bayreuth.de:2656