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Intangible assets as goodwill, licenses, research and development or customer relations become in high technology and service orientated economies more and more important. But comparing the book values of listed companies and their market capitalization the financial reports seems to fail the information needs of market participants regarding the estimate of the proper firm value. Moreover, with the introduction of Anglo-American accounting systems in Europe and Asia we can observe even in the accounts of companies sited in the same jurisdiction diverging accounting practices for intangible assets caused by different accounting standards. To assess the relevance of intangible assets in Japanese and German accounts of listed companies we therefore measure certain balance sheet and profit and loss relations according to goodwill and self-developed software. We compare and analyze valuation rules for goodwill and software costs according to German GAAP, Japanese GAAP, US GAAP and IAS to determine the possible impact of diverging rules in the comparability of the accounts. Our results show that the comparability of the accounts is impaired because of different accounting practices. The recognition and valuation of goodwill and self-developed software varies significantly according to the accounting regime applied. However, for the recognition of self-developed software, the effect on the average impact on asset coefficients or profit is not that high. Moreover, an industry bias can only be found for the financial industry. In contrast, for goodwill accounting we found major differences especially between German and Japanese Blue Chips. The introduction of the new goodwill impairment only approach and the prohibition of the pooling method may have a major impact especially for Japanese companies’ accounts.
In international accounting literature there are various approaches to assess the quality of national accounting systems with respect to specific key functions, e.g. the intensity of capital market information. An empirical approach often used measures the quality of disclosure by ranking the national systems with the so-called "disclosure index" (e.g. Choi 1973, Barret 1975, Cooke 1992, Taylor/ Zarzeski 1996). Concentrating on disclosure regulation in contrast to accounting practices, Cooke/ Wallace 1990 construct an index which measures the "degree of financial regulation". They identify groups of countries which can be clearly classified in highly regulated, regulated and moderately regulated national accounting systems.
In our analysis, we want to enrich the idea of the degree of financial disclosure regulation to a concept for evaluating the degree of determination of financial measurement. Assuming that a high degree of determination of a national accounting system leads to more comparable accounts than a low degree, the index can be interpreted as a quality measure of national accounting systems according to the intensity of capital market information. The following hypothesis is to be proved: the degree of disclosure regulation equals the degree of measurement regulation in order to serve the information needs of the national capital markets.
Three groups of different degrees of determination for national accounting systems can be easily identified which are compared to the results of Cooke/ Wallace. For some of the national systems the above hypothesis seems to be appropriate whereas some opposing results can be shown. Possible explanations are presented which can be causally related to these diverging results. They are based on historical developments, the differentiation between rules for individual and group accounts, and on conditions where different degrees seem plausible.