喻园管理论坛2024年第103期(总第1035期)

演讲主题: Heterogeneous Effects of ASC 606 on Financial-Statement Comparability: Evidence from an Industry-focused Approach

主讲人: 王雪 俄亥俄州立大学教授

主持人: 施汉忠 计算金融系讲师

活动时间: 2024年12月10号（周二）15：30-17:30

活动地点: 管院大楼107室

主讲人简介：

王雪，俄亥俄州立大学费舍尔商学院教授, 研究领域包括银行治理、会计信息治理等相关领域。在Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review等国际财务与会计学顶级期刊发表文章20余篇。

活动简介：

This paper examines the effects of ASC 606 (Revenue from Contracts with Customers) on financial-statement comparability. Identifying the effects of ASC 606 on information comparability is challenging due to the difficulty of controlling economic similarity between transactions and pre-existing accounting differences. Given the fundamental differences in operating environment and sales contract design for firms in different industries, we expect that the effects of ASC 606 on financial-statement comparability are heterogeneous. Thus, we employ an industry-focused approach to evaluate the effects of ASC 606 and focus on firms in the information technology (IT) sector that have similar economic transactions and sales contracts. Specifically, we compare software firms in the IT sector, which is expected to be more significantly affected by ASC 606, to hardware firms in the IT sector as a control group. We find that the adoption of ASC 606 is associated with improvement in financial-statement comparability for software firms compared with hardware firms. When we expand the scope of the investigation to other industries, we find substantial variation in the impact of ASC 606 on financial-statement comparability in different industries. Collectively, these findings based on an industry-focused approach suggest the importance of considering underlying economic comparability and pre-existing accounting differences, supporting that the evaluation of the effects of new accounting standards can benefit from a series of narrow-sample studies.