The Politics of Accounting Standards: A Comment on Ramanna’s “Unreliable Accounts: How Regulators Fabricate Conceptual Narratives to Diffuse Criticism”

Vogel Steven K. ()
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Vogel Steven K.: University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

Accounting, Economics, and Law: A Convivium, 2022, vol. 12, issue 2, 247-252

Abstract: Karthik Ramanna recounts how the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) dropped “reliability” as a fundamental property of accounting in 2010. He offers two possible explanations for this change: (1) The FASB removed reliability to clarify its conceptual framework, and (2) It sought to reconcile its framework with the growing use of fair-value accounting. Ramanna does not give total victory to one explanation over another, nor does he assign purely public- or private-interest motives to the actors in the story. Yet this very ambiguity tells us a lot about the distinctive politics of accounting and other technical realms of regulation, and exposes some of the shortcomings of more standard interest-group models in political science.

Keywords: accounting standards; FASB; politics; regulation; regulatory capture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G18 M41 M48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1515/ael-2021-0088

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