The economic determinants of depreciation accounting in late nineteenth-century Britain

Shirley Carlon and Richard Morris

Accounting History Review, 2003, vol. 13, issue 3, 275-303

Abstract: This paper examines the economic incentives for unregulated companies, in late nineteenth-century Britain, to disclose in their published accounts the fact that they had charged depreciation. We argue that the disclosure will be positively associated with whether a company has outside shareholders and long-term debtholders, profitability, extent of depreciable assets, appointment of a professional auditor, and size. These hypotheses are tested using 150 British companies from the years 1880/81, 1889/90 and 1899/01. Our results indicate that whether depreciation was charged is related to profitability and, to a lesser extent, to the presence of outside shareholders, long-term debt holders and the appointment of a professional auditor. However, the amount of depreciation charged is related only to profitability and appears to be opportunistically determined.

Keywords: accounting history; depreciation; dividends; profits; positive accounting theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585200310001606590 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:acbsfi:v:13:y:2003:i:3:p:275-303

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rabf21

DOI: 10.1080/09585200310001606590

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting History Review is currently edited by Stephen Walker

More articles in Accounting History Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().