Accounting, accountability and governance: the roles of financial reporting

Christoph Pelger

Chapter 5 in Handbook of Accounting, Accountability and Governance, 2023, pp 99-118 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The historical origins of (financial) accounting are strongly linked to accountability. However, in recent decades standard-setters have turned away from accountability and have instead highlighted the usefulness for valuation decisions of capital providers as the official objective of corporate financial reporting. The current chapter traces the development from accountability to valuation usefulness, which becomes most apparently manifest in the conceptual frameworks developed by the financial reporting standard-setters in the United States and at the international level. This chapter evaluates the standard-setters' reluctance to consider accountability as a separate objective of financial reporting in light of analytical and empirical evidence in the accounting literature. On this basis, the chapter provides a critical discussion of the standard-setters' views and concludes with some thoughts on the future role of accountability in corporate financial reporting and further research potential in this area.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800886544.00014 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20723_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().