The discount rate: a note on IAS 36

Sven Husmann, Martin Schmidt and Thorsten Seidel

No 246, Discussion Papers from European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: Measurement in financial accounting often requires determining an interest rate to discount future cash flows. One example is the International Accounting Standard (IAS)36 Impairment of assets. IAS 36´s impairment test requires determining a value in use (a present value). The Appendix A to the standard gives some guidance on how to determine a suitable discount rate. In this paper, we show that the different approaches included in IAS 36´s guidance are theoretically different. We discuss how the standard should be interpreted and applied based on the theoretical background of financial theory. Only the first alternative, we weighted cost of capital should be used and the other two alternatives should be discarded. In addition, we show that IAS 36´s guidance, applied in practice, may give rise to substential measurement errors.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/23816/1/246_Husmann_Schmidt_Seidel.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:euvwdp:246

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().