Relative to several other areas of capital market research
(e.g., studies on the ‘information content’ of earnings announcements), I believe the reliability of inferences drawn from most existing capital market studies on effects of accounting policy decisions to be low. Most policy decision studies have had limited industry diversification in their sample, limited time period diversification and limited controls for other information releases. In this paper, a variety of suggestions have been made to improve the internal validity of existing research designs. These suggestions involve the researcher conducting much more extensive analysis of financial reports, debt agreements, industry newsletters, etc., than has been done in prior studies. However, it is believed that the inclusion of this additional work will
considerably improve the reliability