1. Introduction
In recent years, we have witnessed a series of fundamental shifts in accounting regulation internationally, both in the
substance of rules and the institutions of the regulation. The focus on the decision-usefulness objective of standards in the
recent common framework of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the Financial Accounting Standards
Board (FASB), their favoring of the asset-liability approach combined with fair value measurement, and their attempts to
develop standards that conceptually deviate from current practice, such as lease accounting and revenue recognition, are
illustrative of the changes in the rules. The institutions of accounting regulation have changed with the increasing
worldwide adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). For many jurisdictions, including several
member states of the European Union, this event replaced government regulation with that of the IASB as a private
standard setter. In contrast, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the U.S. introduced substantial federal regulation in the formerly
heavily self-regulated realm of corporate governance.
For accounting researchers, these fundamental changes provide abundant research opportunities. In fact, a large set of
theoretical and empirical research is motivated by such changes. The deliberations and the outcomes of the standard
setters’ efforts are commonly taken as exogenous events which have economic consequences that can be studied.
However, standard setting is not exogenous but influenced by interested parties, including those being subject to
regulation. Little research has been directed to the relationship between the outcomes of regulation and the institutional
setting under which standard setting occurs. The paper by Bertomeu and Magee (this issue), ‘‘From Low-Quality
Accounting to Financial Crises: Politics of Disclosure Regulation along the Economic Cycle’’ (henceforth BM), is a notable
exception. It probes into the theme of the politics of accounting regulation by examining the evolution of accounting