V. CONCLUSION
This study examines whether managers’ decisions to withhold segment information
under SFAS No. 14 are influenced by their agency cost as well as proprietary cost motives
to conceal segment profits. We hypothesize that when the proprietary (agency) cost motive
dominates, managers tend to withhold the segments with relatively high (low) abnormal
profits. We test these hypotheses by comparing a hand-collected sample of restated SFAS
No. 131 segments with the historical SFAS No. 14 segments. The mandated change setting
allows us to identify a set of ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘old’’ SFAS No. 131 segments and, hence, examine
managers’ reporting choices at the segment level. Our results are consistent with the agency
cost hypothesis. In particular, we find that the new segments tend to have lower abnormal
profits than the old segments when the agency cost motive dominates, suggesting that
managers exploited the discretion afforded under SFAS No. 14 to opportunistically conceal
negative information. Our results are mixed with regard to the proprietary cost hypothesis.
We believe the change from an industry approach to a management approach for seg-
ment reporting provides an excellent opportunity to study the motives behind the discre-
tionary aggregation of segments under the industry approach. As part of its convergence
project with the FASB, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has issued
an exposure draft that proposes changing its segment reporting standard from the current
industry approach (similar to SFAS No. 14) to a management approach that would be very
similar to SFAS No. 131. Such a change (currently scheduled to take effect in 2009) would
allow for a rich extension of the approach in this paper to a broad set of countries with
considerable variation in disclosure practices and, presumably, in the proprietary and agency
costs of discretionary disclosure choices.