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Accounting Treatment of Goodwill in IFRS and US GAAP
The article presents an overview of the new accounting treatment of goodwill regarding International Financial Reporting Standards and American Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Goodwill acquired through a business combination is no longer amortized but tested for impairment. Despite the fact that the objective of the new International Financial Accounting Standard has been to move towards international convergence; significant differences between standards still exist. The article presents the main changes of the regulation in the last years and the key differences between the two accounting treatments. In spite of the new accounting approach there are still lots of discussions, which indicate that the field is still not properly regulated. Finally, the article offers possible directions for future research and reporting practice.

Few law students remember judicial accounting law from their property law course, and it's hard to blame them. This little-discussed body of law is formulaic and rarely addressed by appellate courts. Judicial accounting law, however, should not be ignored. The law, which allocates equity to cotenants (or, more colloquially, co-owners) of residential property upon partition of that property, guides homeowners' behavior and shifts wealth between them. This Note argues that state legislatures should reform judicial accounting law to better protect those cotenants living in their homes from partitions brought by cotenants living elsewhere. The problem with judicial accounting law lies in its rigid approach to distributing property among cotenants. Current judicial accounting law considers only six monetary factors when allocating equity to cotenants, including housing payments and the fair market value of rent (credited to cotenants who are not living in the home). As this Note explains, this inflexible process ignores the unique nature of residential property, improperly pushing occupying cotenants—those who live on the property—away from their home. To prevent harm to occupying cotenants, judicial accounting law should incorporate some additional non-monetary factors to enable judges to shift more equity to the occupying cotenant in cases where (1) that cotenant has an established connection to their home and community, and (2) the non-occupying cotenant has induced the occupying cotenant to rely on stable housing. This modest change in law promotes utility while remaining grounded in analogous areas of law, such as the marital distribution of property.

AbstractThe adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) represents an important and (potentially) progressive development in the protection framework under international humanitarian law (IHL). Article 11 of the CRPD specifically obliges States to protect persons with disabilities from harm in situations of risk, including armed conflict, consistent with IHL and human rights law. The CRPD framework signals the need to address the traditional framing of disability under IHL and to draw from human rights concepts in the CRPD in order to inform the protection accorded to persons with disabilities in armed conflict.This article is divided into four main parts: the first three address three main lines of inquiry, while the fourth is forward-looking. The first part analyzes the framing and construction of disability in IHL and the implications of such framing for the protection of persons with disabilities. The second part analyzes fundamental IHL rules in an effort to demonstrate how the framing of disability and the protection framework of the CRPD can be used in the application of IHL. The third part identifies some specific problem areas ripe for further disability scoping and harmonization of the CRPD and IHL. Looking forward, the fourth part identifies entry points for focused action and research aimed at bringing about the kind of dynamic treaty practice envisioned by Article 11 of the CRPD.

Generational accounts answer the simple question of how much future generations will have to pay in net taxes as compared to today's generations. This paper briefly reviews the concept of generational accounting and provides estimates for Sweden, where public finances deteriorated significantly after 1990. The results suggest that the measures adopted since 1994 should improve dramatically the relative position of future generations, who may nevertheless be expected to face large net tax bills.

This article assesses the Donald J Trump administration's pursuit of closer relations with Taiwan beginning in March 2018, which some observers labelled as "playing the Taiwan card". The US trade dispute with China was the backdrop. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and her party exaggerated the significance of this as they head towards an election in January 2020. It was uncertain, however, how lasting US policies might be and if the trend would continue if and when the trade war ended.

This paper examines the interaction between accounting standards and legal capital in the European Union legal framework. More in particular, it attempts to compare on a parallel basis the distributional and behavioural function of both concepts and to address whether the current legal status quo in the European Union fulfils these functions. First, this paper makes a short reference to the various accounting families which are encountered today, with a strong emphasis on the distinction between Anglo-American and Continental systems. Then, it describes the EU accounting regulation and the introduction of IFRS in domestic legislation. Further, it discusses the concept of legal capital as it has been established in European jurisdictions and it points to the relevance of the Continental accounting standards. It is argued that both are characterized by paternalism, contrasting with Anglo-American standards and American distributional methods, which are outlined by contractariansm. The final argument is that the combination of legal capital rules and Anglo-American standards, like the IFRS, neither achieves the protective role prescribed to the former, nor guarantees the aims of the latter.

Cost accounting in government is a topic that has an oddly uncertain place in public financial management. Many people know what it is as an ideal construct but do not know what it is in practice. This uncertainty of practice and strong expectations about what it should be creates a tightrope that must be consciously attended to and exacts a toll on those who study its practice. For example, activity based costing, or ABC, was generally presumed to be the state of the art for cost accounting in government (Geiger, 2010). While there has been much research about cost accounting in the context of private organizations, the literature on cost accounting in public organizations has not kept pace with its development for the past two decades, especially when many public organizations are experiencing fiscal stress and there is a renewed interest in the subject of cost measurement and containment. This thesis reviews the development of cost accounting research and practices, including the practice of a hybrid of traditional cost accounting and ABC. The research then applies transaction cost theory and a variety of contextual factors that are supported in the literature to create a theoretical model of how cost accounting is used in public organizations. The model is tested on a case study of an ABC implementation in a small city. The insights from this analysis are corroborated through the analysis of the cost accounting practices in a sample of 30 large US cities. The hierarchical logistic regression of 1122 services in these cities finds that the transaction cost variables of asset specificity and uncertainty are significant factors that influence which services get measured in the cost accounting plans. The final empirical chapter looks at why cost accounting is used in US cities and shows that fiscal stress is related to US cities using cost accounting. The last chapter draws conclusions from the current research and discusses avenues for future research.