Intended and unintended consequences of mandatory IFRS adoption: A review of extant evidence and suggestions for future research

This paper discusses empirical evidence on the economic consequences of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union (EU) and provides suggestions on how future research can add to our understanding of these effects. Based on the explicitly stated objectives of the EU‟s so-called „IAS Regulation‟, we distinguish between intended and unintended consequences of mandatory IFRS adoption. Empirical research on the intended consequences generally fails to document an increase in the comparability or transparency of financial statements. In contrast, there is rich and almost unanimous evidence of positive effects on capital markets and at the macroeconomic level. We argue that certain research design issues are likely to contribute to this apparent mismatch in findings and we suggest areas for future research to address it. The literature investigating unintended consequences of mandatory IFRS adoption is still in its infancy. However, extant empirical evidence and insights from non-IFRS settings suggest that mandatory IFRS adoption has the potential to materially affect contractual outcomes. We conclude that both the intended and the unintended consequences deserve further scrutiny to assess the costs and benefits of mandatory IFRS adoption, which may help provide a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of the IAS Regulation. We provide specific guidance for future research in this field.International accounting, IFRS adoption, economic consequences, contracting, regulation, review

The Case of Labor Standards and International Framework Agreements

Although institutional work has recently attracted considerable attention from organization research, there is a surprising neglect of inter-organizational negotiations as a form of institutional work. This neglect is astonishing, since negotiations provide a unique opportunity both to study institutional change in settings characterized by diverging institutional logics and to illustrate how institutional constraints and strategic agency are linked in interaction processes. Based on a combination of the literature on institutional work and the theory of strategic negotiations, we examine in detail three illuminating negotiation processes taking place around International Framework Agreements on global labour standards. This examination reveals three types of (proto-)institutional outcomes produced by these processes: institutional creation, modification and stagnation. Whereas institutional creation and modification, albeit differing in quality, show how integrative negotiation practices of global unions might engage management in a joint endeavor for institutional change, institutional stagnation illuminates some of the pitfalls of negotiation work

Bargaining in the Photonics Industry

This paper investigates how path dependence may come about in inter- organizational networks. To do so, we focus our analysis on one particular type of network management practices – bargaining practices – and ask whether and how they can become path-dependent. Bargaining practices are recurrent activities through which network partners agree to identify and distribute their cooperative surplus. Targeting these practices, we first operationalize the core concepts of path dependence theory by deriving empirical indicators. We then use a ‘pattern matching’ approach to analyze whether these empirical indicators can be found in real bargaining practices. Empirically, we conduct three case studies of regional networks in the photonics industry. We use qualitative interviews and content analysis to reconstruct the development dynamics of their bargaining practices. A major finding is that network bargaining practices can indeed exhibit inter-organizational path dependencies. This paper contributes not only by operationalizing the theory of organizational path dependence but also by extending this theory to the network level of analysis

Adapting Energy Infrastructure to Climate Change – Is There a Need for Government Interventions and Legal Obligations within the German “Energiewende”?

AbstractThe energy sector is considered a critical infrastructure. Important questions to be answered are, how climate change will affect the security of energy provision in the future. Based on an analysis of the available relevant literature the major vulnerabilities of the German energy sector are identified. Focusing on power generation and grid infrastructure we analyze whether adaptation measures, if necessary, are taken voluntarily or if governmental interventions are needed and justifiable. We show that governmental interventions are justifiable regarding measures to adapt the grid infrastructure

The agent architecture InteRRaP : concept and application

One of the basic questions of research in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is how agents have to be structured and organized, and what functionalities they need in order to be able to act and to interact in a dynamic environment. To cope with this question is the purpose of models and architectures for autonomous and intelligent agents. In the first part of this report, InteRRaP, an agent architecture for multi-agent systems is presented. The basic idea is to combine the use of patterns of behaviour with planning facilities in order to be able to exploit the advantages both of the reactive, behaviour-based and of the deliberate, plan-based paradigm. Patterns of behaviour allow an agent to react flexibly to changes in its environment. What is considered necessary for the performance of more sophisticated tasks is the ability of devising plans deliberately. A further important feature of the model is that it explicitly represents knowledge and strategies for cooperation. This makes it suitable for describing high-level interaction among autonomous agents. In the second part of the report, the loading-dock domain is presented, which has been the first application the InteRRaP agent model has been tested with. An automated loading-dock is described where the agent society consists of forklifts which have to load and unload trucks in a shared, dynamic environment

Attentional modulation of orthographic neighborhood effects during reading: Evidence from event-related brain potentials in a psychological refractory period paradigm

It is often assumed that word reading proceeds automatically. Here, we tested this assumption by recording event-related potentials during a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, requiring lexical decisions about written words. Specifically, we selected words differing in their orthographic neighborhood size–the number of words that can be obtained from a target by exchanging a single letter–and investigated how influences of this variable depend on the availability of central attention. As expected, when attentional resources for lexical decisions were unconstrained, words with many orthographic neighbors elicited larger N400 amplitudes than those with few neighbors. However, under conditions of high temporal overlap with a high priority primary task, the N400 effect was not statistically different from zero. This finding indicates strong attentional influences on processes sensitive to orthographic neighbors during word reading, providing novel evidence against the full automaticity of processes involved in word reading. Furthermore, in conjunction with the observation of an underadditive interaction between stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and orthographic neighborhood size in lexical decision performance, commonly taken to indicate automaticity, our results raise issues concerning the standard logic of cognitive slack in the PRP paradigm