The Modern Corporation Statement on Accounting

A number of regulatory initiatives on the national, international and EU levels both foster and fortify the principle of Maximizing Shareholder Value (MSV) in corporate governance. This tendency can be clearly seen in such areas as financial accounting standards and various soft and hard law initiatives pertaining to corporate governance that have flourished in recent decades. These have created a new type of accountability for managers of listed corporations as will be exemplified below. One of the most important regulatory changes over this period was when the EU opted for International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as a basis for financial reporting for the accounts of all listed, EU-based corporations in 2005. These accounting standards, amounting to quasi legislation, are issued by a private sector body – the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Other important regulatory changes include the various national ‘corporate governance codes’ that have mushroomed since the early 1990s. Although such codes pertain to member states, the EU remains the main body prescribing most new hard-law corporate governance regulation within the union, for example, by means of the 13 company law directives issued so far

A comparative analysis of the impact of accounting differences on profits and return on equity

The purpose of this paper is to make a quantitative comparative analysis of differences between Swedish accounting practice and US GAAP. The empirical data consisted of eighty-four US GAAP reconciliations of income statements and shareholders' equity, disclosed in Swedish annual reports during 1981-90. Prior qualitative research has suggested that Swedish accounting practice is conservative compared with that in the USA. However, the empirical analysis of profits and return on equity provided little support for this hypothesis. Instead, there were indications of a less conservative accounting treatment in the Swedish accounts compared with US GAAP. The most material differences between Swedish profits and those calculated using US GAAP were caused by differences in treatment of foreign currency translation, income taxes, sale and leaseback transactions and business combinations.

Finance, Discipline and the Labour Share in the Long‐Run: France (1911–2010) and Sweden (1891–2000)

There is an ongoing debate within political economy on how finance affects capital–labour relations. Industrial relation scholars have demonstrated that financialization empowers capital and induces the liberalization of industrial relations. Additionally, meso and macro level studies show that finance reduced the labour share during neoliberalism. However, the literature is relatively limited and does not extend to the pre‐WWII period. Considering finance as historically integral to capitalism, this paper estimates the impact of finance on the labour shares of France (1911–2010) and Sweden (1891–2000). The results show that mortgage debt decreases the labour shares of both countries, thus, the financialization of households induces industrial discipline historically. However, the negative effect is substantially smaller in Sweden where housing finance is state‐led and bargaining coordination is centralized over the last century