Towards an Understanding of the Role of Standard Setters in Standard Setting

We investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting: we examine how certain professional and political characteristics of FASB members and SEC commissioners predict the accounting "reliability" and "relevance" of proposed standards. Notably, we find FASB members with backgrounds in financial services are more likely to propose standards that decrease "reliability" and increase "relevance," partly due to their tendency to propose fair-value methods. We find opposite results for FASB members affiliated with the Democratic Party, although only when excluding a financial-services background as an independent variable. Jackknife procedures show that results are robust to omitting any individual standard setter

Lobbying Behavior of Governmental Entities: Evidence from Public Pension Accounting Rules

We examine the lobbying behavior of state governments in the development of recently issued public pension accounting standards GASB 67 and 68. Consistent with opportunistic motivations, we find that states’ opposition to the liability increasing provisions embedded in these standards is increasing in the severity of pension plan underfunding, state budget deficits, and the use of high discount rates. Further we find opposing states are subject to more stringent balanced budget requirements and greater political pressure from unions. By contrast, we find evidence that the support from financial statement users for these provisions is amplified in states with poorly funded plans and large budget deficits, suggesting government lobbying is misaligned with a public interest perspective. We also find evidence that user support varies by type: internal users (public employees) overwhelmingly oppose the standards, relative to external users (credit analysts and the broader citizenry) but the difference is moderated in states with constitutionally protected benefits. This finding is consistent with the expectation that pension accounting reform will motivate cuts in pension benefits as opposed to increased levels of funding from the governments. Analyses of 2011 and 2012 state pension reforms confirm that states opposed to accounting reform are more likely to cut pension benefits

Auditor Lobbying on Accounting Standards

We examine how Big N auditors’ changing incentives impact their comment-letter lobbying on U.S. GAAP over the first thirty-four years of the FASB (1973–2006). We examine the influence of auditors’ lobbying incentives arising from three basic factors: managing expected litigation and regulatory costs; catering to clients’ preferences for flexibility in GAAP; and being conceptually aligned with the FASB, particularly on the use of fair values in accounting. We find evidence that auditor lobbying is driven by prevailing standards of litigation and regulatory scrutiny and by support for fair-value accounting. But we find no evidence that catering to clients’ preferences for flexibility in GAAP drives auditor lobbying. Broadly, our paper offers the first large-sample descriptive analysis of the role of Big N auditors in the accounting standard-setting process

Agenda Setting at the FASB: Evidence from the Role of the FASAC

I examine the extent to which the FASB’s agenda determination is a function of the contemporaneous preferences of its primary constituents: auditors, preparers, and financial statement users. Using the FASB’s consultation with the FASAC as a lens through which to view constituent preferences, I find evidence that from 1982 to 2001 influence on FASB agenda decisions is concentrated among “Big N” audit firms, whereas from 2002 to 2006 the preferences of financial constituents appear most significant. Across both periods, I find no evidence of significant preparer influence in agenda formation, which is in contrast to their documented role in later stages of standard setting. Collectively, the results contribute to our understanding of the influence of constituents in standard setting and highlight a shift in that influence over time

Effect of boron concentration on recombination at the p-Si–Al2O3 interface

We examine the surface passivation properties of Al₂O₃ deposited on boron-doped planar crystalline silicon surfaces as a function of the boron concentration. Both uniformly doped and diffused surfaces are studied, with surface boron concentrations ranging from 9.2 × 10¹⁵ to 5.2 × 10¹⁹ cm⁻³. Atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition and thermal atomic layer deposition are used to deposit the Al₂O₃ films. The surface recombination rate of each sample is determined from photoconductance measurements together with the measured dopant profiles via numerical simulation, using the latest physical models. These values are compared with calculations based on the interface properties determined from capacitance–voltage and conductance measurements. It is found that the fundamental surface recombination velocity of electrons, Sn 0 , which describes the chemical passivation of the interface, is independent of the surface boron concentration Ns for Ns  ≤ 3 × 10¹⁹ cm⁻³, and in excellent agreement with values calculated from the interface state density Dit and capture coefficients cn and cp measured on undiffused boron-doped surfaces. We conclude that the physical properties of the Si– Al₂O₃ interface are independent of the boron dopant concentration over this range

Safeguarding the metaverse

Safeguarding the metaverse has been produced by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) to examine the potential harms associated with virtual reality (VR) and the metaverse. It examines the background and context of the adoption and uptake of VR technologies as well as its benefits to wider society. It also highlights areas in which there could be negative outcomes created by engagement with the metaverse, while addressing areas of concern regarding safeguarding for users, particularly minors. This report is written for government, policy makers, digital industry and technology professionals

Using Weak Supervision and Data Augmentation in Question Answering

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the need for access to biomedical literature to answer timely and disease-specific questions. During the early days of the pandemic, one of the biggest challenges we faced was the lack of peer-reviewed biomedical articles on COVID-19 that could be used to train machine learning models for question answering (QA). In this paper, we explore the roles weak supervision and data augmentation play in training deep neural network QA models. First, we investigate whether labels generated automatically from the structured abstracts of scholarly papers using an information retrieval algorithm, BM25, provide a weak supervision signal to train an extractive QA model. We also curate new QA pairs using information retrieval techniques, guided by the clinicaltrials.gov schema and the structured abstracts of articles, in the absence of annotated data from biomedical domain experts. Furthermore, we explore augmenting the training data of a deep neural network model with linguistic features from external sources such as lexical databases to account for variations in word morphology and meaning. To better utilize our training data, we apply curriculum learning to domain adaptation, fine-tuning our QA model in stages based on characteristics of the QA pairs. We evaluate our methods in the context of QA models at the core of a system to answer questions about COVID-19

On the Mechanical Energy Available to Drive Solar Flares

Where does solar flare energy come from? More specifically, assuming that the ultimate source of flare energy is mechanical energy in the convection zone, how is this translated into energy dissipated or stored in the corona? This question appears to have been given relatively little thought, as attention has been focussed predominantly on mechanisms for the rapid dissipation of coronal magnetic energy by way of MHD instabilities and plasma micro instabilities. We consider three types of flare theory: the steady state "photospheric dynamo" model in which flare power represents coronal dissipation of currents generated simultaneously by sub-photospheric flows; the "magnetic energy storage" model where sub-photospheric flows again induce coronal currents but which in this case are built up over a longer period before being released suddenly; and "emerging flux" models, in which new magnetic flux rising to the photosphere already contains free energy, and does not require subsequent stressing by photospheric motions. We conclude that photospheric dynamos can power only very minor flares; that coronal energy storage can in principle meet the requirements of a major flare, although perhaps not the very largest flares, but that difficulties in coupling efficiently to the energy source may limit this mechanism to moderate sized flares; and that emerging magnetic flux tubes, generated in the solar interior, can carry sufficient free energy to power even the largest flares ever observed.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Effects of solar wind magnetosphere coupling recorded at different geomagnetic latitudes: Separation of directly-driven and storage/release systems

The effect on geomagnetic activity of solar wind speed, compared with that of the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field, differs with geomagnetic latitude. In this study we construct a new index based on monthly standard deviations in the H-component of the geomagnetic field for all geomagnetic latitudes. We demonstrate that for this index the response at auroral regions correlates best with interplanetary coupling functions which include the solar wind speed while mid- and low-latitude regions respond to variations in the interplanetary magnetic field strength. These results are used to isolate the responsible geomagnetic current systems