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September 12, 2005, at 4:45 p.m. Click here to visit the photo gallery Click here to watch the video clip of the colloquium (89.20 MB) |
An important trend in external financial statement reporting is to provide more qualitative disclosures such as the management discussion and analysis section, the president’s letter, and reports about environmental and social performance. These qualitative disclosures are important to accountants as report preparers, auditors as report verifiers, and investors and bankers as users of these reports. This presentation is a synopsis of the research in this area. I will explain the research that documents the extent to which qualitative disclosures are associated with financial statement information, the kinds of qualitative disclosures that firms make when they have poor financial performance, the extent to which these qualitative disclosures explain past financial performance and predict future financial performance, including bankruptcy, and how readable and comprehendable these qualitative disclosures are. This presentation also will review research in linguistics and psychology concerning how both to increase the readability and comprehendability of qualitative disclosures and to increase their consistency with quantitative disclosures. In addition, I will discuss research in linguistics and psychology that explains how we can tell whether qualitative disclosures are truthful or deceptive. Professor Shields received a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1978 and an honorary doctoral degree from the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration (Finland) in 2000. His teaching interests are managerial accounting, strategic management accounting, and management control systems, and his research uses cognitive, motivation, and organizational psychology theories to study budgeting, performance measurement, and incentives. Professor Shields has published over 50 articles in journals including Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Contemporary Accounting Research, Accounting Horizons, and Journal of Management Accounting Research. Mike was editor of the Journal of Management Accounting Research (1996-98) and is an associate editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society (1991-present) and Journal of Management Accounting Research (1998-present). Mike was President of the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association (2001-02). |
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The colloquium is sponsored by the L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Endowed Chair in Accounting. ________________________________________________ USM Professor Jeffrey Gramlich was appointed the first L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Chair in Accounting in the USM School of Business in 2003. His appointment was made possible by a $1 million gift from L.L. Bean, Inc., its board chair, Leon Gorman, his wife Lisa, Jim and Maureen Gorman, and Tom Gorman, who established the chair in memory of L.L. Bean CFO Lee Surace '73, '81, who died in March of 2001. Surace was chair of the USM School of Business' Advisory Council and was a frequent guest lecturer. The USM School of Business is accredited by the prestigious AACSB International. For students seeking the finest education and companies seeking the highest caliber talent, partnership, and educational opportunities, AACSB International accreditation is one of the most important affirmations of sustained quality in the word. For more information about School of Business programs, call 780-4020. |
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