會計paper如何寫：Lobbying Accounting Standards

本文是會計專業(yè)的paper范例，題目是“Lobbying Accounting Standards（游說會計準(zhǔn)則）”，游說一直是多年來最持久的研究主題。自Watts和Zimmerman(1987)的研究以來，企業(yè)游說會計準(zhǔn)則制定者的動機已經(jīng)在眾多研究中得到了檢驗。雖然大多數(shù)最初的研究都是從一個角度進行的，通常是基于小樣本，但它不能揭示任何模式的公司游說戰(zhàn)略，因為它只看一個單獨的游說決定。因此，在一系列問題和時間段內(nèi)研究游說行為將會獲得更多的好處(Georgiou, 2005)。不同國家和地區(qū)的游說模式各不相同，這是因為影響負責(zé)任的游說的因素，如政府類型、政府干預(yù)、游說系統(tǒng)，以及間接影響利益相關(guān)者，如員工、消費者和非政府組織推動負責(zé)任的游說(鮑爾，2017)

INTRODUCTION TO LOBBYING介紹游說

Lobbying has long been the most persistent research themes for many years. Since the study by Watts and Zimmerman (1987), the motives of companies to lobby accounting standard setters have been examined in numerous studies. Though most initial study was done from one point of view and usually based on small samples, it cannot reveal any pattern in a company lobbying strategy since it only looks at a sole lobbying decision. Therefore, examining lobbying behaviour over a range of issues and period of time would reciprocate more advantages (Georgiou, 2005). Lobbying patterns varies across nations and regions due to factors that impact responsible lobbying by shaping relation between the state and firms such as type of government, government intervention, lobbying system and factors that have indirect effects by shaping the degree to which stakeholders such as employees, consumers and non-governmental organizations push responsible lobbying (Bauer, 2017)

In the modern day, whereby financial statement users often have diverse and conflicting interest, it is hard to achieve an accounting standard that is acceptable by all parties involved. The setting of accounting standards plays an important role in affecting how, when, and where corporate financial information is disclosed. The interplay of power and influence among many different groups makes up the complex process of accounting standard setting. Through lobbying, special interest groups are able to influence the setting of accounting standards whereby it can take on many different forms (Chung, 1999). Studying corporate lobbying on accounting issues is important because it gives us insights into understanding the unique institutional features of the accounting standard setting process. It is generally believed that accounting standards are intended to enhance the quality of accounting information and to reduce information asymmetry among market participants (Scott 1997, pp. 368–370).

LOBBYING DETERMINANTS游說決定因素

Before further analysing the impact of lobbying on standard setting in accounting, multiple variable makes up on the reason why lobbying occurs within companies in the United Kingdom. To generalize a few is the companies particular size that might influence the lobbing activities whereby past studies have concluded that a firm’s frequency of lobbying on ASB proposals is positively associated with the company’s size and operation. Lobbying is costly, thus aside from having more resources available, larger companies are able to devote time and personnel to lobbying activities as the potential benefits favours larger companies and the impact can clearly be seen. Lobbyists make rational choices based on cost-benefit function. Larger companies has greater ability to influence a regulator and to benefit from the outcome as compared to smaller firms and thus they have greater incentive to lobby (Sutton, 1984). Another factor that can be taken into account is the management compensation effect whereby managers are likely to be more interested and consequently more involved in the standard-setting process when their compensation are dependant on the accounting numbers itself. To support this theory, studies has found that the existence of incentive management compensation schemes was found to be positively related to firm participation in the standard‐setting process (Georgiou, 2008).

在進一步分析游說對會計準(zhǔn)則制定的影響之前，多變量對英國公司內(nèi)部游說的原因進行了解釋。概括來說，一些是公司的特定規(guī)模可能會影響拋出活動，過去的研究已經(jīng)得出結(jié)論，公司游說ASB提案的頻率與公司的規(guī)模和運營呈正相關(guān)。游說是昂貴的，因此，除了有更多的資源，大公司能夠投入時間和人員進行游說活動，因為潛在的利益有利于大公司，其影響是顯而易見的。說客根據(jù)成本效益函數(shù)做出理性選擇。與小公司相比，大公司有更大的能力影響監(jiān)管者，并從結(jié)果中受益，因此他們有更大的動機進行游說(Sutton, 1984)。另一個可以考慮的因素是管理層薪酬效應(yīng)，當(dāng)他們的薪酬取決于會計數(shù)字本身時，管理者可能更感興趣，因而更參與標(biāo)準(zhǔn)制定過程。為了支持這一理論，研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，激勵管理薪酬計劃的存在與企業(yè)參與標(biāo)準(zhǔn)制定過程呈正相關(guān)(Georgiou, 2008)。

According to Watts and Zimmerman (1987) companies are more likely to lobby when regulatory changes might impact their reporting figures. If the proposed standard does not give any substantial impact on the accounts, firm will choose not to participate in the process. The new lease proposal intends to move towards a full capitalization model in which lessee companies would increase the amounts of assets and liabilities recognized as a result of capitalized operating leases, as a consequence financial ratios such as leverage would be affected. Managers will usually make accounting choices that would avoid debt covenants violations. Firms with higher financial constraints and leverage levels prefer to use leases instead of other methods of debt. Thus, it can be said that companies with high leverage ratios are more likely to lobby over the long term as compared to other companies.

Companies that generates more profit is said to be more likely to engage with lobbying activities since they have more resources to invest in lobbying activities.  Similarly, income volatility and/or changes in profitability can explain the probability of submitting a comment letter to avoid adverse effects on markets and stakeholders. In terms of financial strategy, lease contracts in large companies is found to be positively correlated with profitability. Aside from profitability, firm’s age is also another major determinant in  lobbying whereby older firms are said to engage in lobbying activities more intensely as compared to younger firms. Reason may be due to their previous experience in lobbying activities within their operating period which supports the theory that firm age increases the likelihood that a firm will engage in lobbying activities. Thus, firms lobbying in the past might experience economies of scale in terms of lobbying (Kosi and Reither, 2014, Morck et al., 2001) because they made considerable investments the first time they lobbied and will thus experience low marginal costs for further lobbying in subsequent periods. Similarly, Weymouth (2012) suggests that older firms have the advantage of repeated interactions during previous years with politicians and regulators and that the costs of monitoring may thus decrease with the age of the firm.

據(jù)說，利潤越高的企業(yè)，就越有可能參與游說活動。因為，企業(yè)有更多的資源可以投資于游說活動。同樣，收益波動和/或盈利能力的變化可以解釋提交評論信以避免對市場和利益相關(guān)者產(chǎn)生不利影響的概率。在財務(wù)策略方面，大公司的租賃合同與盈利能力呈正相關(guān)。除了盈利能力，公司的年齡也是游說活動的另一個主要決定因素，據(jù)說較老的公司比較年輕的公司更積極地從事游說活動。原因可能是由于他們在經(jīng)營期間有過游說活動的經(jīng)驗，這支持了企業(yè)年齡增加了企業(yè)從事游說活動的可能性的理論。因此，過去進行游說的企業(yè)可能會在游說方面經(jīng)歷規(guī)模經(jīng)濟(Kosi and Reither, 2014, Morck et al.， 2001)，因為它們在第一次游說時進行了大量投資，因此在隨后的時期將經(jīng)歷較低的游說邊際成本。同樣，Weymouth(2012)認(rèn)為，較老的公司具有在過去幾年與政客和監(jiān)管者反復(fù)互動的優(yōu)勢，因此，監(jiān)管成本可能會隨著公司的年齡而降低。

Companies in the service industries such as air transport services, hotels, retails, restaurants, shipping and transport use operating leases more intensively. Thus, companies in these industries are more affected by any regulatory change and tend to lobby more that companies in other industries. (Adams & Hardwick, 1998). PwC (2013) believes that the oil industry will be particularly affected based on the definition of a lease because of the capital-intensive nature of the industry and because highly specialized equipment is not always owned. Therefore, we expect a positive relationship between industries that are traditionally more intensively involved in leases and lobbying in the long term.

The convergence project of the IASB and FASB has resulted in IFRS 16 (IASB,2016) being introduced in 2016 with some new divergence regarding certain aspect of its content. The lease accounting proposal is highly controversial and has resulted in substantive differences of opinion among constituents. The ongoing debate over the pros and cons of the new lease accounting standard has become an important matter that has attracted the attention of accounting academia, professionals and the media (see, e.g., The Economist, 2013, The New York Times, 2013). The new lease approach aims to help users’ decision-making processes, but companies are concerned about its costs and consequences.

IASB和FASB的趨同項目導(dǎo)致了2016年引入的IFRS 16 (IASB,2016)，在其內(nèi)容的某些方面出現(xiàn)了一些新的分歧。租賃會計建議是高度爭議的，并已導(dǎo)致實質(zhì)性意見分歧的組成部分。關(guān)于新租賃會計準(zhǔn)則利弊的爭論已經(jīng)成為會計學(xué)術(shù)界、專業(yè)人士和媒體關(guān)注的重要問題(見《經(jīng)濟學(xué)人》2013年、《紐約時報》2013年)。新的租賃方式旨在幫助用戶的決策過程，但企業(yè)擔(dān)心其成本和后果。

Third, the lease standard introduces important accounting modifications from a conceptual and practical perspective. The new approach might have significant economic consequences because it affects companies’ financial statements across all sectors; however, industries with more intensive exposure to operating leases would naturally face greater consequences (e.g., Fito et al., 2013, Fülbier et al., 2008). Scholars such as Beattie, Edwards, and Goodacre (1998), Goodacre (2003), in addition to companies such as PwC (2010), have examined the impact of capitalized operating leases and have shown that some financial ratios would be substantially affected. However, other authors reveal that the amount of off-balance-sheet assets and liabilities resulting from operating leases have been adjusted by analysts and are already included in stock prices and interest rates (see, e.g., Altamuro et al., 2014, Krische et al., 2012), thus reducing concerns about the recognition of assets and liabilities from lease contracts. Nonetheless, transparency would increase if companies calculated the adjustments directly (Nailor & Lennard, 2000).

According to the economic theory of democracy, a rational entity assigns resources to lobbying only when benefits outweigh costs, which is similar to the process of allocating a vote in a political system (Sutton, 1984). This cost–benefit function, which has its origins in classical microeconomic theory and is usually represented by signalling models based on assumptions, also relies on agency theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976).

根據(jù)民主的經(jīng)濟理論，一個理性的實體只有在收益大于成本的情況下才會分配資源用于游說，這類似于政治制度中分配選票的過程(Sutton, 1984)。這種成本效益函數(shù)起源于古典微觀經(jīng)濟理論，通常由基于假設(shè)的信號模型表示，也依賴于代理理論(Jensen & Meckling, 1976)。

Based on previous theories, we assume that companies who become involved in the lease standard-setting process by submitting comment letters have invested in transferring information to standard setters with the aim of ultimately influencing the outcome and reaping benefits. They are signalling themselves as lobbyists through a transactional information strategy based on corporate political activities theory. Independent of the corporate position described in the comment letter which may be interpreted subjectively, the investment is greater when the company is committed during all phases of the project.

Conclusions結(jié)論

The evidence shows that lobbying intensity is associated with firm characteristics such as firm size, profitability, age, whether the firm belongs to a lease-intensive industry, and insider ownership. Our results also reveal that the most powerful companies in terms of size and profitability lobby with more intensity, thus confirming the political cost hypothesis advocated by Watts and Zimmerman (1978) and the rational choice theories of Sutton (1984). The results for firm leverage are not statistical significant, which is in line with the debate on the relationship between debt and leases and also consistent with the argument that current adjustments made by analysts mitigate leverage effects. Firm age has been introduced as a proxy for experience in lobbying activities, which reduces the marginal costs of participation.

證據(jù)表明，游說強度與企業(yè)規(guī)模、盈利能力、年齡、是否屬于租賃密集型行業(yè)、內(nèi)部人所有權(quán)等企業(yè)特征相關(guān)。我們的結(jié)果還表明，規(guī)模和盈利能力最強的公司游說的強度更大，從而證實了Watts和Zimmerman(1978)提出的政治成本假說和Sutton(1984)的理性選擇理論。企業(yè)杠桿率的結(jié)果在統(tǒng)計上并不顯著，這與關(guān)于債務(wù)和租賃關(guān)系的爭論一致，也與分析師當(dāng)前做出的調(diào)整減輕了杠桿效應(yīng)的論點一致。企業(yè)年齡已被引入作為游說活動經(jīng)驗的代理，這降低了參與的邊際成本。

We also validate the hypothesis that those companies that are most intensively involved with leases and that are directly affected by the proposal devote more resources to lobbying, thus supporting positive accounting theory. Our findings confirm this theory, which predicts that self-interested companies are incentivized to participate when they are considerably affected by the potential negative consequences of a proposed standard. Finally, the insiders variable, which represents managerial ownership, is negatively related to the intensity of lobbying. Although there is evidence to suggest that monitoring mechanisms and governance characteristics influence financial reporting, little research on this topic has been conducted in previous lobbying studies. Thus, introducing managerial ownership opens an interesting avenue for future research.

The corporate participants in the lease project demonstrate similar behaviours as shown by the evidence from other accounting projects, but the intensity of the lease accounting project is high because it is a highly controversial convergence project, and the boards delayed publishing the final standard until January 2016. Many large corporate groups have been involved throughout the process to protect their self-interest and to influence the outcome by protecting the status quo. These conclusions have implications for standard setters who wish to predict the intensity of lobbying depending on the degree of controversy of the standard discussed and the specific characteristics of the project.

租賃項目的企業(yè)參與者表現(xiàn)出與其他會計項目相似的行為，但租賃會計項目的強度較高，因為它是一個極具爭議的融合項目，董事會直到2016年1月才公布最終標(biāo)準(zhǔn)。許多大公司集團參與了整個過程，以保護自己的利益，并通過維護現(xiàn)狀來影響結(jié)果。這些結(jié)論對于那些希望根據(jù)所討論的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)的爭議程度和項目的具體特征來預(yù)測游說強度的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)制定者具有啟示意義。

These findings result in a number of possibilities for future research. One potential direction is to introduce more firm factors and qualitative factors to explore their incidence in the lease accounting project. Examining the effects of additional quantitative and qualitative factors on a particular accounting standard project may generate a complete picture of lobbying behaviour. Specially, the analysis of comment letters’ content might help to find more specific qualitative variables that increase explanations and predictions in lobbying behaviour. It might be interesting to deal with notes of financial statements and debt covenants, as a better proxy for balance sheet leverage, to test the impact of this variable in the participation on the lease accounting standards. These measures may clarify the association between liability and lobbying intensity when addressing lease accounting. Another future direction might expand the results using other accounting projects to provide a more complete picture of lobbying behaviour.

Lobbying today is a multimillion pound business. Lobbyists are on hand to pursue the interests of individual corporations, industrial sectors and the generic interests of the corporations. Lobbying is clearly about more than sectional interests of particular capitalists and is also about the restructuring of the way in which capital is or is not regulated. The fact that big business was able to put in place the architecture of neoliberalism (through NAFTA, Maastricht, the final round of the GATT, the creation of the WTO etc) is an indication of the necessity of lobbying for the corporations, and of the inability of ‘public choice’ models to account for the lobbying of which the theorists of public choice approve.

如今，游說是一項價值數(shù)百萬英鎊的業(yè)務(wù)。游說者的目的是追求個別公司、工業(yè)部門的利益，以及公司的一般利益。游說顯然不僅僅關(guān)乎特定資本家的局部利益，也關(guān)乎資本監(jiān)管方式的重組。大企業(yè)能夠建立起新自由主義的架構(gòu)(通過北美自由貿(mào)易協(xié)定、馬斯特里赫特條約、關(guān)貿(mào)總協(xié)定的最后一輪談判、世界貿(mào)易組織的創(chuàng)立等)，這一事實表明了為企業(yè)進行游說的必要性。“公共選擇”模型無法解釋公共選擇理論所認(rèn)可的游說行為。

25 The main issues relating to lobbying today relate to the structure of the public sphere – in particular transparency and accountability – and to the questions of hegemony and outcomes. This includes the narrow ambit of policy discussions, privileged access to decision makers for the corporations and their lobbyists and undue influence in decision making. Some examples follow to illustrate the British lobbying system in Westminster and Whitehall.

CONCLUSION結(jié)論

Responsible lobbying, understood as lobbying in line with a firm’s overall responsibilities toward society, is essential, as it helps to prevent public criticism of political influence and reputational risks. Some firms now begin to recognize the need for an integrative approach and implement measures like lobbying code of ethics or disclosure of political activities in corporate responsibility reports

負責(zé)任的游說，被理解為符合公司對社會的總體責(zé)任的游說，是必不可少的，因為它有助于防止公眾對政治影響的批評和聲譽風(fēng)險。一些公司現(xiàn)在開始認(rèn)識到需要一種綜合的方法，并實施諸如游說道德規(guī)范或在公司責(zé)任報告中披露政治活動等措施。

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