The objective of this paper is to illustrate that the change in shareholders’ attitude towards firms (from stakeholder model to shareholder model) influences the accounting treatments of goodwill. This study is based on four countries (Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and France) and covers more than a century, starting in 1880. The authors explain that all these countries have gone through four identified phases of goodwill accounting, classified as (1) “static”(immediate or rapid expensing), (2) “weakened static” (write-off against equity), (3) “dynamic” (recognition with amortization over a long period) and (4) “actuarial” (recognition without amortization but with impairment if necessary).
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.