会计paper如何写：Lobbying Accounting Standards

本文是会计专业的paper范例，题目是“Lobbying Accounting Standards（游说会计准则）”，游说一直是多年来最持久的研究主题。自Watts和Zimmerman(1987)的研究以来，企业游说会计准则制定者的动机已经在众多研究中得到了检验。虽然大多数最初的研究都是从一个角度进行的，通常是基于小样本，但它不能揭示任何模式的公司游说战略，因为它只看一个单独的游说决定。因此，在一系列问题和时间段内研究游说行为将会获得更多的好处(Georgiou, 2005)。不同国家和地区的游说模式各不相同，这是因为影响负责任的游说的因素，如政府类型、政府干预、游说系统，以及间接影响利益相关者，如员工、消费者和非政府组织推动负责任的游说(鲍尔，2017)

INTRODUCTION TO LOBBYING介绍游说

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游说决定因素

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).

在进一步分析游说对会计准则制定的影响之前，多变量对英国公司内部游说的原因进行了解释。概括来说，一些是公司的特定规模可能会影响抛出活动，过去的研究已经得出结论，公司游说ASB提案的频率与公司的规模和运营呈正相关。游说是昂贵的，因此，除了有更多的资源，大公司能够投入时间和人员进行游说活动，因为潜在的利益有利于大公司，其影响是显而易见的。说客根据成本效益函数做出理性选择。与小公司相比，大公司有更大的能力影响监管者，并从结果中受益，因此他们有更大的动机进行游说(Sutton, 1984)。另一个可以考虑的因素是管理层薪酬效应，当他们的薪酬取决于会计数字本身时，管理者可能更感兴趣，因而更参与标准制定过程。为了支持这一理论，研究发现，激励管理薪酬计划的存在与企业参与标准制定过程呈正相关(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.

据说，利润越高的企业，就越有可能参与游说活动。因为，企业有更多的资源可以投资于游说活动。同样，收益波动和/或盈利能力的变化可以解释提交评论信以避免对市场和利益相关者产生不利影响的概率。在财务策略方面，大公司的租赁合同与盈利能力呈正相关。除了盈利能力，公司的年龄也是游说活动的另一个主要决定因素，据说较老的公司比较年轻的公司更积极地从事游说活动。原因可能是由于他们在经营期间有过游说活动的经验，这支持了企业年龄增加了企业从事游说活动的可能性的理论。因此，过去进行游说的企业可能会在游说方面经历规模经济(Kosi and Reither, 2014, Morck et al.， 2001)，因为它们在第一次游说时进行了大量投资，因此在随后的时期将经历较低的游说边际成本。同样，Weymouth(2012)认为，较老的公司具有在过去几年与政客和监管者反复互动的优势，因此，监管成本可能会随着公司的年龄而降低。

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的趋同项目导致了2016年引入的IFRS 16 (IASB,2016)，在其内容的某些方面出现了一些新的分歧。租赁会计建议是高度争议的，并已导致实质性意见分歧的组成部分。关于新租赁会计准则利弊的争论已经成为会计学术界、专业人士和媒体关注的重要问题(见《经济学人》2013年、《纽约时报》2013年)。新的租赁方式旨在帮助用户的决策过程，但企业担心其成本和后果。

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).

根据民主的经济理论，一个理性的实体只有在收益大于成本的情况下才会分配资源用于游说，这类似于政治制度中分配选票的过程(Sutton, 1984)。这种成本效益函数起源于古典微观经济理论，通常由基于假设的信号模型表示，也依赖于代理理论(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结论

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.

证据表明，游说强度与企业规模、盈利能力、年龄、是否属于租赁密集型行业、内部人所有权等企业特征相关。我们的结果还表明，规模和盈利能力最强的公司游说的强度更大，从而证实了Watts和Zimmerman(1978)提出的政治成本假说和Sutton(1984)的理性选择理论。企业杠杆率的结果在统计上并不显著，这与关于债务和租赁关系的争论一致，也与分析师当前做出的调整减轻了杠杆效应的论点一致。企业年龄已被引入作为游说活动经验的代理，这降低了参与的边际成本。

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.

租赁项目的企业参与者表现出与其他会计项目相似的行为，但租赁会计项目的强度较高，因为它是一个极具争议的融合项目，董事会直到2016年1月才公布最终标准。许多大公司集团参与了整个过程，以保护自己的利益，并通过维护现状来影响结果。这些结论对于那些希望根据所讨论的标准的争议程度和项目的具体特征来预测游说强度的标准制定者具有启示意义。

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，游说是一项价值数百万英镑的业务。游说者的目的是追求个别公司、工业部门的利益，以及公司的一般利益。游说显然不仅仅关乎特定资本家的局部利益，也关乎资本监管方式的重组。大企业能够建立起新自由主义的架构(通过北美自由贸易协定、马斯特里赫特条约、关贸总协定的最后一轮谈判、世界贸易组织的创立等)，这一事实表明了为企业进行游说的必要性。“公共选择”模型无法解释公共选择理论所认可的游说行为。

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结论

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

负责任的游说，被理解为符合公司对社会的总体责任的游说，是必不可少的，因为它有助于防止公众对政治影响的批评和声誉风险。一些公司现在开始认识到需要一种综合的方法，并实施诸如游说道德规范或在公司责任报告中披露政治活动等措施。

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