We provide an overview of the empirical literature on the politics of accounting standard-setting, focusing on the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Although it is clear from casual observation that politics sometimes plays a first-order role in the determination of accounting standards, we argue that more can be done to improve our understanding of this important topic. Based on our review, we outline what we see to be a number of potentially fruitful directions for future research.

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We investigate the impact of endogenous information acquisition on Easley and O'Hara's (2004) result that moving information from being publicly to privately available results in an increase in a firm's cost of capital. As in Christensen et al. (2010), when the cost of information acquisition is fixed, Easley and O'Hara's result reverses. We study two scenarios, however, where Easley and O'Hara's result can continue to hold (i): where the cost of information acquisition is increasing in its precision, and (ii) where the benefits of acquiring private information span multiple firms.