The issue of principles-based accounting standards has been attracting growing interest since the emergence of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as a global phenomenon, and the United States consideration of IFRS adoption. This paper studies the effect of a move towards principles-based accounting standards on price efficiency in the equity market. I assume a move towards principles-based standards requires the firm’s manager to use more of his private, though more subjective, information for financial reporting. I model the manager’s reporting decision as a trade-off between increased compensation through earnings management and a cost associated with earnings management (such as litigation, SEC enforcement, and manipulation effort). I find that the effect of a move towards principles-based accounting standards on price efficiency is non-monotonic. When standards are highly rules-based, reducing the use of rules-based standards increases price efficiency. However, at some point, this relation reverses. The optimal mix of rules and principles reflects a trade-off between two types of effects on price efficiency: predictive ability and comparability.  In addition, expected earnings management is non-monotonic in the use of rules-based standards. Finally, I find that rules intensity and managerial compensation incentives act as complements, such that higher managerial compensation incentives require more rules-based standards for price efficiency to be maximized.

The social welfare costs of earnings management have been known to include the distortion of real investment decisions (resulting in inefficient allocation of resources), as well as deadweight loss incurred by the firms to manage earnings. One of the ways used to mitigate the effect of these costs is increasing the level of earnings management deterrence through legislation, regulation and enforcement, as in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. However, by analyzing a rational expectations equilibrium that includes firms, investors, standard-setters, and legislators, I find that there are situations where such an increase in the level of earnings management deterrence may well be counter-productive. When considering the informational benefits of managing earnings and the substitution effect of accrual-based earnings management with real earnings management, increasing deterrence may result in decreasing the information value of financial reporting as well as increasing total social welfare costs of earnings management.

Companies adopting the recent IFRS 16 would be required to capitalize all their previous "off-balancesheet" operating leases as finance leases. This dramatic shift is expected to have a significant effect on major financial statements' ratios which indicate the level of profitability, financial risk, and liquidity of the company. This review will look at the main financial statements' ratios, and at the expected effect that the switch from the superseded IAS 17 to IFRS 16 will have on them.