Determinants of expected rate of return on pension assets: evidence from the UK

Abstract

This study explores whether UK managers behaved opportunistically when determining the expected rate of return on pension assets (ERRs) during an extended period of major changes in pension accounting rules (1998 -2002), and whether this behaviour changed with the transitional adoption of FRS 17. The empirical results support the contracting hypothesis that UK firms with tightening debt covenants inflated their reported ERRs over this period. The contracting cost incentive underlying reported ERRs appears to be stronger during the FRS 17 transitional adoption period, and ERRs were used jointly with salary growth rate to manage balance sheet leverage. One important implication of our findings is that the IASB's 2011 revision to IAS 19, Employee Benefits, which removed the flexibility that firms could exercise in selection of ERR assumptions, potentially improves the reliability of reported pension cost components.

Research On the Accounting Recognition and Measurement Problems of Enterprise Data Assets

“…One is the characteristics of replicability. Data assets is the data resources, including data and dependent computer and computer technology, computing, machine and computer technology is the carrier of data assets, due to the existence of the carrier of data assets with replicable, such as YouTube, tencent, alibaba and other Internet companies using the data assets "replicable" characteristics, the rapid expansion of business, and the expansion of marginal cost is close to zero, easy to form industry monopoly [10]. Replicability also easy to lead to data assets are malicious circulation copy, even malicious tampering so that the data assets value reduced, such as amazon for data privacy in the European Union in 2021 was fined 746 million euros, TikTok 2021 was citing "invasion of children's privacy" by Dutch parents claim $1.4 billion, etc., from the accounting, the overall value of the data leakage will be reduced.…”