The Financial Reporting Practices of British Municipal Corporations 1835–1933: A Study in Accounting Innovation

Financial Reporting in 1920: The Case of Industrial Companies

“…The focus of the paper was to determine which company-specific factors would affect the corporate decision to disclose financial statements and the amount of disclosure. By looking at these factors, the motivation of firms to disclose voluntarily as in the Coombs and Edwards [1995] model can be understood.…”

“…By finding a number of economic factors associated with voluntary statement reporting, the paper provides a link to the supply of voluntary financial-statement information beyond corporate-governance philosophy as documented in Bartlett and Jones [1997]. However, the paper also finds that, consistent with the Coombs and Edwards' [1995] model of disclosure and regulation, not all firms possess the economic circumstances that are associated with increased voluntary financial reporting.…”

“…Taken together, this literature shows that the 1920 era was a time when social pressure for increased disclosure and threatened legislative or regulatory action were present in both the U.S. and the U.K. This situation created an environment in which both the models proposed by Coombs and Edwards [1995] and Bartlett and Jones [1997] would suggest that companies would logically react by increasing voluntary disclosure. Yet, the empirical reality is that many companies continued to provide minimal financial-statement disclosure.…”

“…The conclusion of that study was that regulation, either externally imposed as in the case of railroads and utilities or self-imposed as in the case of listed companies, increased disclosure. That study focused on the regulatory component of Coombs and Edwards' [1995] disclosure model. The current study uses a similar approach and data set as Archambault and Archambault [2005], but examines a different issue.…”

Educational accounting, accountability and accountants in the era of the ‘Scotch’ school boards,1872–1918

“…The so-called income and expenditure account (it actually reported receipts and payments) was already well established as an appropriate framework for the accounts of public bodies not concerned with profit. As Coombs and Edwards (1995) point out, this was initially the form of accounting employed by municipal corporations, and was descended from the charge and discharge system. The 1872 Act required every board to submit annual accounts to the Accountant for Education in Scotland, whose published cotsolidated records showed each category of income (receipt), expenditure (payment) and bank opening and closing balances for each board, line by line.…”