A firm's value consists of its assets-in-place and growth opportunities: its investment opportunity set. IOS plays a major role in determining a firm's corporate and accounting strategies, and how the marketplace reacts to them. Riahi-Belkaoui shows how IOS can be examined, measured, and used as one way to understand the various accounting and nonaccounting strategies espoused by management. His book fills a gap in the literature on this timely and provocative topic, and provides useful knowledge for upper management, academics, and graduate-level students. The importance of the IOS concept is beginning to be acknowledged in the literature of empirical accounting, finance, and management. There, the investment opportunity set is introduced as an explanatory or moderating variable of the relationship between accounting and economic phenomena and various predictor variables. Riahi-Belkaoui explicates a concept of growth opportunities or IOS (Chapter 1) and provides a general model for its measurement (Chapter 2). He shows its role in a general valuation model based on dividend yield and price earnings ratio (Chapter 3), in the relationship between profitability and multinationality (Chapter 4), in the determination of capital structure (Chapter 5), in a general model of international production (Chapter 6), in a general model of corporate disclosure (Chapter 7), in the relationship between systematic risk and multinationality (Chapter 8), in a model of reputation building (Chapter 9), and earnings management (Chapter 10). He goes on to discuss its role in explaining the relative market value compared to the accounting value of a multinational firm in Chapter 11, and in differentiating between the usefulness of accrual and cash flow based on valuation models in Chapter 12.

The research reported in this volume represents the second stage of a wide-ranging National Bureau of Economic Research effort to investigate "The Changing Role of Debt and Equity in Financing U.S. Capital Formation." The first group of studies sponsored under this project, which have been published individually and summarized in a 1982 volume bearing the same title (Friedman 1982), addressed several key issues relevant to corporate sector behavior along with such other aspects of the evolving financial underpinnings of U.S. capital formation as household saving incentives, international capital flows, and government debt management. In the project's second series of studies, presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference in January 1983 and published here for the first time along with commentaries from that conference, the central focus is the financial side of capital formation undertaken by the U.S. corporate business sector. At the same time, because corporations' securities must be held, a parallel focus is on the behavior of the markets that price these claims.

Using an institutional setting where GAAP is relatively unconstrained, we examine whether managers use their goodwill accounting discretion to reflect firms' growth options that are not otherwise captured in reported identifiable assets. We employ a continuous dependent variable to find that accounting discretion is exercised through estimates of goodwill's economic life (amortization period) in a manner that reflects the firms' underlying growth options. These results are consistent with managers using accounting techniques to reflect firms' investment opportunity sets (IOS). We find that the goodwill accounting decision has a stronger association with IOS variables than with traditionally applied contracting variables. Also, the IOS variables make a greater marginal contribution to the explanatory power of models of goodwill amortization periods than do traditional contracting or opportunism variables.

A less-expensive grayscale paperback version is available. Search for ISBN 9781680922936. Principles of Accounting is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of a two-semester accounting course that covers the fundamentals of financial and managerial accounting. This book is specifically designed to appeal to both accounting and non-accounting majors, exposing students to the core concepts of accounting in familiar ways to build a strong foundation that can be applied across business fields. Each chapter opens with a relatable real-life scenario for today's college student. Thoughtfully designed examples are presented throughout each chapter, allowing students to build on emerging accounting knowledge. Concepts are further reinforced through applicable connections to more detailed business processes. Students are immersed in the "why" as well as the "how" aspects of accounting in order to reinforce concepts and promote comprehension over rote memorization.