International accounting standard setting: lobbying and the development of financial instruments accounting

With the establishment of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) one of the first projects that were added to its agenda was the financial instruments project. The controversy surrounding the standards, and their heavy Anglo-American nature, have led to widespread concerns regarding the IASB granting undue influence to certain lobbying parties in developing these standards. The thesis examines whether these concerns are warranted. The IASB standard setting is characterised by varying degrees of constituent support and opposition for the organisation’s proposed changes to accounting standards. A robust methodology, grounded in ideology theory of regulation, is therefore developed to identify the impact of special interest lobbying on the IASB’s decisions during the development of standards for financial instruments from 2001-2012. Textual analysis is applied to a large sample of comment letters in order to derive a continuous measure of negativity for the analysis of overt lobbying, as well as identifying cases of explicit opinion in the responses. The findings show that the IASB takes account of lobbying in its standard development. Lobbyists are found to be more likely to be successful in blocking proposed changes by expressing negativity in their discussion of a proposal, as opposed to explicitly disagreeing. Further, the results of the analysis show that, in general, all major constituent groups are influential in the development, but that only the business community is influential when it comes to disclosure requirements. Moreover, opposing American constituents are more likely to block proposed changes than are lobbyists from elsewhere. In sum, the thesis investigates and finds that the IASB’s standard setting process allows special interest lobbying to shape the standards for financial instruments accounting and that the business community and American constituents are particularly influential in the process, thus reinforcing the Anglo-American nature of the standards.