Volume 4, Issue 1 -

We analyze director compensation in German listed firms for the 2005–2009 period. Our sample covers all listed companies in the German Prime Standard of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, specifically firms with shares listed in the indices of DAX, MDAX, SDAX, and TecDAX. In the last years, non-executive directors are facing increasing duties and (legal) responsibilities. From that perspective, it is quite surprising that the remuneration of non-executive directors has received rather little attention so far. In this study, we examine the German experience. We present the status quo of non-executive director remuneration and discuss its challenges. Specifically, we will look at the level of director remuneration and the (possible) problem of limited incentives.

The basic premise of this paper is that academic accountants and financial accounting standard setters have traded places in their normative vs positive orientations. Academics have shifted from normative to positive, while standard setters have shifted from positive to normative. This paper was developed from a speech given at the August 2012 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, which was followed by speeches by Ross Watts, Richard Macve, and Steve Zeff on the same subject. Ross Watts argued that a lack of understanding about accounting history and evolution is a likely source of problems. He also summarized the recent evidence in (Allen and Ramanna (2013). Towards an understanding of the role of standard setters in standard setting. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 55(1), 66–90) on the association between standard setters’ backgrounds and the positions they take. Richard Macve added UK and IFRS perspectives (Macve, R. (2013). “Trading places”: A UK (and IFRS) comment. Accounting, Economics, and Law, 2014;4(1):1–14), and Steve Zeff provided a more in-depth historical perspective (Zeff, S. A. (2013). Some historical reflections on “Have academics and the standard setters traded places?” Accounting, Economics, and Law, 2014;4(1):1–8).

This paper is based on my presentation given as part of a panel discussion at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association in August 2012 in Washington DC. To the other panellists’ papers (Glover, 2013; Zeff, 2013b) I add a contrasting perspective from other countries (primarily the UK and the rest of Europe) that incorporates a variety of other actors and differing uses (or ‘objectives’) of financial accounting and reporting. I consider briefly in turn: the major actors; major external uses of financial reports; the ‘rational institutional myths’ that sustain the role of accounting standards; and the potential contributions both of research and of university accounting education. I argue that ‘positive’ and ‘normative’ research, reflecting a deep understanding of accounting’s history, must continue to be complementary in the social engineering of better accounting standards and rules.

This is an attempt, albeit brief, to provide some historical observations on the hypothesis in Jonathan Glover’s article that U.S. academics and standard setters have at some point swapped postures with respect to oughtness and descriptive generalization – that is, as between normativism and positivism.

How do governments answer to the demands of their electorate for prosperity and protection from the vagaries of the market place, if governments have pledged to steer away from protective interventions in markets? This tension is what motivates this timely little book, edited by Ben Clift and Cornelia Woll. “Economic patriotism in open economies” has to find other ways than the outright protective measures of the past by which competitors were excluded from national markets in order to foster national champions. The volume builds on the literature of economic nationalism, popularized by authors such as Helleiner (2002), which has pointed out that liberalization might be an effective industrial policy by certain nation states, thus, making it possible to interpret acts of liberalization as nationally motivated. The volume makes two distinct theoretical contributions, related to its conceptual shift from economic nationalism to economic patriotism: on the one hand, it points out that economic patriotism can also evolve on the subnational or supranational level, which can create tensions with economic patriotism on the national level. Second, this evolution can happen not only on the basis of an imagined patrie, but an imagined patrie to be. Economic patriotism in this sense, they maintain, is as much a discursive device as it is economic policy, a point most clearly made in the contribution by Callaghan and Lagneau-Ymonet when they explain the failure to arouse economic patriotism in France to defend the Euro-next stock exchange from a take-over by the NYSE.

The four-volume set of “A Global history of accounting, financial reporting and public policy” edited by Previts, Walton and Wolnizer is a promising attempt to contribute to our understanding of national specifics, differences, and parallels in accounting traditions. Fifty-one authors capture “global accounting history” in a still diverse and non-standardized world by providing 28 different national perspectives with almost 1,000 pages in total. This seems to be a reasonable and careful first step to handle the current challenge of accounting internationalization and harmonization – out of consideration for and fully aware of the national traditions, thoughts, and institutional settings.