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An Exploratory Investigation of Socio-Economic Phenomena that May Influence Accounting Differences in Three Diverse Countries
This dissertation attempts to provide an exploratory structure to respond to, and tries to resolve, an existing void in international accounting research. The void is a lack of coherently structured, nation-specific, descriptive research to investigate socio-economic phenomena which may influence financial accounting. This dissertation's salient features include a political economy theory, an exploratory, sociological method, and a case study format. The political economy of accounting, introduced by Tinker [1980] and refined by Cooper and Sherer [1984], emphasizes a persuasive social relations dimension. This theory motivates selection of three countries (the United States, France, and Japan) that appear to have divergent socio-cultural environments. An exploratory and analytical approach of modified (enlarged) exogenism, developed by Smith [1973, 1976] and adapted to accounting by McKinnon [1986], provides an analytic structure for this exploratory investigation. Modified exogenism focuses upon an open, dynamic social system (the process of financial accounting), and provides analysis reflecting four major areas (the environment, intrusive events, intra-system activity, and trans-system activity). After examining the nation-specific financial accounting (socio-economic) structures for each country, an analysis of selected financial disclosures attempts to gain a better understanding of how socio-economic factors have influenced the development of financial accounting. My primary objective is to attempt to provide some insight about ,how diverse socio-political factors have impacted the development of financial accounting in three countries. Library research of nation-specific literature attempts to extract a relatively accurate picture of social, political, and economic institutions and policies, and relates such findings to financial accounting processes for each nation. This dissertation attempts to provide a necessary foundation for future theoretical international accounting harmonization studies.
A Study of the Interdependence of Four Major Stock Markets Using a Vector Autoregression
The question for this thesis is whether the four major stock markets--the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, and Japan are interdependent or segmented. The study period runs from February 1979 to June 1987, with the Wall Street Journal as a source of data. The Granger causality test is used to test for relationships among the four major stock markets. The thesis is divided into five chapters-- 1) statement of the problem; 2) survey of literature; 3) methodology; 4) results and 5) conclusions. The overall findings of this thesis indicate that there are few or no comovement similarities among all the four stock markets. However, the findings do point out the significant influence of the United States stock market on the other three stock markets.
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