Event Details

Accounting and Finance, Accounting seminar presented by Professor Laurence van Lent, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. Paper title: Quantifying standard-setting deliberations

Prof. Dr. Laurence van Lent | Frankfurt School (frankfurt-school.de)

Abstract

Official meetings of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) are crucial to shaping

accounting standards globally. Researchers examining these meetings depend on voice recordings

from the IASB website. This study processes all available recordings of board meetings, identifies

speakers using voice printing technology, and applies natural language processing techniques for

transcription. We intend to create a publicly available, fully indexed dataset organizing each

participant’s contributions by meeting and topic. Using textual analysis, we will connect these

discussions to stakeholder comment letters and final accounting standard texts. Our granular

data provides new evidence on three major unresolved issues in the political process of accounting

standard-setting: 1) How ideological is standard-setting? 2) Are accounting standard-setters

captured by interest groups? and 3) Are standard-setting bodies designed for effective decisionmaking?

Keywords: Accounting standard-setting; IASB; Natural language processing; Text analysis; Speech

recognition; Machine learning

JEL Codes: M41, M48, D72, C55