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Child impact statements are a tool for assessing the potential impact of policy, provision, legislation etc on children. Although now predominantly based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the concept preceded this Convention. This article is based on a literature review and a series of face‐to‐face and telephone interviews with relevant Irish civil and public servants and NGOs. It sets out the rationale for child impact statements and the experience of using them in Sweden, the UK, Flanders and Ireland, before highlighting the strengths and weaknesses in existing models. It then presents a number of difficulties with the approach as a means of improving children's well‐being and argues that there is insufficient evidence to support their widespread introduction as a primary means of achieving positive policy outcomes for children.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the financial statement impacts of adopting NZ IFRS during 2005 through 2008.

The effects of NZ IFRS on the financial statements and ratios of first‐time adopters of NZ IFRS for a stratified random sample of 56 listed companies is analysed. In total, 16 of these were early adopters and 40 of which waited until adoption of NZ IFRS became mandatory. The analysis of the financial statement impact of NZ IFRS is conducted in the context of the accounting choice literature.

The results show that 87 per cent of firms are affected by NZ IFRS. The median and inter‐quartile ranges indicate that for most firms the impact of NZ IFRS is small. However, the maximum and minimum values indicate the impact can be large for some entities. The impact has considerable effects on common financial ratios.

The usual limitations applicable to small samples apply.

The findings may be useful to regulators and policy makers reviewing financial reporting requirements.

This study is the first to offer a comprehensive empirical analysis of the effect of adopting IFRS on financial statements in New Zealand, as well as on selected key ratios of interest to financial analysts. The data used are more recent than most IAS or IFRS studies around the world and are stratified to allow for comparison between voluntary/early adopters and mandatory/late adopters.

New lease accounting rules are proposed that will fundamentally change the way leases are accounted for and reported in financial statements. This paper seeks to provide information on the proposed new rules and to illustrate their impact on financial statements and financial ratios using a single restaurant company.

The case of a single restaurant company, CEC International, is used to illustrate the potential impact of the new rules. Additional examples are used to illustrate the impact on financial policies. Financial statements were adjusted and various financial ratios such as interest coverage, leverage and profitability ratios were computed before and after capitalization.

The results show that financial statements presented will change dramatically when lease assets and liabilities are added to the balance‐sheet. The expense recognition pattern will change significantly and negatively impact performance measures such as interest coverage and capital ratios but improve cash flow measures such as EBIT and EBITDA.

Limitations of this study include the assumptions used to capitalize leases such as interest rate, life of leases, no new leases, and exclusion of contingent rentals.

All restaurant companies and managers must assess the costs and benefits of complying with the proposed new rules and start analyzing and evaluating their impact on existing debt agreements, executive compensation plans, and the lease versus buy decision.

This paper serves to inform restaurant managers about the potential implications of the new rules, so managers can prepare, plan and formulate strategies to mitigate their impact.

The present study aims to examine the influence of emotional content and gender pertaining to victim impact statements (VIS) on sentencing outcomes.

The authors used a 2 (emotionality)×2 (participant gender)×2 (victim gender)×2 (statement gender) factorial design. Participants (n=715) read a crime vignette and corresponding VIS, and completed questionnaires pertaining to sentencing recommendations, legal attitudes, and levels of emotional empathy (counterbalanced).

Results indicated that participant gender was related to the emotional appeal of the VIS, and ratings of punishment severity. Emotional empathy was positively associated with perceptions of credibility and emotionality. Higher legal attitudes scores were positively correlated with higher minimum sentences, ratings of credibility, emotional appeal, as well as more severe punishments.

This study has important implications with respect to perceptions of VIS in relation to how emotional they are, who the victim is, who the statement is written by, and who hears the statement. Given the lack of previous research in this area, the study provides data that warrant further investigation.

This paper reviews studies that have examined how accounting information impacts commercial lending judgments. Issues discussed involve the usefulness of accounting data in lending decisions, effects of different accounting methods on lenders’ judgments, bankruptcy and default judgments, and decision processes pertaining to the use of accounting information in lending decisions. Additionally, the paper reviews the research on how audits and other forms of assurance influence commercial loan officers’ judgments. Topics include the way perceived auditor independence influences loan officers’ judgments, the impact of financial statement audits and audit opinions on lending decisions, how internal control reports and other CPA firm reports influence loan decisions, ways in which audit report disclosures and wording impact lending decisions, how perceived auditor quality affects lending decisions, and the effects of limited assurance engagements on loan officers’ judgments.

The purpose of this research is to study the impact of reading a web site's privacy statement on the perceptions of control over privacy and trust in a cyber merchant.

Two experiments were designed to monitor the actual reading of the privacy statement. Study one compares the influence of actual reading with self‐reported claims. Study two manipulated the format of the privacy statement (opt‐in or opt‐out) and included a control condition to assess the influence of the presence of a privacy statement and the influence of the format on the dependent variables.

The findings show that the mere presence of a privacy statement has a positive influence on perceived control. However, reading the privacy statement does not necessarily have a positive influence on perceived control and trust, contrary to commonly held assumptions. Participants who read the opt‐in format felt significantly more control and trust than the participants who read the opt‐out format. The opt‐out format decreases perceived control compared with the group that did not read the privacy statement when it was available.

The sample size for both experiments was relatively modest, which limits the generalisability of the findings.

Cyber merchants should devote particular attention to the strategic role of the format of the privacy statement.

In contrast to other studies that relied on surveys, this paper assesses the impact of the actual reading of the privacy statement via an experimental approach. Moreover, the impact of the format of the privacy statement has been empirically tested.

Financial reporting is the cornerstone of financial management. In 1999, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) ratified unanimously GASB Statement No. 34. In this paper, using the Georgia Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) and interviews with practitioners, we examine the implication of GASB 34 for the linkage between reporting and accountability. The research findings show that Statement 34 introduces significant impacts on reporting. However, its implications for accountability and better financial management are yet to be as significant as hoped.

This manuscript explores the value of mission statement emotional content in the relationship between money raised by a nonprofit organization through fundraising efforts and the money spent. It proposes the emotional content of a mission statement moderates money spent and earned to ultimately to impact how much revenue a nonprofit makes through fundraising.

The manuscript evaluates the qualitative turned quantitative data (via text mining [TM]) in mission statements from 200 nonprofits serving the homeless sector via a moderation analysis. After segmenting the sampled nonprofits by gross revenue, the authors analyze the impact of the positive and negative emotional tone in each group to determine how the content of a mission statement impacts organizational revenue.

The paper provides empirical insights about how the emotional polarity of a mission statement influences money earned through fundraising. However, the positive and negative tone of a mission statement impacts organizations differently based on size. For nonprofits that report an annual revenue of less than $1 million, a positive tone in the mission statement results in higher revenue. Conversely, nonprofits that report over $1 million earn less revenue with a positive tone in their mission statement.

Owing to the specialized group sampled, the findings possibly only apply to the sampled group. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the relationships found in other areas of nonprofits. However, the implications of mission statement polarity influencing financial performance in any population should be of keen interest to practitioners when crafting mission statements.

The finding that mission statement emotional tone influences the financial performance of a nonprofit has direct implications for the effective delivery of services in the nonprofit realm. Leaders of nonprofits can use the study’s findings to position their organizations to capture potential needed revenue in the crafting of their mission statements.

This paper uniquely exposes the moderating impact of the emotional tone in mission statements in relationship with financial performance.

This chapter examines whether professional auditors’ affect toward client management influences fraud likelihood judgments and whether accountability and experience with fraud risk judgments moderate this effect. This research also explores the process by which affect influences fraud judgments by examining affect’s influence on the evaluation of fraud evidence cues. Results indicate that more positive affect toward the client results in lower fraud likelihood judgments. Accountability is found to moderate this effect, but only for experienced auditors. These findings have implications for fraud brainstorming sessions where all staff levels provide input into fraud risk assessments and because client characteristics are especially salient during these assessments. Importantly, results also support the proposition that affect impacts inexperienced auditors’ fraud assessments through errant attribution of client likability to evidence cues that refer to management, rather than biasing all client-related evaluations. Together, these findings suggest that education and training can be improved to better differentiate relevant and irrelevant cues in fraud judgment.

The need for a more structured methodology than currently exists for describing the impact of academic research is widely acknowledged. The most widely used research information standard, CERIF, does not currently allow the encoding of research impact in a structured way: this project devised and tested an extension to CERIF to address this omission. The paper seeks to discuss these points.

The core methodology of the project is a series of extensions to the CERIF model to encode “impact statements”, indicators of impact and measures as evidence for them. These can be linked to persons, organisational units or research outputs. This model is supported by a small semantic taxonomy of indicators and measures. The model was tested by evaluating it against current information environments, and by assessing its compatibility with CERIF and non‐CERIF compliant current research information systems.

Despite some concerns expressed about the validity of reducing qualitative evidence of impact to atomistic measures, and about a general paucity of such data in existing systems, the model tested well against working environments. It offers the potential for reducing workloads and more continuous assessment of research impact within its stakeholder communities.

No substantive methodology for encoding impact statements existed in CERIF prior to this project. In addition, the atomistic, quantifiable approach to describing impact is relatively unexplored in the higher education community, but offers substantial advantages. The work is of relevance to research managers, developers, system designers and metadata specialists.