Financial Accounting and Corporate Reporting [antikvár]

PREFACE. Tell me, I'll forget; Show me, I may remember; Involve me, I'll understand. An old proverb (source unknown) Most accounting academicians, including myself, were educated in the classic classroom style of lecture and problem review. This approach was, and still is, extremely effective given a specific set of academic objectives. Those objectives—the understanding of a preferred or generally accepted set of accounting principles and an understanding of how to apply those principles—seem to be most clearly associated with undergraduate accounting education. It is only at the advanced undergraduate level, and most obviously at the graduate level, that the focus of the educational process in accounting moves from one of conceptualization and preparation to one of analysis and utilization. When the focus of learning shifts in this way, it is no longer clear that the classic lecture/problem-solving approach is pedagogically superior. Having taught accounting to both graduate and undergraduate students, using both the traditional and the case method, it has been my experience that the effectiveness of the pedagogical style is indeed a function of the educational objectives. I have found the lecture approach to be extremely successful with undergraduate students, particularly because of their need to avoid as much uncertainty as possible. At the advanced undergraduate level, for selected courses, and at the graduate level, in general, I have found the case method to be a superior approach. Thus, this book of cases was prepared with that particular set of students in mind. The book contains over 50 cases written by instructors who teach, or who have taught, predominantly at the graduate level. The content covers a full array of financial accounting and corporate reporting topics, and hence, given the large number of cases and the wide topical coverage, the book may be effectively used either in a one- or two-semester (or quarter) course sequence. The case materials have been organized in a structure that parallels that of most accounting textbooks; thus, the casebook may be conveniently used in conjunction with one or more conventional financial accounting textbooks as the primary text, or together with selected readings in a contemporary topics course. The cases included in this book have been used in classrooms at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Lehigh University, The University of Miami, The Naval Postgraduate School, The Ohio State University, Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, and The University of South Carolina. The cases include current case settings, such as the 1982 bankruptcy of Penn Square Bank or the 1984 near-