The Information Content of Goodwill Impairments and the Adoption of SFAS 142

Abstract

As U.S. accounting standard setters increasingly favor a fair value based regime, critics claim that the abandonment of a historical cost based system may produce unintended consequences, such as increased bias and manipulation in financial reports. In this paper, we present exploratory evidence to this debate by examining whether changing the intangible asset impairment trigger to a fair value test, as codified in Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 142: Goodwill and Other Intangibles Assets (SFAS 142), altered the information content of goodwill write-offs. We document a negative and significant stock market reaction to unexpected goodwill write-offs. On a cross-sectional basis, we find that the market reaction is attenuated for firms with low information asymmetry (our proxy is a high analyst following) and for firms who find it relatively costly to implement impairment tests (our proxy is the inverse of firm size). We find no variation in market reaction based on firm complexity (our proxy is the number of firm segments). The negative reaction for the high information asymmetry firms does not persist following the adoption of SFAS 142. The latter result is consistent with SFAS 142 critics' claims that fair value methods are difficult to implement reliably, and thus can reduce the information content of accounting reports.