A review of the financial literature of the last few years indicates a concern within the financial community about the loss of interperiod comparability in the financial statements of firms which implement changes in their accounting policies.' Accountants have responded to this problem by debating such issues as flexibility, uniformity, and comparability,2 and by engaging in empirical studies of the effects of accounting policy decisions on financial reports. Gordon, Horwitz, and Meyers3 first used a smoothing criterion for assessing these effects. Other more recent empirical studies in which this criterion was adopted have