This book, first published in 1988, brings together for the first time a comprehensive, analytical and annotated bibliography of all American Accounting Works up to 1820. The discussion extends, clarifies and corrects our knowledge of early American publications on accounting. All known printings are listed including many heretofore overlooked and hard-to-find accounting treatments. Each work is reviewed and many illustrations are provided including the title pages of the first printing of every item. The reviews represent the first modern analyses of these early accounting writings and the illustrations are often the first ever published.

Historians have not convincingly explained modern capitalism's two major economic crises, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009. Accounting for Crises offers a new explanation, why both began and were more severe in the USA ('America'), based on an accounting interpretation of Marx's theory of crises. It explains their origins in capitalists' control of accumulation, which reveals important overlooked roles for Irving Fisher's accounting theory. This theory, by allowing discretion in accounts, in the context of falling rates of profit, encouraged 'swindling', overstating reported profits, and understating their risk, which facilitated and aggravated both crises. Framed by Fisher's theory, during the 1920s American accounting theorists justified discretion, which Creating the 'Big Mess' (the companion volume) concluded it management used to conservatively smooth earnings. Accounting for Crises shows that Fisher's theory , also underlays the popular new theory of investment that justified valuing shares using reported earnings, which encouraged their manipulation and legitimized 'speculation'. This, it argues, underlays America's exceptional late-1920s stock market boom, the 1929 Great Crash, and the depth and length of its Great Depression. Prominently associated with the boom, Fisher became unpopular after the crash, his name disappearing from public debate. Nevertheless, the book concludes, his theory hindered economic recovery, weakened 1930s reforms, undermined accounting regulation from the late-1930s, and following his rehabilitation from the late-1950s, underlies the Financial Accounting Standards Board's conceptual framework, which by allowing off-balance-sheet accounting for securitization-SPEs, fostered the 2007 'credit crunch' that triggered the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

Creating the 'Big Mess' and its sequel Accounting for Crises use Marx's theory of capitalism to explain why there is no generally accepted theory of financial accounting, and explore the consequences, by studying the history of American accounting theory from c.1900 to 2007. The answer, Creating the 'Big Mess', is first that while late-19th century British accounting principles, founded on the going-concern concept, provided an objective basis for holding management accountable to shareholders for its stewardship of capital, and were accepted by the nascent American profession, they are inchoate. Second, Irving Fisher's economic theory of accounting, based on the assertion that present value is the accountants' measurement ideal, which is subjective, framed early-20th century American accounting theory, which undermined British principles, making them incoherent. In an unregulated, pro-business environment, leading theorists, particularly Henry Rand Hatfield and William A. Paton, Jr., became authorities for management discretion, creating the 'big mess' Hatfield saw in late-1920s American accounting. Accounting for Crises examines the roles of Fisher's theory in promoting the speculation leading to the 1929 Great Crash, aggravating the Great Depression, hindering accounting regulation from the 1930s, producing the Financial Accounting Standard Board's conceptual framework, and facilitating the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis.

The book presents a series of researched biographies of professional accountants who immigrated to the United States and developed their careers there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This volume is a tribute to the efforts of a relatively small group of Scots who helped to establish and nurture American public accountancy at a time when demand for its services greatly exceeded the ability of native-born accountants to provide them.

Accounting carries with its history a vast number of ideas which have slowly developed along with it. This volume relates this history as it took place during the first three decades of the twentieth century in the United States. In particular it deals with those individuals who were for the most part responsible for it. It was these pioneers who recorded their observations of the actual workings of the myriad adaptations and new devices which had slowly eased their way into accounting theory and practice in the USA in the early twentieth century.

This collection of memorial articles and selected obituaries highlights the careers and contributions to accounting practice, the accounting profession, and the accounting literature of leading American figures in the 20th century. The memorial articles do much more than recite their subject’s career. More importantly, they discuss and assess their subject’s role in influencing the course of accounting practice and the profession as well as the evolution of their influential writings, revealing the names of the accounting leaders and leading thinkers of the past century. Memorial Articles for 20th Century American Accounting Leaders is useful in providing students and young researchers with a rich source of intelligence on the leaders who have established norms of practice, advanced the profession, and set the terms of debate in the literature – leaders who are cited and even quoted but who are known mostly as names without a full-bodied treatment of their backgrounds and broader roles in shaping the accounting literature.

This book, first published in 1993, focuses on the evolution of accounting institutions, practices and standard-setting in Canada. Canada’s federal system complicates the jurisdictional authority for accounting matters. The Canadian constitution empowers the ten provinces to regulate the training and certification of accountants, and each can incorporate organizations. A great deal of effort has been made by accounting bodies on jurisdictional coordination and disputes, and this book analyses how these systems have come to function in their present form.