Do you believe that GE’s stock price is affected by the fact that it uses multiple “pro forma” or non-GAAP earnings measures? Why or why not?
If you were an equity research analyst, how would disaggregating pension cost (expense) benefit your analysis? Specifically, how does isolating service cost in operating income and disaggregating the other components (interest, expected return, amortizations) make your analysis better/easier?
What do you expect to be the measurable financial benefits of changing the name of a company, such as Coach has done?
If you were CFO of Intel, what would you do? What are all your options and how would you try to make a decision about your $10 billion in overseas cash?
If the switch to a territorial tax system from the current worldwide system goes through, would firms that have deemed foreign earnings as indefinitely reinvested need to accrue a tax liability on those nonrepatriated earnings? If so, what would be the effect on the financials and the effective tax rate (ETR)?
Toys R US filed for Chapter 11. Could you have predicted this? What inputs to your predictive model would you have included?
If you were a policy maker, would you consider lowering corporate income tax rates in the U.S.? If so, by how much? Would you consider eliminating the corporate tax altogether and just tax individuals? Why or why not?
What are solutions to the perceived problems of executive compensation being based on faulty performance measures and inappropriate peer firms? If you were CEO, would you agree to the changes in how your compensation would be calculated? Why or why not?
Nokia has its plate full on many fronts. The CFO now must also contend with potentially negative interest rates for its $4 billion in cash, making it an even worse non-performing asset. What would you advise?
So, the writer suggests that companies with long-tenured CFOs do better, suggesting that keeping a CFO for a long period is “good” for the firm. Or, could be the other way around? Well performing firms keep their CFOs longer. Which is the dependent variable, the explanatory variable?
So Merck is offshoring accounting functions to other lower-cost countries. Who wins? Who loses? What are some potential externalities?
If you were chair of the SEC, how would you measure the costs and benefits of financial disclosures to try to determine the optimal amount and type of disclosure?
If you were tasked with writing an accounting standard to answer the questions about digital currency, what would you do? How would you begin? What do you think your conclusion would be? Is it cash? Investment? Inventory? Intangible? Would you use fair value accounting?
If you were to start from scratch, how would you define and design an optimal executive (CEO) pay package?
How does the SEC decide which disclosures are problematic, such as those pertaining to free cash flow?
What is your opinion with respect to whether interest on debt should be deductible? Whom would eliminating the deductibility of interest hurt? Whom would it help?
J. Crew needs to modify its debt agreements. What are the two types of modifications, from an accounting perspective? Given the retail sector’s condition in general, do you think they will be successful in achieving a modification? What are the alternatives?
Why do you suppose larger firms, which presumably are more complex, have fewer accounting restatements than smaller firm?
