Rise and Fall of the Golden-Age Nation State Model

Abstract

While Chapter 2 provided a brief overview of accounting regulation in the UK, Germany and the US, this chapter considers the organization of disclosure regulation, and in particular the field of standard-setting in greater detail. Even though accounting rules (standards, broadly defined) can be understood as all kinds of regulation that companies have to consider in their financial reporting, we deal only with a subset of this regulation here. This is due to the fact that we distinguish between disclosure rules of stock exchanges (Chapter 5) and general rules, which have to be applied independently from the listing at a certain stock exchange. The present chapter covers how the latter are determined by the major actors in the three economies Germany, the UK and the US.