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The Impact of New Pension Disclosure Rules on Perceptions of Debt

1987; Wiley; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2491022

1475-679X

Robert M. Harper, William G. Mister, Jerry R. Strawser,

Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis

Statement No. 87 (SFAS 87) requires companies to report a pension liability when the accumulated benefit obligations exceed the fair value of the pension plan assets. A concern that led the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to issue SFAS 87 was that [f]ootnote disclosure is not an adequate substitution for [balance sheet] recognition [1985, para. 116]. In addition, the FASB concluded that while footnote disclosure may be adequate for some sophisticated users, it is not for most users. Opponents of SFAS 87 were concerned that balance sheet disclosure of a pension liability might negatively affect a user's perception of the financial condition of a particular company.1 This paper examines two views: (1) users do not treat pension information included in a footnote as they would a balance sheet liability; and (2) the difference in treatment will be more pronounced for less sophisticated users. Experimental results are consistent with the former view only. The remainder of this paper describes the research design and discusses the results of the experiment.