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In this article, we revisit the history of accounting for goodwill in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Japan following the conclusions and predictions of Ding, Richard and Stolowy (2008). We aim at verifying whether the four phases of development of the accounting for goodwill between 1880 and 2005 are actually determined by the global change from a stakeholder model of corporate governance to a shareholder model. An extended time frame of analysis (until 2016) is considered in this study, which includes Japan among the country-specific accounting systems investigated. Our findings do not support Ding et al.'s predictions for Japan and demonstrate a disagreement between those countries which consider goodwill as a depleting asset and those which consider goodwill as a permanent asset. This observation might explain better the current debate concerning international harmonization on goodwill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the leading countries in the environmental conservation efforts, Japan has made much progress in recent decades. The role of environmental accounting (EA) within Japan is divided into internal and external functions. Internal functions deals with the management of environmental conservation costs and activities. It promotes effective environmental conservation activities through an adequate decision making process. External functions of the EA include public reporting of environmental costs and effects of a company. By disclosing a quantitative measurement of such activities, it opens up the company to further progress. These quantitative measures are environmental conservation costs referring to investment and expenses which help companies keep track the progress in the processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a closer examination of the relationship between the companies reported environmental costs, corporate responsibility rating and their financial performance. To address the research questions in this study, environmental costs were collected from the Japanese company's Corporate Social Responsibility Report (CSR). From the analysis, we found empirical support for the view that companies' financial performance is positively related to average CSR rating and environmental conservation costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]