Co-operatives and the Equity-Liabilities Puzzle: Concerns for Accounting Standard-Setters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SYNOPSIS: The IASB/FASB joint project on Financial Instruments with Characteristics of Equity (formerly Liabilities and Equity) has highlighted the complexity and the associated difficulty of drawing the line between liabilities and equity. While classification difficulties have been identified for investor-owned businesses (IOB), the inconsistency of the different approaches being considered is clearer when applied to classification of the financial instruments of co-operatives whose ownership characteristics differ from the IOB model. In co-operatives the existence of an upper limit on members' claims on the net assets while the co-operative is a going concern is a key ownership characteristic. We have examined the characteristics of co-operative member shares in six European countries as well as in the U.S. and in Canada, in order to analyze the application of the various classification approaches under discussion by the IASB and FASB. The results of this analysis indicate that classification criteria based on ownership must take account of the fact that ownership is multidimensional and contingent on the type of firm. JEL Classifications: M41, P13.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".