Abstract The article presents the American Accounting Association's Financial Accounting Standards Committee's response to the Financial Accounting Standards Board's exposure draft (ED) on consolidated financial statement. The committee concurs with the economic unit concept of consolidated financial statements and the broader definition of effective control as the basic for consolidation. An advantage of the effective control notion is that it is more flexible and is not primarily governed by an arbitrary criterion such as ownership percentage. However, the fact that the definition of effective control is ambiguous and that firms may have incentives to behave opportunistically suggests the importance of implementation guidelines. The Committee specifically discussed the interplay and consistency between this ED and other proposed standards. In particular, the committee is concerned about the relation between the effective control notion in the consolidation ED and the financial-components approach in the ED.
Warfield et al. (Sun,) studied this question.