How Foreign Firms Can Attract U.S. Investors: Overcoming 'Home Bias'

Wharton accounting professor Brian Bushee remembers talking to the CFO of a large Australian consumer products company that was having trouble attracting interest from U.S. analysts and institutional investors. Part of the problem, the CFO had decided, was that his company chose to comply with Australian accounting methods rather than with U.S. GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). His experience led Bushee and two colleagues to study whether foreign firms that use U.S. accounting methods attract more U.S. institutional investors. The results of their research are in a new paper entitled, “Accounting Choice, Home Bias, and U.S. Investment in Non-U.S. firms.”