| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 會計學研究所 === 88 === In recent years, financial reporting of infrastructure has generated a great deal of debate. However, no consensus has been reached. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the correlation between infrastructure reporting and government expenditure decision through laboratory experiments. The study wishes to provide empirical evidence on the debated issue, and to be used as a reference for future governmental accounting reforms.
The study has two parts. The first part is to investigate whether infrastructure recognition and measurement bases will make participators have different cognition about government’s financial position, and then influence their capital investment decision. In the second part, we apply Melioration theory to discuss whether infrastructure’s depreciation information or historical maintenance details is useful in reminding the needs of renewal infrastructure.
The main results of the study are as follows:
(1) The recognition of infrastructure will raise participators’ evaluation about government’s financial position because they do not take into consideration of infrastructure’s special characteristics (i.e., not to be sold). Moreover, when infrastructure’s recognition leads to tremendous net asset, it will affect government’s capital investment decision and induce higher liabilities and waste.
(2) Infrastructure’s depreciation information has no distinct capability in reminding renewal needs. The possible reason is that participators pay too much attention on the experiment, so they do not have melioration bias. Therefore, depreciation accounting has no clear effect in reminding infrastructure renewal needs. As for historical maintenance details, they may be regarded as the evidences of being renewal, therefore make participators reduce their infrastructure maintenance expenditure. In another word, providing historical maintenance details will have negative effect to government’s long-tern benefit. Hence, it should be more careful in providing such information.
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