The SEC's Proposed IFRS Roadmap: An analysis of comment letters using content analysis and textual software

Abstract

We examine comment letters written in response to the SEC's Proposed IFRS Roadmap using traditional content analysis and CLUTO, a unique text clustering software. We find that while there is strong support for the idea of one set of high quality global accounting standards, a majority of respondents are opposed to the proposed roadmap. Additionally, our results suggest that comments received systematically differ with respondent characteristics such as respondent type, firm characteristics, and industry affiliation. Finally, the complementary use of CLUTO with manual content analysis and the robust results obtained from CLUTO, provide support for the potential use of CLUTO to examine large textual databases in future accounting research.