Is it enough to know excel? Do you share the author’s assessment that excel is not effective to handle the tasks mentioned? What database software do you know?
Apple, Microsoft, Google, et al. have cumulatively billions of unrepatriated foreign earnings/cash. If you were a policy maker, what would be the optimal rate of tax on those earnings to encourage repatriation? How would you decide on that rate?
So, the oil firms have fewer goodwill impairments due to rebounding oil prices. Are they allowed to reverse any of these impairments? Should they be allowed to do so? Why or why not?
Do you believe the new revenue recognition standard will meet Mr. Golden’s objective of giving investors “better information”? Why or why not?
If tax laws affect executive compensation in unexpected (and adverse) ways, why do you think special tax rules are imposed? If tax laws are changed again, can you make any predictions about how firms will react and change the way their execs are compensated?
For revenue recognized over time on long term construction contracts, what are the estimates that firms make? How do these estimates affect when and how much revenue and profit are recognized? Is there any reason why a firm would not want to divulge these estimates, or changes in these estimates?
Do you believe that GE’s stock price is affected by the fact that it uses multiple “pro forma” or non-GAAP earnings measures? Why or why not?
If you were an equity research analyst, how would disaggregating pension cost (expense) benefit your analysis? Specifically, how does isolating service cost in operating income and disaggregating the other components (interest, expected return, amortizations) make your analysis better/easier?
What do you expect to be the measurable financial benefits of changing the name of a company, such as Coach has done?
If you were CFO of Intel, what would you do? What are all your options and how would you try to make a decision about your $10 billion in overseas cash?
If the switch to a territorial tax system from the current worldwide system goes through, would firms that have deemed foreign earnings as indefinitely reinvested need to accrue a tax liability on those nonrepatriated earnings? If so, what would be the effect on the financials and the effective tax rate (ETR)?
Toys R US filed for Chapter 11. Could you have predicted this? What inputs to your predictive model would you have included?
If you were a policy maker, would you consider lowering corporate income tax rates in the U.S.? If so, by how much? Would you consider eliminating the corporate tax altogether and just tax individuals? Why or why not?
What are solutions to the perceived problems of executive compensation being based on faulty performance measures and inappropriate peer firms? If you were CEO, would you agree to the changes in how your compensation would be calculated? Why or why not?
Nokia has its plate full on many fronts. The CFO now must also contend with potentially negative interest rates for its $4 billion in cash, making it an even worse non-performing asset. What would you advise?
So, the writer suggests that companies with long-tenured CFOs do better, suggesting that keeping a CFO for a long period is “good” for the firm. Or, could be the other way around? Well performing firms keep their CFOs longer. Which is the dependent variable, the explanatory variable?
So Merck is offshoring accounting functions to other lower-cost countries. Who wins? Who loses? What are some potential externalities?
If you were chair of the SEC, how would you measure the costs and benefits of financial disclosures to try to determine the optimal amount and type of disclosure?
