Discussion of: Market reactions to mandated interest capitalization.

The author comments on the article "Market Reactions to Mandated Interest Capitalization," by J. S. Hughes and W. E. Ricks (HR), concerning the security market reaction to SFAS No. 34. He states that HR's paper was a descriptive analysis of the reaction the capital market had to mandate on accounting changes. He suggests that when HR confined their sample to calendar-year businesses, their sample was considerably reduced and introduced problems with event date clustering. He states that in HR's estimating the net income of over half of the companies, a measurement error was introduced into HR's primary independent variable.