The information content of oil reserves: relevance of specific assets measured by the Ohlson model.

Summary Despite 15 years of work, the international accounting standard setter, the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB), has not succeeded in its attempt to define a specific standard for extractive activities. This partial failure raises the question of whether there is any asset-specific disclosure content, and if so, what form of disclosure it should take. Since the IASB is addressing the shareholder as a priority, our work should naturally begin with an assessment of his perceptions, while recognizing the restrictive nature of such a focus. Using positive theory, consistent with the market orientation of the IASB, our longitudinal study is conducted over eleven years, including the low oil price in 1996/1997 and its sudden rise in 2004, in order to measure the way in which the market(s) perceive(s) the accounting elements relating to the oil and gas extraction activity, characterized by the presence of specific assets with a high strategic content and a reputation for being very uncertain. A review of the literature offers a double retrospective, on the one hand, of works questioning the relevance of value or volume disclosures, and on the other hand, of reasoning by real options, tested in our last empirical work. Carried out on an international population, and measuring the link between accounting disclosures specific to the oil and gas business and market value, our work examines the relevance of these disclosures through the prism of the Ohlson model while proposing a solution to the collinearity problems generated by specific variables.