Sometimes companies purchase businesses for more than what they are actually worth. The difference between a business' actual worth and what someone pays for that business is referred to as goodwill.

Though it sounds bad, "negative goodwill" is actually a good thing for a business owner, because it means your company has bought another business for less than that company's fair market value. In ...

When a company purchases another, it often pays more than the net fair value of the target's assets and liabilities. This excess is recorded as goodwill, an intangible asset reflecting brand strength, ...

This book traces the history of the goodwill accounting controversy in detail. The book explores the problem of recognizing the importance of goodwill as a whole and finding a way of presenting ...

There is a lot of discussion these days about accounting for goodwill, especially with respect to accounting issues subsequent to its acquisition. This debate is driven by managerial criticisms of ...

It wasn't supposed to happen, but gains from new accounting rules seem to have helped some companies, at least temporarily, on the stock market. Analysts and others in the industry expected the rules, ...

Ramanna, Karthik. "The Implications of Unverifiable Fair-Value Accounting: Evidence from the Political Economy of Goodwill Accounting." Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2007. ...

As the Financial Accounting Standards Board considers additional interventions in the way public companies account for goodwill, they would do well to remember one of Hippocrates’ maxims for ...

It wasn't supposed to happen, but gains from new accounting rules seem to have helped some companies, at least temporarily, on the stock market. Analysts and others in the industry expected the rules, ...

Ramanna, Karthik. "The Implications of Unverifiable Fair-value Accounting: Evidence from the Political Economy of Goodwill Accounting." Journal of Accounting & Economics 45, nos. 2-3 (August 2008): ...