SFAS No. 52, Foreign Currency Translation, was issued in December, 1981, replacing SFAS No. 8, Accounting For the Translation of Foreign Currency Transactions and Foreign Currency Financial Statements. SFAS No. 52 has shifted the impact of translation gains and losses from the income statement to the balance sheet. It was expected that SFAS No. 52 would eliminate the incentive for multinationals to engage in various hedging activities to reduce the effect of the translation process in reported earnings. It was also expected that multinationals would change their foreign exchange risk management practices. The major purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of SFAS No. 52 on foreign exchange risk management practices of U.S. based multinationals.

The problem with which this research is dealing is the lack of any explanatory model which explains both the perception and the adoption of new products. One objective of this study is to advance a new conceptual framework concerning both the perception and the adoption of new products. The second objective of this study is to evaluate this new framework theoretically and empirically. Bunge's evaluative criteria are used to evaluate the new model theoretically while Hunter, Schmidt, and Jackson's meta-analysis technique is used to evaluate the model empirically. An extensive review of literature pertaining to the definition of innovation, the adoption process, and innovativeness is included in the second chapter. Chapter three covers research plan and methods. The new model and its assumptions are presented in chapter four. The results of both theoretical and empirical investigations of the new model are reported in chapter five. Finally, chapter six includes a discussion of the main findings and provides some suggestions for future research. An interpretive and postulational model is introduced in this study. The model is built on three main assumptions and contains thirty-one different theoretical constructs. Those constructs are bounded together by forty-six theoretical propositions. Those propositions are the postulates …