Accounting and empire: Professionalization-as-resistance: The case of Philippines

This paper examines the emergence of the Philippine public accounting profession, which began with the Philippine accounting law in 1923 when the Philippines was a colony of the United States. Our study covers the period from 1898 (the American invasion of the Philippines) to 1929 (the immediate aftermath of the law). Extant research into the emergence of professionalization projects identifies as precursors: a competitive market for accounting services, self-organizing groups of accountants, and a ‘self-directed’ modernist state. These precursors did not apply to the Philippines. We propose that the Philippine project is best understood as a form of native resistance (Said, 1993, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus Ltd.). We argue that the law, promoted by a wholly-Filipino legislature, simultaneously both (a) addressed American concerns about financial probity and Filipino competence and (b) sought to (pre)capture the identity and work of the certified public accountant (CPA) from the Americans, who introduced the CPA into Philippine politics to expose Filipino mismanagement of government monies.     

Commentary: Financial Reporting and Financial Stability: Causes and Effects

Distinguished academics at a panel session of the American Accounting Association meeting in Denver in August 2011 discussed the relationship between financial reporting and financial stability. While accounting has been blamed for causing financial crises, the panellists noted that the evidence for this claim, particularly in relation to the recent financial crisis, seems to be missing. It is possible that accounting has an amplifying effect on crises, but even on this point the evidence is weak and complicated. However, financial reporting did not do a good job in reporting on risk ahead of the recent crisis; risks were hidden. Panellists also drew attention to the role of inadequate accounting in the financial problems of sovereign states.     

货币生态共识:理性与克制

历史是押韵的(Histiry Rhyme),这句话韵味无穷.钩沉货币发展史,我们发现以物易物结束之后,先后充当交换媒介的货物包括贝壳、黄金、白银等稀有实物金属.实际上,英国凭借其强大的经济军事实力在1816年最早推行了金本位制.     

花旗分拆的原因和启示

美国花旗集团近期宣布了把旗下业务一分为二的战略重组计划,及分步出售了旗下证券经纪业务的股权。这些举措标志着花旗过去10多年创立的"金融超市"模式宣告终结,开始艰难转型。花旗分拆的主要原因是,该行持续亏损需分拆自救、政府施压及其"金融超市"模式不太成功。花旗分拆的启示是,不可轻易断言全能银行模式终结;投资银行业务模式加速转型;金融危机虽仍持续,但出现大型金融机构倒闭的可能性较低;花旗分拆为有实力的银行提供了战略收购的机遇。     

人民币升值:压力及其缓解

2005年7月人民币汇率形成机制改革以来,人民币汇率振荡走高。进入2007年,人民币升值趋势不减,已先后20余次创出汇改以来新高。如何缓解人民币升值的压力,文章对此进行了精辟论述。     

Presidential Address: Debt and Money: Financial Constraints and Sovereign Finance

Economic analyses of corporate finance, money, and sovereign debt are largely considered separately. I introduce a novel corporate finance framing of sovereign finance based on the analogy between fiat liabilities for sovereigns and equity for corporations. The analysis focuses on financial constraints at the country level, making explicit the trade‐offs involved in relying on domestic versus foreign‐currency debt to finance investments or government expenditures. This framing provides new insights into issues ranging from the costs and benefits of inflation, optimal foreign exchange reserves, and sovereign debt restructuring.     

British Management Accounting Research: Whence and Whither: Opinions and Recollections

This paper is about the development of cost and/or management accounting research in Britain. The authors are three researchers active in this area from the 1970s until the present. The history has not been constructed from careful archival reconstruction of events, or publications, or surveys of colleagues. Rather, it is a personal joint recollection of how the area grew by three scholars involved in this process and perhaps having spent too long in bars discussing it. As history this paper must be carefully covered by caveats—it may be more revealing of the attitudes, perceptions and preoccupations of a set of scholars, than an exact chronology of events. Nevertheless, we hope that even this may be of curiosity. Having traced the chronology of British management accounting research, the paper concludes with the authors’ assessment of British research contributions up to the turn of the twentieth century. This includes a review of the current situation, insofar as it can be discerned and, even more tentatively and with trepidation, possible future prospects for British management accounting research.     

Editorial: Asking questions about risk and worry: dilemmas of the pollsters

The perceived risk of terrorism has been found to have properties similar to those of other risk perceptions. Risk perception research is therefore relevant to a discussion of methods used by polling firms to gauge public opinion with regard to terrorism. Questions used by one firm for this purpose are analyzed in relation to research findings. It is concluded that alternative formulations may be preferable and that more methodological research on risk perception and related attitudes should be conducted. Polling firms working on worry and concerns of the public would profit from taking risk perception research into account.     

Fear of Loss and Happiness of Win: Properties and Applications

This article proposes two coefficients, “fear of loss” ( FL ) and “happiness of win” ( HW ), to capture the variation of risk attitude with respect to wealth. Several properties of interpersonal comparisons of FL and HW are achieved. We present three applications in the default risk bargaining problem ( Tibiletti, 2006 ) to demonstrate that these properties can deliver more shortcut bargaining conditions and unambiguous comparative static results in situations involving interpersonal risk exchanges. We show that FL and HW coefficients are instrumental in explaining the comparative diffidence between an insurer and an insured.     

Discussion of: “Controlling Investment Decisions: Depreciation and Capital Charges”

Review of Accounting Studies -     

Investment and Monetary Policy: Learning and Determinacy of Equilibrium

We explore determinacy and expectational stability (learnability) of rational expectations equilibrium (REE) in New Keynesian (NK) models that include capital. Using a consistent calibration across three different models—labor‐only, firm‐specific capital, or an economy‐wide rental market for capital, we provide a clear picture of when REE is determinate and learnable and when it is not under a variety of monetary policy rules. Our findings make a case for greater optimism concerning the use of such rules in NK models with capital. While Bullard and Mitra’s (2002, 2007) findings for the labor‐only NK model do not always extend to models with capital, we show that determinate and learnable REE can be achieved in NK models with capital if there is (i) plausible capital adjustment costs, (ii) some weight given to output in the policy rule, and/or (iii) a policy of interest rate smoothing.     

Leadership and uncertainty: complexity and the lessons of history

Problems faced by military leaders will be used to evaluate techniques for dealing with the limits of knowledge. A survey of recent scientific developments will establish that knowledge is limited in principle, and historical examples for coping with limited knowledge in practice will then be analyzed. The convergence between the science of complexity and successful cases of social evolution indicates that the limits of knowledge extend the frontiers of understanding. Concluding sections will briefly explore some ethical implications potentially useful to political and social leaders.     

Interaction of credit and liquidity risks: Modelling and valuation

In this paper we discuss the interaction of default risk and liquidity risk on pricing financial contracts. We show that two risks are almost indistinguishable if the underlying contract has non-negative values; however, if it can take both positive and negative values then these two risks demand different risk premiums depending on their loss rates and distributions. We discuss a structural default model and a discrete time default model with exponentially distributed liquidity shocks. We show that short-term yield spreads are dominated by liquidity risk rather than credit risk. We suggest a two-stage procedure to calibrate the model with one scalar optimization problem and one linear programming problem.     

管理控制实践发展的透视与思考

事实上,管理控制的实践一直离不开会计信息的支持,但在19世纪40年代,作为传统生产企业的代表,亦为现代生产技术的先驱者——纺织业界的高层人士并不利用会计资料帮助人们管理企业。只是到了19世纪50年代,老板和经理们才开始利用会计资料来确定单位成本,但这不意味着利用会计数据去进一步管理控制经济活动。19世纪50年代,随着人类社会第一个工商企业——铁路公司的诞生,管理控制开始得到人们的普遍重视,实践中开始探索这方面的一些做法。回顾历史可以帮助我们正确地认识过去、现在和未来。内部控制的研究亦无例外。但是,目前理论界满足于审计…