Hospital Costing: Experience from the VHA

The government administered Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the largest integrated health care system in the USA. As health care dollars are becoming tighter nationwide, VHA faces the dual challenge of achieving cost reductions and improving quality, while operating in an increasingly competitive marketplace. This places new demands on cost accountability within the agency. This paper identifies the cost accounting procedures currently used by VHA as it responds to internal budgetary curtailment and to external competitive pressures. Understanding the different costing approaches taken by the organization along with their associated problems offers lessons of interest to financial managers within and outside VHA.     

A commentary on the applications of activity-based costing

Activity-based costing (ABC) has, within the last decade, generated a voluminous literature which has paralleled its increase in popularity with practitioners. This paper reviews ABC's potential by examining applications of it which extend throughout the core areas of management accounting. Consideration is given not only to how it has positively contributed to practice in these areas but also to its rationale and limitations to particular applications. Assessment is also made of how it interacts with longer established management accounting issues such as the variable versus fixed costing debate for income measurement and decision-making, the use of contribution margin analysis, organizational slack in the budgetary control process and conventional variance analysis. Some conclusions are drawn on its value to practitioners and researchers.     

Wealth effects and committed cost allocation: An agency theory perspective

In this article we examine the effects of committed costs (CC) on compensation and effort (production) decisions in a principal-agent (P-A) setting. In the case where moral hazard is present, the compensation and effort (production) decisions are independent of CC whenever P has constant absolute risk aversion. When P has decreasing absolute risk aversion, he demands as increased risk premium, therefore increases the spread of the compensation schedule, and induces A to increase effort (production) and vice versa. The optimal compensation scheme can be decomposed to conform to incentive schemes that are generally observed in practice. In particular, we decompose the optimal compensation scheme that depends on CC into two parts—a part that is based on cash flows and a part that is based on income (after allocating committed costs). In the case where effort is observable, CC does not effect the compensation scheme and effort decisions, when P has constant absolute risk aversion. In contrast to earlier studies that examine the owner-manager case, when P has decreasing absolute risk aversion, effort (production) could either increase or decrease. The presence of moral hazard affects the effort (production) decision differently than when risk-sharing considerations alone exist. The reduction in A's compensation induced by increased CC never exceeds the amount of CC.     

作业成本法在商业银行集中采购中的应用

本文在对现阶段商业银行集中采购的特点及存在的问题进行分析的基础上,就作业成本法在商业银行集中采购中应用的可行性和必要性、应用的程序及供应商选择评价模型等问题进行了探讨.本文还通过案例说明作业成本法在集中采购中的应用可以为商业银行在供应商的选择、评价及对供应商管理决策上提供相关可靠的信息.最后作者通过商业银行采购部门角色的转换、构建优秀的采购团队、供应商的入围选择、供应商的绩效评估及持续改进等方面对作业成本法在商业银行集中采购中的应用进行了总结,以期能对商业银行集中采购的成本管理控制提供有益的借鉴.     

Screening Talent for Task Assignment: Absolute or Percentile Thresholds?

Matching talents to tasks is an important part of job design. Organizations routinely use performance thresholds to group agents by talent. We see thresholds defined both in terms of an individual's own performance (absolute value) and in terms of peer performance (percentile). Intuition suggests a preference for percentile thresholds because the resulting rank-order statistic is sufficient to assess relative talent. Yet, in the context of a task assignment problem in which the objective is to match talent with task type (using two agents and two task types), we show that absolute thresholds can dominate percentile thresholds under either of two conditions. First, flexibility in task assignment tilts the balance toward absolute thresholds. Second, performance manipulation can adversely affect the inherent advantage of percentile thresholds because they motivate agents to invest relatively more in personally costly influence activities to cast their performance in a favorable light. We examine how these results hold up when there are countably large number of agents and discuss empirical implications.     

Sanac Inc.: From ABC to time-driven ABC (TDABC) – An instructional case

This case deals with the decision of Sanac Inc., a Belgian wholesale company, on whether to proceed with the implementation of an activity-based costing (ABC) system or switch to time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC). As a business consultant, you are hired to decide about the appropriate costing method. Your task is to decide which system the company should implement, given the desire of the president of the company to calculate profitability at the order and the customer level.     

有效银行成本制度的选择

本文分析了银行产出形态的的特殊性,指出造成传统成本制度、成本分析难以应用于银行产品成本分析。通过对银行产品的成本构成路径分析,指出作业成本制度符合银行服务的有效成本方法,对银行成本管理、经营管理具有重大意义,并对商业银行如何推进作业成本提出了设想。     

Towards explaining activity-based costing failure: accounting and control in a decentralized organization

Many of the activity-based costing (ABC) systems introduced in recent years are said to fail (e.g. Cooperet al., 1992; Argyris and Kaplan, 1994; Shields, 1995; Roberts and Silvester, 1996). The use of ABC for surveillance by the group management, with no consequent actions, leads us to propose that claims on ABC failure result, in part, from assessing the use and value of ABCs from the decision-making perspective. The decision-making perspective may be insufficient for capturing the multitude of uses to which ABCs are put in practise. As this study shows, in the context of strategic decision-making the success of ABC cannot depend on whether its results require any actions or decisions to be taken, but on its ability to make a correct diagnosis of the situation. Consequently, some of the so-called ABC failures may not be failures. They may merely reflect a limited appreciation of the uses of accounting and control systems in practise. Nevertheless, failures and resistance are real in a number of organizations. This study explored the origins of resistance to ABC in a case setting, looking at diverse interests of organizational stakeholders, and the role of existing control and information systems in ABC implementation. We show that the resistance may have several sources; some related to the cost and benefits of ABC, some associated with organizational power and politics, and some pertinent to organization culture. The practical implication of this study hinged on the notion that although the resistance to ABC may come from various sources, these sources appear fundamentally structural and are unlikely to be dealt with by employing implementation-based strategies.     

税收优惠政策微观分析指标体系及方法研究——以高新技术企业为例

近几年,政府重视扶持高新技术企业的发展,给予了许多税收优惠,但税收优惠政策对高新技术企业的帮助有多大,哪项政策更有助于企业的发展,并没有一个客观的评价方法,由此导致了优惠政策重叠、脱节等问题的出现。为此,需要通过建立科学的税收优惠政策绩效评价指标体系,对高新技术企业税收优惠政策绩效进行考核。从简易科学、可操作性强的角度,探索建立以可持续增长率指标为主要依据的绩效评价方法,有利于客观有效地评价税收优惠政策的实际运用效果。     

The Performance,Asset Allocation,and Investment Style of International Equity Managers

This paper evaluates the performance of 114 international equity managers over the January 1988–December 1997 period. Performance tests are conducted using Sharpe (1966) and Jensen (1968) performance methodologies. The managers are divided into mutual fund (n=54) and separately managed fund (n=60) investment management categories. Each management category is further divided by foreign and world (global) investment objectives. Three major findings are reported. First, international equity managers, on average, were unable to outperform the MSCI World market proxy during the sample period. However, world managers did perform better than their foreign counterparts. Second, geographic asset allocation and equity style allocation decisions enhanced the performance of international managers during the sample period. Third, separately managed funds outperformed mutual funds during the period studied when mutual fund returns are measured net of management fees. The apparent managed performance advantage abates, however, when mutual fund returns are adjusted to include management fees. Thus, we find no significant difference in the performance of the management categories when returns are measured gross of fees.     

Accrual Accounting for Performance Evaluation

This paper examines alternative accrual accounting rules from an incentive and control perspective. For a range of common production, financing and investment decisions we consider alternative asset valuation rules. The criterion for distinguishing among these rules is that the corresponding performance measure should provide managers with robust incentives to make present value maximizing decisions. Such goal congruence is shown to require intertemporal matching of revenues and expenses, though the specific form of matching needed for control purposes generally differs from GAAP. The practitioner oriented literature on economic profit plans (EPP) has made various, and at times conflicting, recommendations regarding adjustments to the accounting rules used for external financial reporting. Our goal congruence approach provides a framework for comparing and evaluating these recommendations.     

我国绿色债券规则完善与制度优化研究

绿色债券是实现“双碳”目标不可或缺的力量。近年来,我国绿色债券市场快速发展,发行规模持续增长,呈现出创新品种不断出现、债券期限短期化、向高评级主体集中等特点;同时,也存在市场基础设施不完善、发行端审批程序优势不明显以及投资端绿色激励不足等问题。未来,要从市场基础设施、发行端和投资端三个方面完善相关规则与制度,推动我国绿色债券市场持续健康发展。     

高管团队激励分散度、企业风险承担与战略绩效研究

代理问题的存在会导致管理者“短视”,出于私利,管理者往往不愿意承担风险,这虽然会给企业带来短期经济利益,但也会给未来发展埋下隐患。为解决此类代理问题,高管团队成员激励将发挥关键作用。因此,研究高管团队激励对企业绩效影响,高管薪酬激励对企业风险承担影响以及企业风险承担对企业绩效影响,对于中国企业的激励契约设计、经济增长和潜在风险认识均具有重要实践意义。     

Relative Target Setting and Cooperation

A large stream of work on relative performance evaluation highlights the benefits of using information about peer performance in contracting. In contrast, the potential costs of discouraging cooperation among peers have received much less attention. The purpose of our study is to examine how the importance of cooperation affects the use of information about peer performance in target setting, also known as relative target setting. Specifically, we use data from an industrial services company where business unit managers need to share specialized equipment and staff with their peers to manage bottlenecks in their capacity. We construct several empirical proxies for the costs and benefits of information about peer performance and examine their effects on target setting. We find robust evidence that the sensitivity of target revisions to past peer performance is higher when peer group performance has greater capacity to filter out noise but lower when the importance of cooperation among peers is greater.     

Accounting for Shrinkage in Continuous Flow Industries: An Expository Note

This study explores accounting for shrinkage in continuous flow industries, an area which has received no attention in the literature, but which appears to present some difficulty to cost accountants in some companies studied. The study presents an appropriate approach for process cost accounting where the materials in process undergo some dimensional transformation but remain measurable in the same physical units as the raw materials. Appropriate formulae are presented to help calculate the equivalent units of finished output that the semi-processed materials in inventory represent. The initial development assumes a uniform loss rate, an assumption later relaxed to illustrate the solution procedure for non-uniform loss rates.