Household financial planning and savings behavior

Greater personal responsibility toward financial decision-making is being advocated on a global basis. Individuals and households are encouraged to take a more active approach to personal finance. In this paper, we examine behavioral factors, which lead households toward savings and financial planning across a panel of 1253 Dutch households. In line with the available literature, we find that an individual's propensity to save decreases with age and is higher among the financial literate. Moreover, we find that saving behavior varies across generations, and is significantly dominant among baby boomers. This generation effect, however, weakens once we account for more individual specifics. Our results offer evidence for parental influence, and for the effects of the psychological and behavioral metrics of numeracy, self-efficacy, locus of control and future orientation. A good understanding of these personality variables helps to explain why some take financial responsibility while others do not.     

Governmental budgeting as ex ante financial accounting: The United Kingdom case

For many years now the academic governmental-budgeting literature has concentrated almost exclusively on the politics and economics of the budgetary process at the expense of the mechanical foundations. Consequently, we see an interesting but insulated discussion about political involvement and about the strengths and weaknesses of planning models. What we do not see is a discussion of the accounting perspective. This paper offers such a discussion. It explains local government budgeting as “ex ante financial accounting” and offers some important implications of this re-interpretation.     

银行理财与资本市场

银行理财是现代银行一项十分重要的中间业务。银行理财业务的发展,不仅大大拓宽了银行的经营范围,增加了银行取得收益的途径,也为资本市场的发展增添了新的活力。该文介绍了银行理财的主要种类及其存在背景,分析了银行理财资金进入资本市场的联结渠道及其制约因素,指出更多的理财资金应进入资本市场,以更好地满足社会投资需求,有关政策应当对理财资金进入资本市场进行鼓励。     

Taming the untamable: planning,programming and budgeting and the normalization of war

This paper demonstrates the profound political consequences accounting can have by examining the emergence of Planning, Programming and Budgeting (PPB) in the United States as an ostensibly value-free tool for allocating defense resources during the 1960s. The research shows how PPB assisted with normalizing the preparation for nuclear war by converting the “unthinkable” into a technical and mundane resource allocation problem, as well as the internal inconsistencies generated by placing an economically rational frame of representation on a dialectical and political process. In addition, the paper demonstrates how this accounting technique was strategically deployed by the Secretary of Defense to centralized decisions over resource allocations within his office.     

Traditional and emergent theories of budgeting: An empirical analysis

This paper examines the usefulness of both traditional and emergent budgeting theories to understanding budget-related behavior in a state geriatic system. The authors used an action-research methodology to acquire evidence. They conclude that the traditional and emergent theories offer differing insights into budgetary behavior and suffer from different shortcomings. Implications for researchers and practitioners are explored.     

Effects of risk tolerance,financial literacy,and financial status on retirement planning

In this study, we investigate the effects of retirement planning on the economic and psychological factors of consumers using a large sample drawn from the 2012 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Specifically, we examine the combined impact of risk tolerance, financial literacy, savings, income, and debt on consumers’ retirement planning behavior. Risk tolerance, financial literacy, income, and savings are all found to have positive relationships with retirement planning, though debt has no significant relationship with retirement planning. Also, higher levels of risk tolerance weaken the relationship between savings and retirement planning. Implications of these findings for the literature and the financial planning industry are provided as well as directions for future research.

     

Seven myths of financial planning and baby boomer retirement

Myths are tales that combine fact and fiction. Commonly shared business myths help provide the foundation for underlying beliefs about what is important, what matters to the customer, and explain or justify business practices. While myths can be a means to structure information and knowledge, they can also be barrier to innovation in a changing market. The changing demographics in all industrialised markets and the coming retirement of the baby boom generation pose challenges to seven commonly accepted myths among financial planners about who customers are, what they want and the most effective ways to deliver service value. This paper examines these widely held ‘industry beliefs’ and suggests strategies that product developers and planners might consider to improve practice management and to grow new business in an ageing marketplace.     

Tax planning, regulatory capital planning, and financial reporting strategy for commercial banks

We test whether banks' investment and financing policies canbe explained by tax status. We document changes in bank holdingsof municipal bonds in response to changes in tax rules relatingto deductibility of interest expense. We also document an associationbetween banks' marginal tax rates and their investment and financingdecisions, which is consistent with the existence of tax clienteles.However, banks do not sort themselves perfectly into investmentand financing clienteles because of adjustment costs. We positspecific types of transaction-cost impediments to tax planning,and document that banks apparently trade off these costs againsttax-planning benefits.     

Budgeting and profit variance analysis using a financial planning language

This note describes an alternative to typical budgeting and variance analysis exercises. As a term project, students use financial planning software to prepare budgets and then use “what-if” techniques to facilitate profit variance analysis. The method enhances understanding of the relationships among budgets, eliminates formula-driven variance analysis, and elucidates the relationship between budgeting and variance analysis.     

Capital budgeting and delegation

As part of our ongoing research into capital budgeting processes as responses to decentralized information and incentive problems, we focus in this paper on when a level of a managerial hierarchy will delegate the allocation of capital across projects and time to the level below it. In our model, delegation is a way to save on costly investigation of proposed projects. Therefore, it is more extensive the larger are the costs of such investigations. This delegation takes advantage of the fact that the lower-level manager's preferences are assumed to be similar (though not identical) to those of the higher level.     

The integration of zero-base budgeting with management-by-objectives: An empirical inquiry

Popular arguments in the management literature advocate the implementation congruity and complementarity of zero-base budgeting (ZBB) with an established management-by-objectives (MBO) system. The present study examined management perceptions on 28 ZBB implementation variables for MBO users and non-MBO users which were gathered from 153 managers at two hierarchical levels within a single private sector organization. Results from both univariate and multivariate tests indicate that ZBB implementation was not facilitated by the existence of an MBO system for either lower level management or for upper level management. The evidence obtained here strongly suggests that the purported conventional rationale underlying ZBB coupling with an extant MBO system is seriously defective; ZBB design implementation issues need to be thoroughly re-assessed, with the emphasis on matching compatible systemic properties between information sub-systems.     

Some behavioral aspects of budgeting for control: An empirical study

The research reported in this article empirically evaluated the relationships between perceived participation in the budget process, perceived reward dependency of budget performance, and perceived attainability of the budgeted goals, and the dependent variable of motivation to achieve the budget. The results indicated that there were two dimensions to a manager's effort expended (motivation) to achieve the budgeted goals for which he is responsible; they are a goal-directing effort and an evaluative effort. It was found that perceived participation had the most significant relationship with the goal-directing effort, whereas perceived reward dependency had the most significant relationship with the evaluative effort. The relationships between perceived attainability and both dimensions of effort expended (motivation) were either not significant or only moderately significant.     

Intertemporal capital budgeting

This paper analyzes the optimal capital budgeting mechanism when divisional managers are privately informed about the arrival of future investment projects. Consistent with field study evidence, an optimal allocation mechanism can include a stipulation that a capital request for discretionary investment will be declined with positive probability in the period after a significant investment was made even though this is ex post suboptimal. The model derives a number of empirical predictions regarding capital budgeting and the investment of financially constrained firms.     

金融改革破题之年如何破题

全国政协委员、香港创兴银行副主席兼董事总经理梁高美懿表示：互联网金融业态是中国金融市场未来发展的新看点。应以法无禁止即可为、法无授权不能为的监管理念,重程序正义,轻实质内容审核等的行政逻辑,为互联网金融机构提供合规但不压抑的监管环境。她说：     

Retirement planning guidelines: a Delphi study of financial planners and educators

Retirement planning guidelines were determined using a Delphi research design among 188 financial planners and educators. Consensus was found for using a 4% inflation rate, an 8.5% rate of return on investments, and a replacement ratio of 70–89% of current income when making retirement projections. Nine-tenths of the experts agreed that families should have achieved 50–60% of their retirement savings goal by age 50 and 85–90% by age 60. Regarding asset allocation, over 60% felt it was prudent to start moving toward more conservative investments about 3–5 years before retirement. Recommendations were developed on the proportion of growth-oriented equities to hold at various points prior to and after retiring. While the level of consensus was high, occupational and gender differences were noted.     

Zero-base budgeting: Prospects for developing a semi-confusing budgeting information system

This paper argues for the recognition that zero-base budgeting (ZBB) is a destabilizing process which may co-exist in the future with traditional budgeting systems (TBS) to form a semi-confusing information system. The stabilizing and destabilizing features of a semi-confusing information system are explored first. The characteristics of ZBB as a formal budgeting process are examined next to provide a comparative profile of its destabilizing features in a changing environment. Analytically, ZBB characteristics match with the destabilizing properties of a semi-confusing information system and this insight has substantial implications for the future use of ZBB.