The fleeting nature of permanent reinvestment: Accounting for the undistributed earnings of foreign subsidiaries

Over the last decade, an increasing percentage of the profits reported by U.S. corporations were earned by their foreign subsidiaries and retained outside the United States resulting in the deferral of income taxes. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 provided a temporary federal tax incentive to remit such earnings, which resulted in the repatriation of $140 billion by the 30 firms comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average. An analysis of the financial reporting disclosures made by these firms reveals that a tax expense was not fully recognized on a substantial portion of the earnings until repatriation because of an exception for foreign reinvestments deemed to be essentially permanent in duration. The implications of the currently acceptable accounting for undistributed foreign earnings are discussed as well as recommendations to improve the relevancy and reliability of the disclosures required for this exception to comprehensive recognition of deferred taxes.     

THE PLACE OF MANAGERS IN INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

The discussion of industrial democracy in Britain has exploded in the last few years, but the result has been to write an agenda which has still to be worked through, not to reveal a consensus which can be written into action at once.     

Expert opinion and cuisine reputation in the market for restaurant meals

As food is an experience good, the market for restaurant meals is a market where the cost of acquiring information regarding quality is relatively high. In such markets consumers often turn to reputation measures to guide purchase decisions. As Australia does not have a longstanding cuisine style of its own, and given Australia has been open to substantial immigration inflows since federation, it represents an especially appropriate market to study regarding the impact of individual restaurant reputation and collective cuisine reputation on meal prices. The following study uses the hedonic price approach to investigate the implicit price of individual reputation indicators, cuisine type reputation indicators and other objective indicators in the market for restaurant meals. The empirical findings presented suggest that both individual restaurant reputation and cuisine type reputation are important. Other important factors are shown to include the quality of the restaurant wine list, the availability of private dining rooms, and whether or not there is an outdoor dining option.     

The half‐empty office: dilemmas in managing locational flexibility

Through a case study contrasting the impacts of formalised and informal teleworking practices on office‐based workers, multidimensional dilemmas between flexibility, control and equity are uncovered. Formal schemes, although problematic and rare, possess some advantages in resolving the three dimensions. A model is proposed to test findings further.     

Evidence from Patents and Patent Citations on the Impact of NASA and Other Federal Labs on Commercial Innovation

Federal lab commercialization is explored: (1) by analyzing US government patents and (2) in a qualitative analysis of one NASA lab's patents. Tests apply to three distinct sets of patents, 1963–94: NASA, all other US government, and a random sample of all US inventors' patents. The federal patenting rate plummeted in the 1970s. Consistent with increasing commercialization, both NASA's and other federal agencies' rates recovered in the 1980s. The case study finds citations to be a valid but noisy measure of technology spillovers. Excluding 'spurious' cites, two-thirds of cites to patents of NASA-Lewis' Electro-Physics Branch were evaluated as involving spillovers.     

Knowing one’s place: The distribution of new accounting academics into a segmented labor market

New academic accountants tend to believe that there is a singular academic labor market that will receive them as they approach the completion of their doctoral programs. In such a world, the caliber of their ideas would be judged according to their ability to make a contribution to the knowledge of discipline. However, past research suggests that a prestige structure exists for doctoral programs such that a candidate’s ability to be placed at a school is a function of his/her doctoral programs position in that hierarchy. In this world, limits exist upon possible placement for most candidates such that the caliber of their work will not be a determinative factor in their placement. Various divisions of the doctoral schools in accounting show that movement to higher groups is difficult for all groups. The higher-tier schools are more able to place their graduates in the same tier. Falls to lower tiers are especially likely for the graduates of the lower prestige groups of doctoral schools. This paper seeks to help participants in the labor market, doctoral candidates and those that hire them, obtain a more informed appreciation for their realistic prospects. In this way, an achievable expectation should lead to more efficient placement behavior.     

Inside Agency: The Rise and Fall of Nortel

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – fall of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors.