Accounting for Private Estates and the Household in the Twentieth-Century BC Middle Kingdom, Ancient Egypt

This article examines the role of accounting in running the household economy and private estates in ancient Egypt. Drawing on translations of original accounts and business letters dating back to the Middle Kingdom, a number of diverse accounting roles are isolated. Firstly, the accounts and business letters shed interesting light on the determination of rations for individual members of the owner's household during a period of hardship caused by high Nile inundation. Accounting calculations were an instrument of both planning the economy of the household and underpinning a specific pecking order of the relative standing of individual members of the household. Secondly, the accounts and business letters were used as a means of facilitating the 'management at a distance' of the affairs of the private estate, while the owner was absent having entrusted its day-to-day running to his agents. Not only were targets of performance set for the expected crop from the cultivation of the land owned, but also of land to be rented for cultivation. Finally, calculations were made to account for the manufacture of textiles from flax. The quantification produced by accounting calculations rendered the activities of human agents visible to the owner acting at a distance. Moreover, even when dealing with concrete, visible commodities, such as grain, the intervention of accounting sharpened this visibility by converting the concrete into an abstract theoretical value via the use of 'monies of account' to attain a measure of economic and social reciprocity.     

The Incremental Information Content of Accruals: Evidence Based on the Exponential Smoothing of Levels and Trends in Pre-Tax Earnings, Funds Flow and Cash Flow

By arranging the accrual accounting identity as a hierarchy of market response models, this paper investigates whether current and noncurrent accruals have incremental information content beyond earnings. The results indicate that the increase in explanatory power attributable to funds flow and cash flow disclosure can be improved upon by estimating the surprises in reported numbers by exponentially weighting prior values. The unexpected information simplifies to the weighted sum of deviations from the estimated level and estimated trend. Further improvements are obtained by allowing components of the error to vary with time and by company in a non-autoregressive, homoscedastic pooling scheme which takes account of the joint presence of time series disturbance and cross sectional disturbance.     

The association between privatisation and voluntary disclosure: Evidence from Jordan

This paper investigates the impact of privatisation on the extent of corporate voluntary disclosure in Jordan.We conduct a longitudinal examination using 243 annual reports of 27 privatised firms in Jordan over a period of nine years from 1996 to 2004. Employing univariate and pooled regression models our results show that privatisation is positively associated with voluntary disclosure. Specifically, we find that accounting regulation reforms and foreign investments accompanying privatisation have a significant impact on the levels of accounting disclosure in Jordan. Our study provides evidence on the role of privatisation in improving the disclosure culture as an important pre‐condition for the development of active capital markets.     

Absorptive Capacity and Source‐Recipient Complementarity in Designing New Products: An Empirically Derived Framework*

Numerous publications are dedicated to absorptive capacity and new product development (NPD). Most are centered on the recipient team, and very few consider the effects of the source team knowledge characteristics on the knowledge absorption and the NPD performance. This paper analyzes the type of the external knowledge sourced from outside the organization and the process through which it is used by the recipient firm and the effect on NPD performance. This is done through a specific type of source team knowledge, the design, and through the NPD process in industries (clothing and construction) where it plays a key role. NPD cases were analyzed and clustered in three categories of design absorption processes. From these categories, a conceptual framework of the source‐recipient knowledge complementarity and its impact on the NPD performance is proposed. The main result is that the complementarity between the recipient and the source knowledge is a critical aspect of the absorption process and therefore of the NPD performance. From a managerial perspective, this research highlights the role of design in the NPD process and how the combination of design knowledge with prior knowledge (marketing or technological) is related to NPD performance.     

The Crash and Ricardo: Does the US Budget Deficit Matter?

How important was the American budget deficit as a cause of the crash? Geoffrey Wood and Mahmoud Pradham of the City University Business School argue that the deficit was not even a contributory cause. A modern version of the‘Ricardian Equivalence Theorem’suggests that the effect of government borrowing on the economy can be greatly exaggerated.     

Accounting in Transitional and Emerging Market Economies

The aim of this introduction is to discuss some of the challenges and problems faced by researchers who are interested in conducting research in transitional and emerging market economies and to highlight some of the key attributes and characteristics of these economies. The papers contained in this Special Section are introduced by way of providing a brief overview of their contributions and identifying other important areas that future researchers might wish to pursue.

This Special Section of European Accounting Review is devoted to publishing papers on various accounting issues in transitional and emerging market economies. In this introduction, we aim to set the scene for the papers contained in this Special Section, to highlight some of the key attributes and characteristics of transitional and emerging market economies, to provide a brief overview of the contributions published here and finally to identify some other important areas that future researchers might wish to pursue.