Using FTE and RVU performance measures to assess financial viability of academic nurse-managed centers

Financial performance measures are essential to improve the fiscal management of academic nurse-managed centers (ANMCs). Measures are compared among six ANMCs in a consortium and against an external, self-sustainable, profitable ANMC and national data for family practice physicians. Performance measures help identify a center's strengths and weaknesses facilitating the development of strategies aimed at a variety of targets (business practices related to revenue and costs) to improve financial viability. Using a variety of financial performance measures to inform decision making will aid ANMCs in keeping their doors open for business.     

ACCOUNTING AND THE COLD WAR: THE TRANSFORMATION OF WASTE INTO RICHES

This paper argues that contrary to mainstream accounting's portrayal of managerial controls as benefitting society by helping to ensure that resources are employed in the most efficient manner, in at least one arena@8iU.S. national defense@8imanagerial control systems have simply served as a means to mask the transformation of waste into riches. Since World War II, the defense budget has been one of the primary mechanisms by which the U.S. government has maintained the status-quo distribution of wealth and power in this country through the production of waste. Because such a strategy required a militarized concept of security and a nuclear arms race which threatened the existence of life on this planet, the history of the Cold War has been one of internal contradiction and social conflict. This paper demonstrates how managerial control systems were employed by various components of the military-industrial-complex to maintain or extend their decision making power and to re-rationalize defense spending during periods of social crises, not to promote the efficient use of national resources. By documenting a history of the control systems used for defense acquisition during the first phase of the Cold War, the period 1950 to 1972, this paper implicates accounting's role in producing social inefficiencies and waste.     

Assessing financial distress dependencies in OTC markets: a new approach using trade repositories data

In this paper, we study the relationships among financial market sub-segments as a way to identify potential financial distress through increased co-movements among them. To study how sub-markets are mutually co-dependent, we combine granular data on over-the-counter derivatives by trade repositories and the joint probability of distress (JPoD) approach introduced by the International Monetary Fund. We define an indicator that combines several distress drivers and observe that results on co-dependencies are similar to those that would be expected: similarities between financial and contractual terms seem to be responsible for stronger co-movements among sub-markets. However, high values for JPoD even in correspondence of quite dissimilar sub-markets suggest the presence of other drivers that should be investigated in future research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study on systemic risk assessment based on micro-founded trade repositories’ data on interest rate swaps.     

Profiting from destruction: The Iraq reconstruction,auditing and the management of fraud

While several US corporations have benefited tremendously from the Iraq reconstruction, the Iraqis and US taxpayers have not done as well. This paper argues that the Bush Administration's neoliberal agenda in Iraq created a corrupt, lawless environment in which corporations could reap huge profits through what would normally be called malfeasance. It further demonstrates how the audit reports produced by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction helped to manage the impact of this massive fraud by giving the perception that the laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration were innocent mistakes, making the failures appear to be independent of one another, reconstructing corporate malfeasance as waste while criminalizing low level employees, and blaming the government agencies, the war and the Iraqis for the fraud.     

XBRL for Financial Reporting: Evidence on Italian GAAP versus IFRS

The systematic adoption of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for financial reporting represents a great challenge. Worldwide, a large number of regulators are making an effort to promote the adoption of this standard to simplify and enhance the communication of financial information. This requires the definition of well‐structured taxonomies that can standardize and accommodate the content of financial reports prepared by firms. This study aims to analyze the regulator‐led adoption of XBRL for financial reporting. It examines the XBRL taxonomies used by Italian firms to reflect their financial reporting under rule‐based Italian GAAP and principles‐based International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). We compare the alignment of the Italian GAAP taxonomy and the IFRS taxonomy with Italian companies' financial statements and find two different levels of fit. The results offer useful insights for regulators and policy makers in prescribing or establishing appropriate taxonomies. We illustrate the potential impacts of the different taxonomies on the quality of financial reporting in terms of comparability and potential loss of information.     

From the Gold Standard to a Bipolar Monetary System

This paper argues that the international monetary system will evolve into a bipolar structure consisting of a dollar area and a euro area, each of which attracting other countries to their gravitational centers. A deepening and widening of NAFTA and the EU will enlarge the sphere of influence of both currencies; trade wars will restrict them. The yen is a big question mark. The deep and still unresolved financial crisis in Japan works against the enlargement of the yen; deregulation of its financial markets, with the attendant decline in transaction costs, goes in the opposite direction. Our conclusion is that the yen area will be much smaller than the dollar and the euro area and, consequently, the two large blocs will shape the international monetary system of the 21st century in a critical way. We also discuss feasible scenarios of interaction between currency blocs. A large EMU works in favor of cooperation because fewer players imply lower decision-making costs in reaching a cooperative solution. The relative closeness of the EMU and the United States, on the other hand, works against cooperation and in favor of benign neglect. Exchange-rate agreements are fragile unless supported by strong commitment to economic policy cooperation, and such a commitment may well be premature. The article advocates that the United States and EMU target common inflation rates, an idea that Keynes proposed back in 1923.     

Competition,firm size and returns to skills: Evidence from currency shocks and market liberalisations

We investigate the impact of product market competition on returns to skills in Italy using a longitudinal dataset on individual working histories. This impact is identified using three exogenous shocks affecting competition: the unforeseen devaluation of the Lira in 1992, its return to a fixed exchange regime in 1996 and the market liberalisation in the utility and transport sectors in the late 1990s–early 2000s. We analyse how firm heterogeneity and shocks of different types and signs affect the impact of competition on skill premia. We find that opposite shocks have opposite effects: an increase (resp. decrease) in international competition increases (resp. decreases) skill premia. Moreover, international shocks have greater effects on medium sized firms, while domestic liberalisation shocks have greater effects on large incumbents.     

Magic mirror in my hand … How trade mirror statistics can help us detect illegal financial flows

Misreporting tricks of different sorts applied to the transfer of goods between different countries are typically exploited by criminals worldwide for money laundering ends. The main international anti‐money laundering organisations started paying attention to this phenomenon, dubbed “trade‐based money laundering” (TBML), a long time ago, but the failure to develop appropriate analytical tools has reportedly dogged preventive actions. Nonetheless, literature has widely advocated the possibility that the analysis of inconsistencies in mirrored bilateral trade data could provide some help. By building on previous contributions in the field, this work sets up a model factoring in the main structural determinants of discrepancies between mirrored data concerning Italy's 2010 to 2013 external trade at a highly detailed (6‐digit) level of goods classification for each partner country. Point estimates of freight costs are used to net each observation of the corresponding cif/fob discrepancy. The regression estimates are then deployed in order to compute TBML risk indicators at a country/4‐digit product level. Based on the indicators, rankings of countries and product lines can be compiled, which may be used for a risk‐driven search of potential illegal commercial transactions.