Management earnings forecasts and the quality of analysts’ forecasts: The moderating effect of audit committees

This study investigates whether effective audit committees influence the association between management earnings forecasts and the properties of analysts’ forecasts. We posit that this influence on the part of an audit committee would likely result from increased responsibility for monitoring voluntary disclosure. Using the four attributes that the Blue Ribbon Committee (1999) and prior research suggest as being indicative of audit committee effectiveness, we find that analysts’ forecasts exhibit higher accuracy and lower dispersion with the issuance of management forecasts for those firms employing audit committees that are composed exclusively of independent directors, include an accounting expert, and act with due diligence. We also find that effective audit committees strengthen the association between management and analyst forecast accuracy. Our evidence, therefore, supports the notion that effective corporate governance influences the reliability of voluntary disclosure, and thereby benefits the users of financial information.     

Designing a medicalized wellness service: balancing hospitality and hospital features

Medicalized environments around the world are challenged with making trade-offs between the clinical nature of the service and the customer service elements needed to deliver the service. Many medicalized wellness services have yet to achieve an effective balance between their hospitality and hospital features to generate loyalty (repeat patronage). We present a case study of a blood service organization in a developed country that, at the time of data collection (2011), was working to resolve tension between clinical goals and expectations of Millennial donors. The results identified seven principles: ‘control over booking and service interactions’; ‘build social connections’; ‘offer a luxury, indulgent experience’; ‘build relationship with customer beyond the “medical” procedure’. The three remaining principles related to hospital-like features: ‘hide the functional/medical features of the service experience’; ‘demystify the “hidden” processes’; ‘ability for the physical service environment to be modified by the customer’.     

Key Managerial Accounting Skills for Lodging Industry Managers: The Third Phase of a Repeated Cross-Sectional Study

This study is the third phase of a repeated cross-sectional study that explores the current rankings of important accounting skills to lodging managers and the changes in the importance of accounting skills to lodging managers over time. In this study, as with two prior studies, financial executives were asked to rate the importance of a list of managerial accounting skills used by hotel general managers. The top three managerial accounting skills were the operating budget, the income statement, and analysis of variances. This study can provide a better sense of the perception of importance of accounting skills utilized by lodging managers. It will be useful for hospitality educators in designing the curriculum for managerial accounting courses to meet the expectations of the current hospitality industry.     

Pricing Political Rallies

Why are political rallies free to attend? Fundraising is a central campaign activity and a perennial correlate of political victory. We argue that politicians set a zero price for rallies in order to reap a non‐pecuniary benefit: political support. An ‘allocation by waiting’ scheme selects those attendees with a lower opportunity cost of time relative to a standard ‘allocation by price’ scheme. Transactions costs mitigate Coasean bargaining by removing the secondary market, thereby altering the composition of the average rally crowd. This mechanism allows politicians to facilitate exchange with ‘general interests’: citizens who do not engage in rent seeking due to collective action costs but still stand to gain from redistributive policies.     

Do Firms Use Time‐Vested Stock‐Based Pay to Keep Research and Development Investments Secret?

I find that executives’ unvested equity holdings are larger when executives are employed by R&D‐intensive firms in industries that rely more on secrecy to profit from R&D. Moreover, I find that this relation is more pronounced for executives with a greater ability to exploit R&D‐related information and also holds for nonexecutive employees. In addition, I find that these firms use option grants with longer vesting periods and that unvested equity holdings reduce the likelihood that their executives leave to find employment elsewhere. Overall, my findings are consistent with firms using time‐vested stock‐based pay to reduce the leakage of R&D‐related information to competitors through employee mobility.     

A weighted max-min model for fuzzy multi-objective supplier selection in a supply chain

Supplier selection is one of the most important activities of purchasing departments. This importance is increased even more by new strategies in a supply chain. Supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision making problem in which criteria have different relative importance. In practice, for supplier selection problems, many input information are not known precisely. The fuzzy set theories can be employed due to the presence of vagueness and imprecision of information. A weighted max-min fuzzy model is developed to handle effectively the vagueness of input data and different weights of criteria in this problem. Due to this model, the achievement level of objective functions matches the relative importance of the objective functions. In this paper, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine the weights of criteria. The proposed model can help the decision maker (DM) to find out the appropriate order to each supplier, and allows the purchasing manager(s) to manage supply chain performance on cost, quality and service. The model is explained by an illustrative example.     

Anticorruption reforms,tax evasion,and the role of harassment

We examine the impact of anticorruption reforms on tax evasion when corruption and potentially harassment are endemic among tax auditors. We find that the threat of harassment may counterintuitively boost the impact of such anticorruption reforms on tax evasion and also eliminate corruption. Specifically, a moderate anticorruption policy can discontinuously reduce tax evasion to a level even below that under no corruption. Further strengthening of such policy can nonetheless prove counterproductive and increase tax evasion. On the contrary, in the absence of harassment, a moderate anticorruption reform induces higher tax evasion and sustenance of bribery. In this case, only a large reform can reduce tax evasion and eliminate corruption.