Allocations and Common Costs in Long-Run Investing and Pricing Decisions: An Historical Analysis

The extent to which allocated common costs should influence business decisions remains controversial in management accounting. In the finance and investment literature this issue is generally ignored or dismissed by appeals to the'incremental' principle. This article presents an historical analysis of allocations in long-run investing and pricing decisions. It is demonstrated that seminal figures in the development of both investment and price theory were conscious of the need for firms to cover common costs and generally favoured some form of allocation. The anti-allocationist position is shown to be of relatively recent origin and to have caused an inconsistency in the management accounting literature in the treatment of common costs. European costing theory is shown to have been consistently allocationist. Evidence of a return in the recent U.S. literature to the older Anglo-American, and continuing European, allocations tradition is presented.     

Goodwill—an Example of Puzzle-Solving in Accounting—a Reply

Grinyer and Russell's (G&R, 1992) contention that Ma and Hopkins (1988) have imposed the mutually exclusive rules of the valuation-based paradigm on the matching-based paradigm that underlies accounting practice is overly defensive and misguided. Our 1988 paper was an attempt to throw light on why there was so little agreement on the rules governing the treatment of goodwill. G&R's comment does not change our view that the only answer to the 'puzzle' lies in the lack of a full understanding of the nature of goodwill.     

会计数据信度与效度的特征性描述——基于会计变量及变量间关系的认识

无形会计数据信度即度量结果的重复性程度,是反映会计数据的客观性指标。效度是判断度量结果即研究对象结果的有效性程度。会计数据的信度与效度的探讨有助于会计信息质量的改善与质量标准的制定,对于进一步展开会计科学的研究也具有一定的意义。本文通过分析会计数据信度与效度的特征性,探讨与验证会计数据信度与效度路径研究方法。     

From rationality to hyperreality: paradigm poker

This paper, following McGoun's (1997) seminal article comparing the economy of financial securities to a hyperreal poker game, argues that finance and accounting researchers should take the “linguistic turn” that has rejuvenated theory and research in many, if not most, of the social science and humanities in recent decades. In general terms, this means following Ludwig Wittgenstein's language game paradigm rather than Karl Popper's scientific deductive hypothesis testing methodology. The paper illustrates this by drawing on some of Jean Baudrillard's' ideas, particularly his concept of hyperreality and his phases of the image theoretic.The paper presents a poststructuralist genealogical analysis of the radical ruptures and reformulation of the meaning attributed to the accounting sign of earnings over the feudal, counterfeit, production, and simulation eras. It concludes that, as with many other signs in contemporary society, the earnings sign no longer has any relationship with, nor does it any longer refer to, any real or intrinsic profit but instead floats ungrounded in today's financial economy.The paper recommends that researchers in finance and accounting adopt paradigms from literary theory, semiotics, linguistics, and semiology rather than continue to rely on economics-based theory, which has lost its power for explaining and predicting happenings in today's financial economy of self-referencing models and images.     

Reporting Performance: Comprehensive Income and its Components

The underlying question raised in this article is: why is the accounting profession's conceptual framework (CF) so authoritative when it is conceptually incoherent? A supplementary question is how can ‘conceptually robust’ accounting standards be derived from an incoherent framework? This article draws on Page and Spira's (1999) contrasting framework metaphors to suggest that the appearance of conceptual robustness is more important than the reality, and illustrates the point with the International Accounting Standards Board's (IASB’s) progress report on its reporting performance project. Some inherent weaknesses in the move towards internationally enforceable financial regulations have been acknowledged, but this article suggests the IASB's project demonstrates two additional weaknesses: internal incoherence, and the potential for political ends to drive supposedly technical regulations.     

浅谈会计教育改革

会计队伍素质的提高有赖于会计教育水平的提高，如何培养出适应社会发展的高素质的会计人才，已成为会计教育面临的课题。客观上对高级会计人员需求不断增长与落后的会计教育的矛盾越来越突出，会计教育改革势在必行。     

浅谈应收账款的管理

章出自于实践，针对欠款这一顽症，作提出了一系列解决措施，具有对实践的普遍指导意义。     

统分经营的有效结合：农民协会的成功所在——基于萍乡市排上生猪养殖协会的案例研究

本文通过对萍乡市排上生猪养殖协会的案例研究,揭示了农民协会在农业产业化经营中的重要作用:一方面发挥了协会统一经营的功能,为分散的农户提供资金、技术和市场等方面的帮助;另一方面又可以有效地调动农户分散经营的积极性,促进农户生产规模的不断壮大。本文对这种模式进行了分析,得出结论:农民协会统分结合经营模式的成功在于借助于组织实现了农户对生产费用和交易费用的节约。     

Researching with whom? Stability and manipulation

This paper explores the existence of stable research teams, when the preferences of each agent depend on the set of researchers who are collaborating. We introduce a property over researchers’ preferences, called top responsiveness, guaranteeing the existence of stable research teams configurations. We also provide a stable mechanism, induced by the so-called top covering algorithm, which is strategy-proof when researchers preferences satisfy top responsiveness. Furthermore, we find that, in this framework, the top covering mechanism is the only strategy-proof mechanism that always selects stable allocations.     

对完善我国企业环境会计报告的探讨

针对目前我国企业环境会计报告的现状以及存在的缺陷,本文认为我国企业环境会计报告应由报告使用者与目标、报告主体、报告内容、报告模式、报告呈报及报告审计六方面的内容构成,同时提出了完善我国企业环境会计报告的对策。