Managing Revenue and Costs to Implement Strategy: The Conference Organizer's Dilemma

This instructional case describes a situation in which revenues include both a fixed and variable component. The situation illustrated is common among nonprofits that have sponsor/donor revenues as well as client‐service revenues. The case provides students with an opportunity to explore cost–volume–profit relationships in greater depth than usual textbook illustrations and reinforces their understanding of the important link between revenues, costs and activities, and how all these relationships connect to strategy.     

Does Accounting Conservatism Discipline Qualitative Disclosure? Evidence From Tone Management in the MD&A*

We investigate whether accounting conservatism, which has been found to be effective in constraining management opportunism in other settings, constrains upward tone management (UTM) in the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the 10-K filing. We hypothesize that conservatism makes it harder for managers to opportunistically downplay bad news and magnify good news when discussing current performance. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that UTM is negatively associated with several accounting conservatism proxies. Additionally, we hypothesize and find that this association is stronger for firms where managers have higher incentives to manipulate tone. In supplemental analyses, we find evidence to suggest that our results are not due to an endogenous relationship between conservatism and UTM. We also find that conservatism neither encourages downward tone management (DTM) nor constrains managers from conveying real information about future good news. Together, our results suggest that accounting conservatism improves disclosure narratives.     

Workplace risks and stressors as predictors of burnout: The moderating impact of job control and team efficacy

Air medical healthcare (AMH) professionals care for critically-ill individuals while conveying them to healthcare centres from distant, and frequently dangerous, locations. AMH professionals experience additional health and safety issues beyond the “typical” stressors faced by other healthcare professionals. Therefore, we integrated the safety and psychosocial health literatures to examine the relationship between workplace stressors (risk perception, worries, and patient-care barriers) and two components of burnout (emotional exhaustion; depersonalization), and the moderating impact of job control and team efficacy for 106 Canadian AMH professionals. Worries over medical hassles and barriers to patient care uniquely predicted emotional exhaustion. Lack of perceived control over one's job was related to exhaustion and depersonalization after controlling for stressors. Job control and team efficacy buffered some of the stressor-burnout relationships. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Structural replacement or structural inducement: government ties of Chinese business executives

We suggest that the structural replacement thesis, which proposes that managers in Chinese nonstate-owned enterprises (NSOEs) possess more government ties than managers in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), is theoretically incomplete because it considers only the motivation of managers of NSOEs. The extensiveness of social ties is influenced also by the capability and opportunity for social actors to cultivate these social ties. We introduce the structural inducement thesis, which holds that SOE managers have more government ties than do NSOE managers, as an alternative to the structural replacement thesis. Our analysis of 250 Chinese managers' ties supports this structural inducement thesis. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Castries Merchandising Inc.

This two‐part case focuses on red flags of attempted earnings management for a St. Lucian company that is moving from 100 percent family‐owned to selling 50 percent of the family's shares to an equity fund. In order to increase the earnings growth rate in the three years leading up to the proposed sale to an equity fund in 2021, the earnings for the most recent three years (2016–2018) have been artificially depressed. The resulting byproduct of the earnings management is the underprovision of income taxes for the past three years, which is detected by the tax authorities in St. Lucia. The student assumes the role of a tax auditor for the tax authority in St. Lucia assigned to audit Castries Merchandising Inc. (CMI), a merchandiser of building products, hardware, and automobile parts. In Part 1 the student is provided excerpts of the financial statements of CMI with some anomalies that have been detected by a software program. In Part 2 the student is provided with further information of excerpts from the trial balance and an interview with the CFO, who is a member of the family ownership group of CMI and also a Canadian CPA registered in Ontario. Drawing on the student's knowledge of auditing, accounting principles, and financial statement analysis, the student's task is to both reassess the income taxes for the years 2016 to 2018 and contemplate how management may be manipulating the financial statements in order to benefit from the planned future sale of CMI's shares to an equity fund.     

Relative Importance of Major Job Performance Dimensions in Determining Supervisors' Overall Job Performance Ratings

This study explores the factor structure of job performance and each performance dimension's relative importance in determining supervisors' overall job performance ratings. We found that the optimal factor structure of job performance includes five dimensions: task performance, organizational citizenship behaviour directed toward the organization and individuals (OCB‐O and OCB‐I, respectively), and counterproductive work behaviour directed toward the organization and individuals (CWB‐O and CWB‐I, respectively). The percent‐based relative weight (%RW) is the highest for task performance in determining job performance, followed by OCB and CWB. Interestingly, the %RW of non‐task performance dimensions directed toward the organization (OCB‐O and CWB‐O) is similar to the %RW of task performance but greater than the %RW of non‐task performance dimensions directed toward individuals (OCB‐I and CWB‐I). Copyright © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social planning for tourism in the developing countries

The usual perspectives on tourism planning have been economic. This paper argues for the need to take much more explicit account of non-economic costs (and benefits) in this field, and links the discussion to questions that have preoccupied those concerned with general issues of development in recent years. It emphasises that planners act in specific socio-politocal contexts, and that it is especially the dynamics of class structures and theis expression in the power relations at local and national levels which influence outcomes in this field. Practical issues of social planning for tourism are discussed, and the dangers of development which is too massive and too fast are stressed. Some attention is also paid to the role of transnational enterprises in the tourism field, and to the question of bargaining at the international level.     

Impacts of International Greenfield Investment on Firm Valuation

Our study examines the announcement effects of 343 international greenfield investments by 289 U.S. firms for their impact on shareholder wealth. This paper develops five hypotheses based on the positive‐multinational‐network hypothesis. The evidence indicates that market reactions to announcements by firms entering developing countries are more favorable than those entering developed countries. In addition, the results show that the wealth effect for firms entering a host country for the first time is greater than for those that are already operating within the country. As for the long run, greenfield firms have shown improvement in their operating performance and stock performance. Copyright © 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stock price informativeness and analyst coverage

We examine whether more analyst coverage translates into more informative stock prices and apply this to both developed and emerging markets. We measure price informativeness using the association between current stock returns and future earnings. We argue that more informative stock prices contain more information about future earnings. Results indicate that analysts' activities do not contribute to the impounding of future earnings information into current stock prices, in accordance with the view that analysts are outsiders who do not have full access to firm‐level information. We also find that analysts specialize according to industry and that “industry expertise” is limited to developed countries. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the explanation that analysts focus on gathering and mapping industry‐ and market‐level information (macroeconomic information) into stock prices. Copyright © 2013 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Private Benefits of Managerial Control,Government Ownership,and Acquirer Returns: Evidence from the Chinese State‐Controlled Listed Companies

This article examines how government ownership affects the relationship between private benefits of managerial control, measured as excessive overhead expenses, and profitability of acquirers. A total of 246 merger and acquisition (M&A) events from Chinese state‐controlled listed companies (CSCLCs) between 2001 and 2006 constitutes the analytical sample. Under a low level of government shareholding, private benefits of managerial control positively correlated with acquirer announcement returns. However, there was no relationship between private benefits of managerial control and acquirer announcement returns under a high level of government shareholding. The implications of these findings for scholarship and practice are discussed. Copyright © 2011 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.