Accounting practice,fiscal decentralization and corruption

In prior studies, accounting and decentralization corruption solutions have so far been analysed in isolation. In this article, we connect these two strands of literature on corruption. Understanding this connection is important because weak financial accounting and reporting systems can inhibit monitoring incentives and thus reduce decentralization benefits in countering corruption. We argue that the effectiveness of decentralization as an anti-corruption barrier is complemented by the quality of the accounting practice in a country. Using multiple sources of data, we find that decentralization has a positive and increasing effect on reducing corruption among countries with a high-quality accounting practice. In contrast, decentralization has a negative and decreasing effect on reducing corruption among countries with weak-quality accounting practices. These findings are robust to alternative measures of accounting, decentralization and corruption and to endogeneity tests. Our findings demonstrate the crucial information role of accounting in enhancing decentralization monitoring mechanisms and in thereby reducing corruption.     

20kV及以下配电网工程造价的确定与有效控制方法分析

随着我国电网逐渐向智能电网迈进,信息技术在电能传输、转换、分配、调度等方面的应用,使电力企业可以进行结构调整,提高电力系统管理水平。据统计,2011年,我国电力信息化投资达220亿元,2012-2015年,电力工程建设稳步推进。为了促进电力企业全面开展项目成本核算和有效控制,提高电力工程项目的效益,确定了典型方案设计模块,通过定额规则库与典型方案设计相匹配的方法,解决了安装过程中定额第一版遗留的一些问题,并通过设计选型等措施加强了成本控制。     

关于企业成本管理的探讨

成本管理是预算管理和绩效管理的前提,企业需要正确地将成本进行分类、计量和归集。恰当的成本管理制度可以帮助企业提升运营效率和业务绩效,同时企业的流程改善、突破和优化与成本管理密不可分。另外,管理者需要令客户对产品和服务满意,并且有效控制各项成本。企业成本管理不是单纯地降低成本,而是通过利用成本分析工具,有效地管理和规划资源,进而提高总体运营效率,保证企业总体绩效的持续改善。论文通过成本计算制度的制定方法和业务流程改善分析技术两方面对成本管控进行探讨。     

Large scale infrastructure investment and economic performance – a case study of Oresund

We analyse the effect of a large scale infrastructure investment, namely the construction of the Oresund bridge, on the local and supra-regional economy. We employ the synthetic control method to construct counterfactual regions that mimic the trajectory of Malmo and Southern Sweden without treatment. Our results point to a positive effect. However, placebo tests in space and time only reveal statistical significance at a larger regional level. The results suggest that spillover effects are eminent.     

Perceptions of the benefits of the A3 planner in facilitating project-based learning in accounting education

This paper evaluates ways of instilling project management skills into accounting-based learning by the use of an iterative A3 planner to plan, monitor and review assignment progress. The application of an A3 planner to facilitate a project-based learning (PBL) group assignment in undergraduate accounting education has been critically evaluated in terms of both the student and tutor experience. The study uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Quantitative data assisting exploration of perceptions were collected through 100 undergraduate students. A series of focus group discussions were carried out to investigate students’ engagement and tutors’ teaching experiences regarding the adoption of the A3 planner. The results suggest that the A3 planner promotes active planning and effective management of a PBL group assignment. It makes students’ thought processes more visible thereby facilitating and enhancing the tutoring/mentoring process. Moreover a more interactive and transparent approach by doing assignment via the use of an iterative A3 planner has ensured more feedback points and action based efficiency in the doing approach for learners.     

Optimal investment with vintage capital: Equilibrium distributions

The paper concerns the study of equilibrium points, or steady states, of economic systems arising in modeling optimal investment with vintage capital, namely, systems where all key variables (capitals, investments, prices) are indexed not only by time but also by age. Capital accumulation is hence described as a partial differential equation (briefly, PDE), and equilibrium points are in fact equilibrium distributions in the variable of ages. A general method is developed to compute and study equilibrium points of a wide range of infinite dimensional, infinite horizon, optimal control problems. We apply the method to optimal investment with vintage capital, for a variety of data, deriving existence and uniqueness of equilibrium distribution, as well as analytic formulas for optimal controls and trajectories in the long run. The examples suggest that the same method can be applied to other economic problems displaying heterogeneity. This shows how effective the theoretical machinery of optimal control in infinite dimension is in computing explicitly equilibrium distributions. To this extent, the results of this work constitute a first crucial step towards a thorough understanding of the behavior of optimal paths in the long run.     

Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

Periodic strategies in optimal execution with multiplicative price impact

We study the optimal execution problem with multiplicative price impact in algorithmic trading, when an agent holds an initial position of shares of a financial asset. The interselling decision times are modeled by the arrival times of a Poisson process. The criterion to be optimized consists in maximizing the expected net present value of the gains of the agent, and it is proved that an optimal strategy has a barrier form, depending only on the number of shares left and the level of the asset price.     

Uncertainty,Control, and Karl Polanyi’s Protective Response

Post-Keynesian institutionalist economists like Wallace Peterson and John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that the impact of uncertainty on economic wellbeing depends in part on the degree of control people have over the sources and consequences of it. Given the inability of government and other large institutions to reduce uncertainty or to provide citizens with the ability to manage it, mediating structures are considered as an alternative means of promoting economic security. The article concludes by describing and evaluating several of these alternatives.     

Financial scandals: a historical overview

I examine the incidence of fraud from c.1720 to 2009 and relate it to the occurrence of significant financial scandals. Focusing on the UK, and US prior to Enron, and using a detailed dataset of significant events and news content, underpinned by examination of specific watershed scandals, the paper highlights the regulatory response to scandals and the implications for accounting and financial reporting. The evidence reveals the incidence of fraud and financial scandal to be historically contingent and skewed towards certain sectors, particularly banking and finance, facilitated by complex group structures and international capital mobility, and mediated by managerial incentives and ownership concentration. Financial reporting and auditing can mitigate fraud opportunities in all sectors and businesses without complex group structures, and the accounting profession achieved some success in this respect up to the mid-1970s. Since then, the profession has been increasingly challenged by, and to some degree implicated in, the development of interconnected and international business networks, which, combined with wider financial deregulation, has led to a resurgence of fraud and financial scandal not previously experienced since the mid-nineteenth century.