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This paper discusses the ability of explanationist theories of epistemic justification to account for the justification we have for holding beliefs about the future. McCain's explanationist account of the relation of evidential support is supposedly in a better position than other theories of this type to correctly handle cases involving beliefs about the future. However, the results delivered by this account have been questioned by Byerly and Martin. This paper argues that McCain's account is, in fact, able to deliver plausible results in cases involving such beliefs and that explanationism, if properly articulated, is illuminating with respect to the justification we have for holding such beliefs, as it manages to correctly distinguish evidence that only supports believing probabilistic claims about the future from evidence that is sufficient to believe that a particular event will happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often purported that the ECB's ultra-loose monetary policy significantly affects household income and financial wealth. Considering selected euro area countries, this paper addresses two questions: first, how did households net interest income develop in recent years? Second, did portfolio structures change? Based on recently extended national accounts data, I derive stylised facts suggesting that net interest income indeed changed with monetary policy. However, patterns differ across countries. Whereas households in some countries suffered from declining incomes, in other countries they achieved incomes which, considered in real terms, were substantially higher than before. Tentative links to household balance sheets and their interest rate fixation suggest that these factors outweigh the significance of monetary policy. Regarding portfolios, however, less divergence is observed. Risk-taking did not increase in any country, despite the low yields of safe assets. General statements claiming that the ECB's monetary policy has solely negative effects for household finances therefore seem to be inadequate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is motivated by the need of accounting for the practical syllogism as a piece of defeasible reasoning. To meet the need, the paper first refers to ranking theory as an account of defeasible descriptive reasoning. It then argues that two kinds of ought need to be distinguished, purely normative and fact-regarding obligations (in analogy to intrinsic and extrinsic utilities). It continues arguing that both kinds of ought can be iteratively revised and should hence be represented by ranking functions, too, just as iteratively revisable beliefs. Its central proposal will then be that the fact-regarding normative ranking function must be conceived as the sum of a purely normative ranking function and an epistemic ranking function (as suggested in qualitative decision theory). The distinctions defends this proposal with a comparative discussion of some critical examples and some other distinctions made in the literature. It gives a more rigorous justification of this proposal. Finally, it starts developing the logic of purely normative and of fact-regarding normative defeasible reasoning, points to the difficulties of completing the logic of the fact-regarding side, but reaches the initial aim of accounting for the defeasible nature of the practical syllogism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the comparison of how financial market and accounting data affect stock prices and returns. The goal was to ascertain whether financial information or accounting data dominate in evaluating stock prices. Most valuation techniques used by firms are based on models using either accounting variables (earnings, book value, cash flows, research and development expenses) or financial market data (e.g. beta, market value, interest). The answer is of great importance for valuators and investors as it will help them focus on the most important variables and make better valuations and choices. This answer is also important for accounting standard setters as the preferred method will serve as an indicator for the quality of financial statements and their importance to users. The paper contributes to the existing literature in the fields of value relevance of accounting information and firm valuation and accounting standards (e.g. International Financial Reporting Standards, United States General Accepted Accounting Principles). To answer this question, share prices were estimated based on financial data using the capital asset pricing model and for accounting data, using Ohlson's model. The results were tested for both methodologies by comparing estimated share prices with actual ones. The greater the correlation between the two variables the better the explanatory power of the model. The focus was on S&P 500 firms for the period 2002–2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent feature within the sphere of international macroeconomics surrounds the notion of the domestic economy succumbing to a "sudden stop" — i.e. the point at which creditors are no longer willing to enter into fresh exposures vis-à-vis debtors. One avenue which has been increasingly adopted as a means to survey a nation's external sustainability (i.e. its vulnerability to sudden stops) is through the net international investment position (NIIP) — the difference between stocks of cross-border claims and liabilities. On the basis that financial account transactions are larger than current account transactions in terms of both volume and value, this paper by conjoining several strands of the international macroeconomics literature presents three motivations to suggest that the notion of external sustainability can be decoupled from the NIIP, namely that while a nation may in theory be a net creditor vis-à-vis the rest of the world in accordance with its NIIP, in reality, its susceptibility to sudden stops may be larger than an economy which is a net debtor as a consequence of (1) stock or (2) flow effects. Moreover, should the domestic economy succumb to a sudden stop as a result of either stock or flow effects, (3) this may not translate into changes to NIIP, thereby masking the fact that even though the domestic economy has succumbed to balance of payments difficulties, it continues to appear as a net creditor. To achieve its objectives, each motivative factor is presented through systems of financial accounts. Separate annexes also disseminate how delays between payment and settlement result in credit risks, in addition to how exchange rate fluctuations can impose accounting losses/gains on the balance sheets of counterparties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of the economy, the number of financial tickets is increasing. The traditional invoice reimbursement and entry work bring more and more burden to financial accountants. However, standard OCR technology weakly supports financial tickets with various layouts and mixed Chinese and English characters. In view of this problem, this paper designs a method of financial ticket all-content text information detection and recognition based on deep learning. This method can effectively suppress the common noise of ticket image and extract financial information from ticket image in batch. At the same time, aiming at the problem of multi-character mixed character recognition, we propose a financial ticket character recognition framework (FTCRF), which can improve the accuracy of multi-character mixed character recognition and make the detection and recognition of financial ticket surface information more efficient. The experimental results show that the average recognition accuracy of the character sequence is 91.75%. The average recognition accuracy of the whole ticket is 87%, which significantly improves the efficiency of the financial accounting system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analytical approach that complements the traditional two-step linear regression and one-single step linear regression suggested by Chen et al. (J Account Res 56:751–796, 2018). Using the regression residual as the dependent variable in a second regression is a procedure commonly used in studying discretionary accounting. Chen et al. (J Account Res 56:751–796, 2018) propose to adopt one-step regression to avoid estimation bias and inference error. However, the mean level effect estimated by one-step OLS regression is not sufficient to capture the overall spectrum of discretionary accounting behaviors and thus may mislead its user in drawing implications. We use two-stage quantile regression to examine determinants of discretionary accounting such as discretionary accruals, discretionary expense, discretionary book-tax differences, and abnormal investment in different quantiles. We illustrate the differences between the one-step regression and our two-step quantile regression using four common discretionary accounting studies. Our results and implications reconcile, to some extent, the contradictory findings between results of the one-step OLS regression and the previous established works based on two-step regression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative analysis of three American (Enron, WorldCom and HealthSouth) and three European (Parmalat, Royal Ahold and Vivendi Universal) corporate failures. The first part of the analysis is based on a theoretical framework including six areas of ethical climate; tone at the top; bubble economy and market pressure; fraudulent financial reporting; accountability, control, auditing, and governance; and management compensation. The second and third parts consider the analysis of these cases from fraud perspective and in terms of firm-specific characteristics (ownership structure) and environmental context (coverage in media and academic literature, regulatory and corporate governance frameworks). The research analyses shed light on the fact that, despite major differences between Europe and U.S. in terms of political institutions, laws and regulations as well as managerial practices, there are significant similarities between six groups. The analysis also demonstrates that, the ethical dilemma has been coupled with ineffective boards, inefficient corporate governance and control mechanisms, distorted incentive schemes, accounting irregularities, failure of auditors, dominant CEOs, dysfunctional management behavior and the lack of a sound ethical tone at the top. Significant similarities were also observed in the analysis from the fraud triangle perspective. However, there are several major differences between the six corporate failure cases particularly with regard to ownership structure, coverage in media, and legal, regulatory and governance frameworks. This research study may have several academic and practical contributions, particularly because of multidisciplinary, international features, and comparative analyses used in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US positivistic accounting research is increasingly perceived as having come to be the point of reference for researchers in other countries, including the German-speaking area where formerly normative research was widespread. In this paper, we present the survey results retrieved from 293 doctoral students in accounting in 2009, a period of transition in which old and new approaches to doctoral education co-existed. Specifically, doctoral students were subject to institutional change in the form of more structured doctoral studies and a focus on internationalisation and attempts to publish in academic journals. We find that at that time there was diversity with regard to both the set of accounting journals considered by doctoral students and the methods employed by the latter in their dissertations. With respect to research methods, we show that factors of the institutional setting reflecting a more structured and international approach to doctoral education are in particular linked to empirical quantitative, and to a lesser extent qualitative, research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1992 the Italian local health units (LHU) gained financial independence and became responsible to provide and deliver health care at the local level. Management and financial accounting represent the tool utilized to monitor their net income and the working capital every year. From 2001 on, LHU budget data have being summarized by means of the 'income statement'. The income statement is considered the most relevant form for the monitoring of healthcare expenditures. A big amount of data have been collected after that obligation of publishing the income statement. The application of new methods for a better understanding of relationships among variables would be worthwhile. The development of artificial neural networks (ANNs) can represent a useful tool to analyze the relationships among these variables. The purpose of this paper is showing the potentialities of ANNs and especially of artificial neural networks what-if theory (AWIT) model when applied to health budgetary data. This innovative methodology has been employed, in the present paper, to analyze data from five Italian Regions, carrying out some comparison among them. In short, using one dataset that is defined as being the ideal standard containing the relationships necessary to measure desired outcomes, another dataset can be compared to determine its degree of closeness. We can determine the degree of closeness of the second or treated dataset with the original standard. This is the key concept of the method called AWIT. The descriptive analysis carried out outlines the areas of waste LHU and suggests to develop strategies to contrast an inefficient use of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimized material parameters obtained from parameter identification for verification wrt a certain loading scenario are amenable to two deficiencies: Firstly, they may lack a general validity for different loading scenarios. Secondly, they may be prone to instability, such that a small perturbation of experimental data may ensue a large perturbation for the material parameters. This paper presents a framework for extension of hyperelastic models for rubber-like materials accounting for both deficiencies. To this end, an additive decomposition of the strain energy function is assumed into a sum of weighted strain mode related quantities. We propose a practical guide for model development accounting for the criteria of verification, validation and stability by means of the strain mode-dependent weighting functions and techniques of model reduction. The approach is successfully applied for 13 hyperelastic models with regard to the classical experimental data on vulcanized rubber published by Treloar (Trans Faraday Soc 40:59–70, 1944), showing both excellent fitting capabilties and stable material parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In life cycle assessment (LCA), literature suggests accounting for land as a resource either by what it delivers (e.g., biomass content) or the time and space needed to produce biomass (land occupation), in order to avoid double-counting. This paper proposes and implements a new framework to calculate exergy-based spatial explicit characterization factors (CF) for land as a resource, which deals with both biomass and area occupied on the global scale. Methods: We created a schematic overview of the Earth, dividing it into two systems (human-made and natural), making it possible to account for what is actually extracted from nature, i.e., the biomass content was set as the elementary flow to be accounted at natural systems and the land occupation (through the potential natural net primary production) was set as the elementary flow at human-made systems. Through exergy, we were able to create CF for land resources for these two different systems. The relevancy of the new CF was tested for a number of biobased products. Results and discussion: Site-generic CF were created for land as a resource for natural systems providing goods to humans, and site-generic and site-dependent CF (at grid, region, country, and continent level) were created for land as a resource within human-made systems. This framework differed from other methods in the sense of accounting for both land occupation and biomass content but without double-counting. It is set operationally for LCA and able to account for land resources with more completeness, allowing spatial differentiation. When site-dependent CF were considered for land resources, the overall resource consumption of certain products increased up to 77 % in comparison with site-generic CF-based data. Conclusions: This paper clearly distinguished the origin of the resource (natural or human-made systems), allowing consistent accounting for land as a resource. Site-dependent CF for human-made systems allowed spatial differentiation, which was not considered in other resource accounting life cycle impact assessment methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proportion of business ethics literature devoted to accounting and the proportion of academic accounting literature devoted to ethical issues are both small, yet over the past two decades there has been a steady accumulation of research devoted to ethical issues in accounting. Based on a database of more than 500 articles gathered from a wide range of accounting and business ethics academic journals, this paper describes and analyses the characteristics of what has been published in the past 20 years or so. It identifies and explores patterns and trends in publication outlets and the type of research conducted. Furthermore, through a comparison with issues that have been raised in the general business ethics literature, it offers guidance to researchers who intend to take the field of accounting ethics forward using empirical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature and antecedents of a unique "sustainability" reporting initiative developed within a large Australian family-run manufacturing company. In so doing, the paper responds to calls for empirical insight into how accounting can inform organisational objectives relating to sustainability. Despite known flaws in the data, the company's weekly sustainability reports had become a critical support to on-going sense-making, driven by deliberate strategies focused on resource efficiency, and understanding the business. While the contributions of these initiatives to broader global sustainability concerns were limited, the case provides insight into a well-intentioned and passionate journey towards the unknown of sustainability. The case explains how management distinguished related activities from core economic objectives. What is important here is that the CEO availed space for management to explore the moral dimensions of corporate activity. There was opportunity to now enhance that space, by encouraging engagement with a broader range of stakeholders, and a broader range of sustainability impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having been recognised as a "resource-intensive" economy, the People's Republic of China has been experiencing major implications in terms of ecological environment degradation, which continuously harms the health of the Chinese people and the productivity of China's economy. Among the political efforts set forth by the Chinese central authorities, the claim of promoting a "National Ecological Accounting and Auditing Scheme" (NEAAS) has been drawing nationwide attention. Through a series of critical discourse analysis on relevant written texts produced by the central authorities, mainstream media and the Chinese academics, this paper sets out to analyse the historical evolution of the institutional context in relation to the establishment of such a scheme, and further, to decipher the ideological underpinnings that have shaped this context. The findings indicate that the signification of NEAAS goes far beyond the environment protection, in that, this scheme constitutes a fundamental institutional reform that the Communist Party of China seeks to conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brown and Kimbrough (Review of Accounting Studies, 2011, this issue) examine the effect of intangible assets on the 'uniqueness' of a firm's earnings. The paper represents an important link between the strategy literature on firm organization and the accounting literature on the drivers of firm performance. This discussion reviews the relevant strategy literature and its link to the accounting literature, discusses various aspects of Brown and Kimbrough, and explores implications of Brown and Kimbrough's findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andersen’s exit from the already-concentrated market for auditing services is shown to have increased market concentration and audit fees. Changes in market concentration are found to be significantly related to changes in audit fees, suggesting that the structure-performance hypothesis is applicable to the post-Andersen accounting industry and that the “Final Four” accounting firms may have exercised market power in this environment. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of Andersen’s exit from the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper discusses Bloomfield, Nelson, and Smith’s (BNS) model and experimental study of the price dynamics that arise when a firm’s accounting reports are predictable from its stock returns. This phenomenon occurs when the firm takes a position in an asset that generates unrealized gains and losses (UGL’s) that are correlated with the firm’s own returns. My discussion of BNS focuses on three features that are often used to evaluate research—namely, potential for falsification, internal validity, and external validity. I view and evaluate the BNS paper in light of each of these features. I also briefly comment on how well the paper addresses issues related to fair value accounting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we offer a new framework to measure cross-border supply chain fragmentation and its impact on the global trade elasticity. Firstly, we introduce the supply chain fragmentation ratio that sums the volume of imports by all countries that participate in a particular supply chain. We find that supply chain fragmentation slowed down after 2010 for most goods, but not for services. We demonstrate the importance of using trade and production data at constant prices in measuring fragmentation trends. Secondly, we quantify the impact of fragmentation on the elasticity of trade to world GDP, extending the framework of Bems et al. (Am Econ Rev Pap Proc 101(3):308–312, 2011). We account for trade effects from fragmentation within supply chains as well as asymmetric shocks to final demand. We find that the declining pace of fragmentation accounted for more than a third of the decline in the global trade elasticity after 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of naturalistic decision making, the data-frame model (DFM) has proven to be a popular and useful way of thinking about sensemaking. DFM provides a parsimonious account of how ‘sensemakers’ interact with the data in their environment to make sense of what is happening. In this paper, however, we argue that it is useful to elaborate DFM in several ways. We begin by arguing for the idea of sensemaking as a quest for coherence, an idea that we see as consistent with the DFM. We then present some examples of sensemaking studies and use these to motivate a ‘distributed resources’ model of sensemaking. This model uses the notion of resources for action, as resources that can be flexibly drawn upon in both choosing courses of action and accounting for the actions of oneself and of others (as opposed to prescriptions or mechanisms that determine behaviour in any strict way). The model describes resources involved in sensemaking in terms of three domains: knowledge and beliefs, values and goals, and action. Knowledge and beliefs are concerned with how things are, values and goals are concerned with how things are desired to be and action provides the means for redressing the gap. Central to the model is the idea that these resources can be distributed across a cognitive work system including actors and representational media. Hence, the model aims to provide a framework for analysing sensemaking as distributed cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper derives the combined effect of depreciation schedules and regulatory lag on a firm's choice of input mix, It shows that a schedule called the real constant (RC) schedule induces efficient capital-labor proportions. More (less) accelerated schedules cause undercapitalization (overcapitalization). Since most typically used schedules are accelerated relative so the RC schedule, they lead to undercapitalization. Testable predictions are derived by showing that these distortions become more severe as the inflation rate increases and as the lag length decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a research study of participation in the accounting standard-setting process in the United Kingdom. The study considers the 1,519 responses to the Accounting Standards Board's ('the ASB') proposals for accounting standards. Consistent with the findings of other studies in the USA and Australia, the present paper finds that there is a high level of participation by the preparers of financial statements in the ASB's consultation process. The paper then examines the size of the preparer firms which formally lobby the ASB. The evidence confirms that those firms which become involved in the lobbying process in the UK tend to be larger than non-lobbying firms, and the paper concludes that, as elswhere, the standard-setting process in the UK appears to be a discourse of the powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was developed to evaluate the effectiveness of energy efficiency policies recently launched in the Russian Federation. Pilot applications in 2011-2013 of the energy efficiency and energy savings accounting system in Russia and energy consumption growth decomposition analysis developed in this paper have shown that (1) its creation is possible even when using a noncomprehensive statistical database; (2) its application provides nontrivial results and shows that the impressive GDP energy intensity decline in the period 2000-2012 was mostly (to 64 %) driven by structural and other factors with limited contribution of technological ones failing to bridge the technological gap with advanced economies. Facing slowing economic growth in years to come, the federal policy to improve energy efficiency is to be focused on providing incentives for more dynamic penetration of energy-efficient technologies to improve the Russian economy, competitiveness, and energy security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports three empirical findings on the differential information content of the components of accounting profitability. First, the paper finds that the shareholder profitability driven by operating activities has a stronger association with annual stock returns than the shareholder profitability driven by financing activities. The finding provides empirical support for the FASB Financial Statement Presentation project, and the project suggests disaggregating accounting profitability into operating and financing activities. Second, the paper finds that the sustainable portion of operating profitability has a stronger association with annual stock returns than the unsustainable portion. This finding contributes to the literature by extending the two popular methods of breaking down operating profitability (DuPont analysis and operating liability leverage) into sustainable versus unsustainable operating income. Penman (Financial statement analysis and security valuation. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, ) suggests disaggregating operating income into sustainable versus unsustainable operating income. Finally, the paper identifies the conditional persistence in Amir et al. (Rev Acc Stud 16:302-327, ) as one of the empirical attributes that affects the valuation usefulness of disaggregated accounting profitability. The conditional persistence measures the marginal contribution of disaggregated profitability to the persistence of aggregate profitability. This paper reports that the disaggregation is more useful in firms with significant differences in the conditional persistence of disaggregated components than in other firms. Test results are robust to controls for cross-sectional and time-series dependence in error terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and economic developments in European countries have put pressure on their national budgets and threaten the sustainability of public policies. The traditional fiscal indicators, specifically, the deficit and the debt, which are still used today as guiding tools, have proved to be insufficient, due to their arbitrary nature and short-term focus. In this paper, we resort to an alternative fiscal indicator, known as 'generational accounting', which is able to incorporate the future changes in the demographic structure of the population, and their corresponding impact on public accounts. It is also able to evaluate how current fiscal policy affects, not only, current generations, but also future generations. We apply this methodology to assess the long-term fiscal situation of Portugal, and compare the results with those obtained in 1999. In this context, we also explore additional scenarios, as well as additional indicators, in order to provide some robustness to our findings. Our results show that, if the current fiscal policy is not significantly changed, future generations will face a much heavier fiscal burden than current generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In for-profit organizations, efficiency and productivity measurement with reference to the potential for input-specific reductions is particularly important and has been the focus of interest in the recent literature. Different approaches can be formulated to measure and decompose input-specific productivity change over time. In this paper, we highlight some problems within existing approaches and propose a new methodology based on the Principle of Least Action. In particular, this model is operationalized in the form of a non-radial Luenberger productivity indicator based on the determination of the least distance to the strongly efficient frontier of the considered production possibility sets, which are estimated by non-parametric techniques based upon Data Envelopment Analysis. In our approach, overall productivity change is the sum of input-specific productivity changes. Overall productivity change and input-specific changes are broken up into indicators of efficiency change and technical change. This decomposition enables the researcher to quantify the contributions of each production factor to productivity change and its components. In this way, the drivers of productivity development are revealed. For illustration purposes the new approach is applied to a recent dataset of Polish dairy processing firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the value of audit quality, proxied by the selection of a big N auditor, to the external claimholders of private and public companies. Although the combination of a lower ownership concentration of public companies, the greater demand for financial information quality about these companies and their higher litigation risk can result in the expectation that audit quality should be more valuable for public than for private companies, the greater information asymmetry between the managers and the external stakeholders and the unavailability of alternative mechanisms for monitoring the managers can make external audit more valuable for the external claimholders of private companies. In this paper, we test these two competing views by analysing if banks and lenders take into account auditor selection in the formation of the cost of debt. Our results support the second view: we find that only private companies obtain a lower cost of debt when they are audited by a high-quality auditor. These results are robust to both endogeneity and unobserved firm-specific heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relation between information's properties, such as reliability and relevance, and public disclosure policy. It shows that the optimal accounting system often involves a carefully balanced combination of mandatory and voluntary disclosure, with mandatory reporting focused on more reliable information. The emphasis on reliability causes the welfare-maximizing mandatory report to consistently lag behind the financial market in incorporating value-relevant information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to deal with the analysis of the scale effect in the value-relevance of accounting numbers. We examine the impacts of widely used deflators on the adjustment of scale effect. We find that most of the usual deflators employed in the literature generate endogeneity problems. In this paper we recommend the use of exogenous deflator such as the number of employees in market-based accounting research models. This alternative deflator produces, at least for the USA and Canada data, slightly better statistical results than other (endogenous) deflators such as the market value, the book value of equity, or the total assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to extend the model of Acharya et al. (J Financ Econ 57:65-101, ) to examine the ex-ante optimality of repricing of executive stock options while considering dilution effects and the tax effects of new accounting rules associated with repricing. Although there has been a body of empirical literature on repricing, the optimality of repricing after considering the economic impact of changing accounting rules has not been addressed in an ex-ante contracting setting. We find that traditional repricing loses its ex-ante dominance over the do-nothing strategy after we incorporate the tax effects of new accounting rules. The theoretical predictions of our paper shed light on this controversial practice and lay a foundation for evaluating repricing alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper attempts to give an explanation of why accounting bodies are hesitant to embrace new intellectual capital valuation and reporting models that have sprung up in the last decade, in spite of the fact that accounting standards are generally ill-suited to cater for intangibles. Despite some resistance, this paper highlights the commendable efforts of those pushing for change and even offers recommendations to standard setters and accountants at large as to the way forward in approaching the complex dynamics involving the measurement of intellectual capital. The information of the research project was gathered from various secondary sources of data. The sources range from industry trade journals; practitioner accounting journals; and academic publications, to give both practical and theoretical views on the subject matter. A comparison will first be made that looks into the limitations of existing financial models and the subsequent implications of ignoring IC in financial statements versus the significance of accounting for IC. The second part entails comparing IC valuation techniques using conventional reporting standards against proposed new reporting methodologies. From this discussion, a conclusion will be drawn which will include a proposition of a way forward in addressing IC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present international comparisons of potential output growth among several economies—Canada, the euro area, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States—for the period 1991–2004, for which we construct consistent and homogenous capital stock series. The main estimates rely on a structural approach where output of the whole economy is described by a Cobb–Douglas function and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is estimated allowing for possible breaks in the deterministic trend. The results confirm that over the considered period the potential gross domestic product growth has been faster in the United States than in other studied countries, reflecting a combination of higher labour contribution and faster TFP growth. Overall, this paper might help to shed some light on cross-country differences in economic performance over the recent period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates forward-looking and forecast-based Taylor rules for France, Germany, Italy, and the euro area. Performing extensive tests for over-identifying restrictions and instrument relevance, we find that asset prices can be highly relevant as instruments in policy rules. While asset prices improve Taylor rule estimates, different assets prove most relevant across countries and this result could be seen as complicating the tasks of the European Central Bank. Encompassing tests show that forecast-based outperform forward-looking Taylor rules. A policy implication is that central banks ought to release their own forecasts and the basis upon which they are generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes 47 reverse takeovers (RTOs), in which privately held firms acquire public firms to obtain listing status in Singapore and Thailand between 2007 and 2015. Unlike U.S. RTOs in prior studies, these transactions cannot be regarded as short-cuts to bypass listing rules since merged firms must meet the same minimum listing requirement as firms listing with IPOs. Rather, private firms treat RTOs as an opportunity to become public firms without immediate dilution by acquiring smaller firms at bargain prices. By examining shareholder circulars and analysis of transaction characteristics, we find that co-parties tend to cite growth from business diversification as their motivation for RTOs. Distressed public firms more frequently emphasize the motivation to reorganize and revive by merging with stronger private firms. Analysis of return and financial accounting performance shows that the merged firms experience improved growth and generate positive wealth impact; thus, offering opportunity for incumbent shareholders of public firms to recover some of their investment value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the Discrete Sources Method has been extended to describe the influence of the geometry asymmetry of a core-shell particle accounting for the effect of spatial dispersion inside the plasmonic metal shell. We found that varying the plasmonic shell thickness has more influence on the near field intensity distribution then on the average enhancement factor. Besides, we demonstrates that the effect of spatial dispersion can decrease the near field intensity up to 60% of its value and it provides a small blue shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the liaison between taxation and corporate governance issues of listed multinational firms and the core characteristics of their boards' functioning. The aim is to capture the determinant factors of board independency of listed firms as well as taxation, through a multiple regression analysis. For this reason, two models are examined, in order to get the impact of financial and non-financial factors in board independence and taxation, such as the number of directors and/or managers, the number of recorded shareholders and subsidiaries. In order to confirm results, taxation, as a compulsory expense, is examined so as to identify whether and in what extent impacts to board independency. Corporate governance indicators are also used as financial factors that relate directly with the viability and efficiency of a firm. The sample data is comprised of 918 listed European companies, over the period 2006–2015. Country determinant, as a supportive element in this research, enhances understanding of the core topic, that of board independency and taxation. Results are very promising regarding corporate governance practices, implemented by sample firms, providing at the same time evidence about their corporate profile and the possibility of overtrading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present a solution to the problem that the need to accommodate the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses for reliabilism. Defeaters are supposed to remove justification for previously justified beliefs. According to standard process reliabilism, the justification of a belief depends on the reliability of a process that is already completed when a defeater for that belief is obtained. It is hard to see, then, how a defeater can affect reliabilist justification, if that justification, from the perspective of the defeater, lies wholly in the past. What is more, undercutting defeaters plausibly defeat by generating incompatibilities with higher-order propositions (Sturgeon in Philos Stud 169(1):105–118, 2014; Melis in Philos Stud 170(3):433–442, 2014). This is hard to integrate with reliabilism which explicitly denies higher-order conditions for justification. I argue that both of these phenomena can be accommodated by it via what I call the "Replacement Principle": when a defeater is obtained, it generates either a logical incompatibility (in cases of rebutting defeat) or a doxastic incompatibility (in cases of undercutting defeat). The resulting tension is registered and initiates a reasoning process that compares the epistemic support for the defeater with that for the defeated belief. This process may replace the original reliable formation process as a doxastic base for the defeated belief. If the defeater is not given its due weight in the reasoning process, that process was unreliable and if the defeated belief is retained as a result, it will be unjustified. This is intuitively the right result. Since reasoning is reliable, only if it is rational, the account manages to capture the intuition that disregarding a defeater would be irrational without having to make rationality a condition for justification. Replacement is not only plausible on causal pictures of doxastic basing, but also required in order to allow for the possibility of belief reevaluation in general and is therefore not an ad hoc addition to reliabilism, but rather part of its inherent explanatory resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I both propose and discuss a novel account of truthmaking. I begin by showing what truthmaking is not: it is not grounding and it is not correspondence. I then show what truthmaking is by offering an account that appeals both to grounding and what I call 'deep correspondence'. After I present the account and show that it is an account that unifies, I put it to work by showing how it can overcome an objection to truthmaking, how we can get truthmaking from correspondence, what it says about truthmaker necessitation, and how it can explain a connection between truthmaker maximalism and pluralism about truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increased penetration of distributed renewable energy sources (DRES) in the grid, new pathways are required to keep the electricity distribution system stable. The provision of ancillary services (AS) by the DRES can contribute in this regard. However, it is necessary to communicate the need for AS from the third party providers such as distribution system operator (DSO) to the DRES in an efficient and scalable manner. To this end, a flexible information and communication technology (ICT) architecture is presented in this paper, and the requirements for the architecture are elaborated. We argue that this architecture is capable of supporting the present and future needs of electricity distribution networks. To illustrate its utility and effectiveness, an accounting use case for DSOs has been presented; it describes a remuneration scheme for the AS provision. A dashboard has been developed to enable communication via this architecture and to allow control of the grid. In addition, a distributed ledger technology for the realization of accounting has been analysed with respect to its scalability and performance capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we construct a new theory of nanobeams taking into account the dependence of the material properties on the stress state. The theory is based on the Euler–Bernoulli kinematic model in the first approximation. The beam material is isotropic but heterogeneous. For the first time, the physical nonlinearity and the dependence of the material properties on the temperature are taken into account in the study of nanobeams, and the theory is developed for arbitrary materials. It is based on the theory of small elasticplastic strains and on the the modified torque theory of elasticity. The stationary temperature field is determined by solving the three-dimensional Poisson equation with boundary conditions of orders 1–3. The initial equations are derived from the Hamilton–Ostrogradskii principle. The desired system of partial differential equations is reduced to the Cauchy problem by the finite difference method of the second order of accuracy, and the Cauchy problem is solved by the Runge–Kutta or Newmark method. At each time step, an iterative procedure is developed by the Birger method of variable elasticity parameters. The stationary solution follows from the dynamic solution of the problem obtained by the method of determination (the method of the parameter position). The convergence of the solution is investigated depending on the number of points of partition along the length and thickness of the beam in the finite difference method as well as on the method of solving the Cauchy problem and the size-dependent parameter, i.e., the solution of the problem is considered to have almost infinite number of degrees of freedom. Numerical examples are given for a beam rigidly clamped at the ends with the stress-strain diagram for aluminum. Accounting for the size-dependent parameter in the nanobeam theory significantly affects the load-carrying capacity of nanobeams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse the impact and persistence of shocks to global (push) and domestic (pull) factors on each component of the financial account for the Mexican Balance of Payments, at the highest degree of disaggregation, including investment by foreign residents in Mexican public and private sector securities, as well as investment by domestic residents in foreign securities. To this end, we estimate impulse response functions from vector autoregressive models for the period 1995–2015. We find that an increase in the foreign interest rate leads to lower portfolio investment. An increase in global risk generates lower portfolio investment, particularly in private sector securities. Foreign investors respond to a higher extent to foreign interest rate and liquidity shocks compared to domestic investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper was motivated by previous results (Meyer et al. Journal of Management, 40, 1010–1041, 2014) that appeared to contradict the popular idea that "strong" situations weaken the impact of personality on job performance. We extend situational strength theory by contending that, when a strong situation blocks one outlet for poor performance (e.g., low task performance), employees predisposed toward such behavior experience negative affect. They then displace their negative behavior to a second outlet (e.g., counterproductive work behavior), thereby strengthening their predispositions, unless that second outlet, too, is blocked by a strong situation. We then test this assertion using a two-wave survey (N = 369), analyzed using dual-stage moderated mediation. Results indicate strong support for this assertion vis-à-vis the personality traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness, thereby replicating and extending Meyer et al.'s (Journal of Management, 40, 1010–1041, 2014) seemingly anomalous results. However, results indicate weaker support vis-à-vis a third personality trait, emotional stability, which has a weaker bivariate relationship with counterproductive work behavior. The extended situational strength theory suggests important avenues for future research as well as practical guidelines for avoiding unintended consequences when applying strong situations in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seem to be cases where A believes p, and B believes not-p, but neither makes a mistake. This is known as faultless disagreement. According to the (realist) epistemic account, in at least some cases of faultless disagreement either A or B must believe something false, and the disagreement is faultless in the sense that each follows the epistemic norm. Recently, philosophers have raised various objections to this account. In this paper, I propose a new version of the epistemic account and show how it can handle those objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buckling analysis of isotropic and orthotropic plates resting on two-parameter Pasternak's foundations using the four-variable refined plate theory is presented in this paper. The theory takes account of transverse shear effects and parabolic distribution of the transverse shear strains through the thickness of the plate; hence, it is unnecessary to use shear correction factors. Governing equations are derived from the principle of virtual displacements. The nonlinear strain–displacement of Von Karman relations is also taken into consideration. The closed-form solution of a simply supported rectangular plate subjected to in-plane loading has been obtained by using the Navier method. Numerical results obtained by the present theory are compared with classical plate theory solutions, first-order shear deformable theory solutions, higher-order shear deformation theory and available exact solutions in the literature. The effects of the foundation parameters, side-to-thickness ratio and modulus ratio, the isotropic and orthotropic square plates are considered in this analysis. It can be concluded that the present theory, which does not require shear correction factor, is not only simple but also comparable to the first-order shear deformable theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically discusses an objection proposed by Nikolić against the naturalness of the stochastic dynamics implemented by the Bell-type quantum field theory, an extension of Bohmian mechanics able to describe the phenomena of particles creation and annihilation. Here I present: (1) Nikolić's ideas for a pilot-wave theory accounting for QFT phenomenology evaluating the robustness of his criticism, (2) Bell's original proposal for a Bohmian QFT with a particle ontology and (3) the mentioned Bell-type QFT. I will argue that although Bell's model should be interpreted as a heuristic example showing the possibility to extend Bohm's pilot-wave theory to the domain of QFT, the same judgement does not hold for the Bell-type QFT, which is candidate to be a promising possible alternative proposal to the standard version of quantum field theory. Finally, contra Nikolić, I will provide arguments in order to show how a stochastic dynamics is perfectly compatible with a Bohmian quantum theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41308-021-00139-3 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study responds to suggestions that business-school faculty are promoting distorted views of human nature and out-dated notions of ethics. Specifically, the paper examines in-depth interviews with a sample of 15 faculty centrally-positioned within the field’s symbolic market, namely, academics who completed their Ph.D. programs in the same institutional space as the editors of five top accounting journals. The paper finds that ethics are for the most part important to these individuals, but that the field’s general adherence to the neoclassical economic model creates pressures that militate against a deeper concern for and more adequate treatment of the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]