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The purpose of this paper is to research the use of accounting information by politicians. Based on the Portuguese Parliament setting, it seeks to understand how useful politicians consider this information to be, what type of budgetary and financial information they use, and for what purposes. Finally, the research also seeks to find out whether politicians resort to expert intermediaries or advisors help them in the use of this information.

Following a qualitative and interpretative methodology, the study draws upon interviews with Members of Parliament in Portugal (and their technical advisors (TAs)) from all political parties, in particular the members of the Budget, Finance and Administrative Modernization Committee (COFMA) of the Parliament.

Research shows that, due to the general lack of knowledge and the complexity of the accounting information, politicians in the Parliament do not use it frequently, only occasionally. To be better or worse informed for the debates and other activities depends on each Member of Parliament’s personal willingness to prepare oneself, notwithstanding some aggregated and previously analyzed information made available by official technical support units. Parliamentarians may also resort to TAs, who prepare the information at their request. Both intermediaries and TAs are deemed important to support parliamentarians’ understanding of more technical budgetary and financial issues.

This paper shows that politicians acknowledge there is room for improving the role of information intermediaries and advisors, who would support them to better understand and use accounting information. Parliamentary groups incharge of hiring advisors, as well as accounting professionals, in Portugal and in other countries, must be aware of the very useful role accountants play in this process.

While allowing to understand whether and how politicians use accounting information, this research contributes to the process of public sector accounting reforms in Portugal, and at an international level, inasmuch as public sector accounting and reporting standards should better address these users’ information needs. Assuming that these reforms would foster more accurate, transparent and useful information for accountability and decision making, it is essential that politicians acknowledge and become real users of accounting information, in order to accomplish those objectives.

This study contributes to the general knowledge of how politicians use accounting information. Academic studies so far have not gathered enough evidence about the type of accounting information that is actually important for politicians. This paper highlights that use of such information by politicians depends on individual skills and their willingness to receive the appropriate advice.

This quantitative study aims to examine the impact of accumulated knowledge of accounting on the academic performance of Cost Accounting students.

The sample consisted of 89 students enrolled in the Accounting program run by a business college in Kuwait during 2015. Correlation and linear least squares regression analyses tested the study’s hypothesis.

Results indicated significant impact of accumulated knowledge on academic performance, with and without controls for other factors.

The findings provide administrators, academic advisors, accounting educators and researchers with a useful benchmark for the development of accounting curriculum, teaching plans and strategies and future academic research, and it forms the basis for comparative work aimed at the harmonization of international accounting education.

The study provides empirical support for the theoretical prediction that quantitative accumulated knowledge in accounting has an impact on the academic performance of students, especially in Cost Accounting. Internationally, it provides a foundation for future comparative studies, potentially leading to the harmonization of international accounting education. Regionally, it attempts to fill some of the gaps in the regional accounting education literature. Locally, the study seeks to improve the performance of the accounting students in Cost Accounting within the college where data were collected.

It is difficult to develop an overall picture of the practice of management accounting (MA) in farms and farm enterprises (FEs) because little research has been published on the topic, and these studies are mostly discrete and unconnected to the others. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available research, develop an explanatory framework for MA practices in farming entities and identify some major avenues for future research on the topic.

This paper uses systematic literature review methods. After an extensive database search and an examination of references/citations, 41 empirical journal articles published between 1964 and 2016 are identified, described and analyzed in this research paper.

The findings reveal that the practice of MA in farms is subject to information problems and that the empirical research on this topic largely lacks a theoretical explanation. Therefore, the explanatory framework of MA practices in farming entities reveals that these practices are subject to influencing factors such as familism, government farm policies, market competition, technological changes, the seasons and the weather/climate.

The overall limited findings on the practice of MA in FEs indicate that caution should be taken when generalizing the current knowledge on the use of MA practices in other organizational forms to farming entities. Moreover, future research should draw on explicit theories to explain empirical results.

This paper is the first comprehensive literature review of studies on MA practices in farms and FEs.

Green sukuk is a tool to finance climate change which has garnered considerable attention. However, having only recently come into existence has its own set of challenges for this tool that require immediate identification and government intervention to intensify its growth. This study aims to explore the challenges encountered by green sukuk issuers and the structure of a reconciled green sukuk issuance framework to speed up the market’s growth with the right interventions.

The study engaged a qualitative approach via multiple case study interviews with green sukuk issuers and used expert views for data triangulation to generate the findings. A total of four green sukuk issuers participated in the interviews, and for data triangulation purposes, four expert’s opinions and views were considered. The thematic analysis technique is used to report the findings.

It was revealed that amongst the challenges encountered in the green sukuk market are shoddy green taxonomy, difficulty in identifying green assets, it is time-consuming and costly, no compelling benefits and exposure to higher-risk profiles.

This study may be influenced by observer error and observer bias. However, the researchers have taken cautious steps to overcome these issues by following strict case study methodology procedures and triangulating the qualitative research findings with views from green sukuk experts. These interventions increased the rigour and trustworthiness of the results.

This study is amongst the pioneer in Malaysia, exploring challenges in the green sukuk market. The results are relevant to governments, regulators, institutions and central banks to structure the right interventions to counter the challenges. Greater government involvement is required to strengthen the green sukuk market and to spearhead the green agenda.

Widespread forces of cultural rationalization have combined with parallel expansions in the legitimated actorhood of human persons. The result has been an explosion of formalized organization. Empowered organizations, filled with empowered actors, rise and expand in every social sector and every society. The expanded cultural principles involved lead many actors to play roles as “others,” helping individual and organizational actors to fill their often implausibly expanded roles. The chapters of this volume reflect the processes involved.

Advisors play a key role in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) process, but research to date has rarely focused on how their influence impacts these transactions. The present chapter takes stock of the present literature on M&A advisors from finance, economics, and management in order to integrate the currently diverging research traditions into a coherent framework. The current research has focused on proximal acquisition outcomes, like acquisition premiums or expected performance in the form of cumulative abnormal returns, but there is limited theoretical understanding of the advisors impact on the post-acquisition period. Moreover, while the role of advisor reputation has been highlighted on both the management and finance literatures as an important aspect of the role advisors play in the M&A process, there seems to be much to be addressed. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of the relationship between the advisor and the acquirer or target presents challenges to researchers where the advisor acts both as a provider of expertise in the M&A process, but may be simply acting on their own best interest. The new framework that the authors present here provides management scholars with a roadmap into a cohesive research agenda that can inform our theoretical understanding of the role of M&A advisors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons why public sector managers approach either consultants or academics for their help in solving problems related to public sector accounting and management reforms.

A field study based on reactions to real‐life constructs and answers to questions about the experiences of public sector managers in Italian, Dutch and Swedish central government agencies.

Public sector managers approach consultants, due to their experience‐based knowledge, for solving well‐defined practical and technical problems. In the case of tacit knowledge, a strong interaction between the public sector manager and the consultant, denoted as socialization, is the typical way of knowledge transfer. In accordance with expectations, public sector managers approach academics for advice regarding value‐laden problems in their organization. However, academics also give advice about practical and technical issues, usually being the primary domain of consultants, but often when impartial advice is required. Although the authors expected academics to transfer knowledge rather detached from their clients (interiorization), this was not corroborated, because often academics work closely with their counterparts in the client organization.

The theoretical framework was helpful in explaining the role of consultants, but it required refinement in explaining the role of academics as external experts.

The paper contributes to a better articulated set of preferences of public sector managers in asking advice from either a consultant or an academic.

The paper offers a simultaneous and systematic empirical examination of the roles that consultants and academics play in public sector management and accounting reforms.

The purpose of this study is to gauge the awareness and perception of Indian individual investors about a new fintech innovation known as robo-advisors in the wealth management scenario. Robo-advisors are comprehensive automated online advisory platforms that help investors in managing wealth by recommending portfolio allocations, which are based on certain algorithms.

This is a phenomenological qualitative study that used five focussed group discussions to gather the stipulated information. Purposive sampling was used and the sample comprised investors who actively invest in the Indian stock market. A semi-structured questionnaire and homogeneous discussions were used for this study. Discussion time for all the groups was 203 min. One of the authors moderated the discussions and translated the audio recordings verbatim. Subsequently, content analysis was carried out by using the NVIVO 12 software (QSR International) to derive different themes.

Factors such as cost-effectiveness, trust, data security, behavioural biases and sentiments of the investors were observed as crucial points which significantly impacted the perception of the investors. Furthermore, several suggestions on different ways to enhance the awareness levels of investors were brought up by the participants during the discussions. It was observed that some investors perceive robo-advisors as only an alternative for fund/wealth managers/brokers for quantitative analysis. Also, they strongly believe that human intervention is necessary to gauge the emotions of the investors. Hence, at present, robo-advisors for the Indian stock market, act only as a supplementary service rather than a substitute for financial advisors.

Due to the explorative nature of the study and limited participants, the findings of the study cannot be generalised to the overall population. Future research is imperative to study the dynamic nature of artificial intelligence (AI) theories and investigate whether they are able to capture the sentiments of individual investors and human sentiments impacting the market.

This study gives an insight into the awareness, perception and opinion of the investors about robo-advisory services. From a managerial perspective, the findings suggest that additional attention needs to be devoted to the adoption and inculcation of AI and machine learning theories while building algorithms or logic to come up with effective models. Many investors expressed discontent with the current design of risk profiles of the investors. This helps to provide feedback for developers and designers of robo-advisors to include advanced and detailed programming to be able to do risk profiling in a more comprehensive and precise manner.

In the future, robo-advisors will change the wealth management scenario. It is well-established that data is the new oil for all businesses in the present times. Technologies such as robo-advisor, need to evolve further in terms of predicting unstructured data, improvising qualitative analysis techniques to include the ability to gauge emotions of investors and markets in real-time. Additionally, the behavioural biases of both the programmers and the investors need to be taken care of simultaneously while designing these automated decision support systems.

This study fulfils an identified gap in the literature regarding the investors’ perception of new fintech innovation, that is, robo-advisors. It also clarifies the confusion about the awareness level of robo-advisors amongst Indian individual investors by examining their attitudes and by suggesting innovations for future research. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the awareness, perception and attitudes of individual investors towards robo-advisors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of attitudes toward the perceived importance of corporate ethics and social responsibility, and Machiavellianism, a general measure of the propensity for manipulative and deceitful behaviour, on tax professionals' willingness to participate in aggressive tax avoidance schemes of corporate clients.

The paper is based on a survey of tax professionals in Hong Kong.

The paper finds that Machiavellianism affects tax advisors' expressed viewpoints toward the importance of corporate ethics and social responsibility, which affect professional judgements toward aggressive tax minimisation. As anticipated, high Machiavellians are more likely to endorse the traditional “stockholder view” of corporate responsibility (which holds that corporations have little responsibility beyond maximising their profits), and less likely to support the “stakeholder view” (which recognises corporate responsibilities to a broader range of potential stakeholders). The stockholder view (but not the stakeholder view) of corporate responsibility mediates the relationship between Machiavellianism and ethical/social responsibility judgements. Machiavellianism also had significant direct effects on ethical and social responsibility judgements.

The paper provides insights into the decision processes used to justify aggressive tax minimisation strategies. The findings indicate that commonly articulated views toward corporate ethics and social responsibility may be used to support unethical strategies. In particular, the finding that the stockholder view mediates the relationship between Machiavellianism and ethical/social responsibility judgements suggests that the stockholder view may be adopted to rationalise overly aggressive tax avoidance.

International business, Accounting and Finance.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels (advanced financial accounting, international accounting, other accounting and business courses with an international setting.

The case uses the Asia Pulp & Paper Company’s (APP) entry into the international debt market to highlight the consequences of different business practices between the East (in this case, Indonesia) and the West. On the one hand, it shows that APP was set up as the “front” to access international debt capital; on the other, it reveals the naïvety of Western lenders who parted with their funds without conducting a thorough background research on the financial viability of the company they invested in. The APP debacle is a poignant reminder for market participants and business/accounting students that the divergence of the business settings across countries can make business contractual arrangements tenuous and corporate financial information irrelevant to its users. It also exposes the unique ways of how some Asian countries conduct their business affairs.

The following are the expected learning outcomes: comprehend the impact of differences in culture and ethnic origin on business practices; evaluate the impact of cultural nuances on the legality of contracts in the international business setting; understand the impact of currency fluctuation on the financial position of multinational firms; and be more cautious in conducting business and entering into contracts with foreign firms.

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CCS 1: Accounting and Finance.