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This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

The authors extend research suggesting that external funders reduce their contributions to not-for-profit (NFP) organizations in response to media-reported CEO compensation levels.

Employing a maximum archival sample of 44,807 observations from US Form 990s, the authors comprehensively assess the extent that high relative NFP CEO compensation is associated with decreases in future contributions.

The authors find that donors and grantors react negatively to high relative CEO compensation but do not react adversely to high absolute executive compensation. Contributors seem to take issue with CEO compensation when they perceive it absorbs a relatively large portion of the organizations’ total expenses, which may hinder the NFP’s mission. Additional findings suggest that excess cash held by the NFP significantly exacerbates the negative baseline relationship between future contributions and high relative CEO compensation. Finally, both individual donors and professional grantors are sensitive to cash NFP CEO compensation levels, but grantors are more sensitive to CEO noncash compensation.

The authors’ data are focused on larger NFP organizations, so this limits the generalizability of the study. Furthermore, survivorship bias potentially influences their time-series investigations because a current year large-scale decrease in funding due to high relative CEO compensation may cause some NFP firms to drop out of the sample the following year due to significant funding reductions.

The study makes three noteworthy contributions to the literature. First, the study documents that the negative association between high relative CEO compensation levels and future donor and grantor contributions is much more widespread than previous literature suggested. Second, the authors document that high relative CEO compensation levels that trigger reductions in future contributions are significantly exacerbated by excess cash held by the NFP. Finally, the authors find that more sophisticated grantors are more sensitive to noncash CEO compensation levels as compared with donors.

Ethical issues and moral reasoning are important in the tax policy context because shared moral values create good societies (Paul et al., 2006). This study of the equitable relief subset of the innocent spouse rules is a good example of Congressional and IRS policy that has been substantially reformed twice (and continues to be reassessed) to create tax law that effectively treats innocent spouses equitably (Fleischman & Shen, 1999). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the degree to which subjects' moral reasoning, using the first two steps of Rest's (1986) ethical reasoning model, is related to perceived moral intensity (Jones, 1991) in several tax-based equitable relief situations. Integrative social contracts theory provides the study's theoretical lens.

Subjects evaluated a mailed-questionnaire containing two separate equitable relief scenarios about a spouse who was unaware of her husband's tax evasion – one scenario included verbal abuse and the other scenario contained no such abuse. The survey also contained a variety of ethics and attitudinal measures used to measure the study's focal variables. The results support the a priori hypotheses that moral intensity is positively related to recognition of an ethical issue, judgment that the ethical scenario is unethical, and judgment to grant equitable relief. In addition, the scenario containing emotional abuse was associated with increased levels of moral intensity as compared to the scenario that did not contain abuse. The paper concludes with a discussion of both professional and public policy implications.

Purpose: We examined whether the five-service quality dimensions described by SERVQUAL (SQ) and SERVPERF (SP) are consistent with perceived dimensions of management accounting (MA) service quality and we compared responses from users and providers.

Design/methodology/approach: We surveyed experienced providers and users of MA services to learn their perceptions and expectations of accounting service quality using SQ/SP adapted to an MA context. We used principal components analysis (PCA) to investigate service quality dimensions.

Findings: Participant responses identified three dimensions of MA service quality. There was a high degree of correspondence in dimensions of service quality between users and providers, but with notable differences in service priorities. A performance-only (SP) approach seems to provide a better measure of overall service quality than performance minus expectations (SQ).

Research limitations/implications: Participants self-selected to participate. Respondents were not matched by organization. The SQ/SP instrument may not capture important organization specific attributes. Our approach may serve as a guide for future studies of accounting service quality.

Practical implications: SP may be more useful to managers who wish to evaluate overall service quality. SQ may be more useful to identify specific gaps between user perceptions and expectations. SQ/SP assessments may help to improve the quality of MA service delivery and provider-user communications.

Originality/value: This is the first empirical study to our knowledge that reports on MA service quality dimensions using both the SQ and SP instruments. This study investigated perceptions and expectations of MA service users and providers. Our sample is a cross-section of experienced professionals.

Management discretion in the decision to reduce payroll costs is an important but under-researched issue in management accounting. The authors leverage the experimental environment to test the role of organizational culture (close vs. distant) and managerial communion (concern for others) along with their interaction with sales decline persistence (one vs. two periods) on planned layoff decisions. The authors find that communal managers are hesitant to downsize employees and that a close organizational culture interacts with one period sales declines to reduce layoffs although the influence of culture is reduced with persistent sales declines. The authors also examine the influence of culture and communion on managers’ preference for pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs. The authors find that a close culture and higher communion are associated with decisions to choose pay cuts over layoffs; however, these costs interact such that managers low in communion in a distant culture express a higher preference for layoffs. These findings illustrate the combined influence of economic, organizational, and dispositional factors on manager decisions about the extent and form of labor cost reductions due to sales declines.

The purpose of this chapter is to encourage investigation of management accounting (MA) service quality via comparisons of perceptions by service users and providers. Such comparisons are important in order to satisfy the needs of service users, assure good communications, justify the costs of MA, promote improved decision-making, and help improve the organizational standing of MA. We review literature from accounting, service marketing, and information systems, a common information service with similarities to accounting, to argue the case for conducting research on MA service quality.

The findings from our literature review show that research on service quality is seemingly important and abundant in many areas, but not concerning accounting. In essence, we don't know what perceptual differences exist between management accountants and their customers, why these differences might exist, or how organizations might identify and narrow identified gaps.

This chapter is among the first to call for research into perceived differences in MA service quality between users and providers. We argue for investigating sources of differences based on prior research in internal marketing and information systems. We offer a conceptual model that might be used as a basis in future investigations.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the entrepreneurial opportunity identification process of William Oscar Carpenter (WOC), a nineteenth century farmer, who went to California in 1850 to make his fortune in gold mining and ended up starting several new business ventures. The paper seeks to recount WOC's experiences and then apply them to similar issues faced by entrepreneurs in a modern‐day developing economy.

Using qualitative inquiry through archival research, the paper examines a compilation of WOC's letters to his future wife in New York. The letters provide a detailed account of the hardships and poor living conditions faced by gold seekers. The letters are examined and interpreted in the context of opportunity identification and the California Gold Rush, then applied to contemporary entrepreneurs.

WOC's letters elucidate the difficulties encountered making the trip from the East Coast to California, give later generations an historical viewpoint on a variety of social issues, and detail WOC's entrepreneurial activities in California. After a brief period as a successful miner, WOC's business career developed and branched out in different directions as he perceived entrepreneurial opportunities associated with the California Gold Rush. His story is an excellent example of opportunity recognition that has implications for current entrepreneurial activity.

WOC's awareness, anticipation, and timely action regarding business opportunity can be related, compared and contrasted with entrepreneurial activity today. The paper discusses these implications in light of opportunity recognition research and developing entrepreneurial economies.

This paper examines the optimal use of tax incentives relating to the Hawaii sales, use and excise tax. While many states offer exemptions to these taxes, Hawaii is the only known state that ties its excise tax credit to the depreciation method used on the state income tax return. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to use the Hawaii business tax context to illustrate the complex trade-offs and year-by-year analyses that small businesses often must employ in the presence of shifting federal tax policy that indirectly influences state tax structures because of tax coupling. Federal and Hawaii taxpayers can elect to expense depreciable property using the 179 expensing provision or to depreciate using the modified accelerated cost recovery system (MACRS). We develop a model that will help non-corporate small businesses in Hawaii determine their optimal tax cost recovery strategy: (1) Utilize Hawaii Section 179 immediate expensing on purchases of tangible personal property, or alternatively (2) Employ MACRS depreciation on these purchases combined with the Hawaii Capital Goods Excise Credit. Our modeling separately considers the possibility that the proprietor jointly makes the federal and Hawaii cost recovery decision, as well as the alternative possibility that these cost recovery decisions are made independently.

The study illustrates that the interaction of federal and state law differences exacerbated by frequent tax changes may cause significant tax compliance complexity and resulting confusion for small non-corporate business taxpayers who are generally not equipped to wrestle with such issues. From a policy perspective, states may wish to minimize complexity using coupling efforts with federal law or otherwise routinely revisit outdated state tax statutes that indirectly cause unintended tax consequences. States must be cognizant, however, that their own budget constraints may worsen if they fully couple with recent generous federal Section 179 expensing limits.