Search results

Set in September 1992, this exercise provides teams of students the opportunity to negotiate terms of a merger between AT&T and McCaw Cellular. AT&T, one of the largest U.S. corporations, was the dominant competitor in long-distance telephone communications in the United States. McCaw was the largest competitor in the rapidly growing cellular-telephone communications industry. Prior to the negotiations, AT&T had no position in cellular communications. This case and its companion (F-1143) are designed to allow students to be assigned roles to play. The case may pursue some or all of the following teaching objectives: exercising valuation skills, practicing strategic analysis, exercising bargaining skills, and illustrating practical aspects of mergers and acquisitions.

The theory of economic regulation is used to ascertain how and why the failure of regulatory governance in New Zealand contributed to investor losses of $8.5bn following the collapse of more than 60 public finance companies since 2006.

Relevant documents in the public domain, including government documents, government agency reports, newspaper articles, business journals, academic journals and trade publications were examined to gather evidence for this study.

This study found that the regulatory and supervisory framework failed to provide the trustee companies with the necessary enforcement powers and/or responsibilities and ensure effective auditor performance.

The findings suggest that, segmenting the market with different regulations for each market segment may discourage competition and may protect private interests rather than the public interest. It was also found that the control mechanisms for monitoring auditor performance are detective rather than preventive in nature which means investor losses from poor auditor performance can only be mitigated and not prevented.

This study analyses the contributing factors to the investor losses.

Scotland's day of reputation in publishing came with the Foulises, who set a standard not only for Scotland but also for Europe. Robert Foulis, who was inspired by Dr. Francis Hutcheson to become bookseller and printer, opened his shop in Glasgow about 1741. He and his brother Andrew had visited the Continent on occasions, devoting themselves to studying the printing houses there. In a letter written by Thomas Innes of the Scots College of Paris, a well‐known Jacobite, to James Edgar, Secretary to the Chevalier de St. George at Rome, he tells about the departure of the brothers from Paris, and says that they returned home by London bringing with them six or seven hogsheads of books they had bought up in France. On their return to Glasgow, Robert opened out as a bookseller, his printers being Urie & Co., a firm some of whose issues are of higher quality than had to that date been achieved in Scotland. There was an obvious leaning to the classical side in the early Foulis publishing, and this inclination increased as the connexion with the University became cemented.

This paper aims to examine the historical evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking in management accounting. As an organising framework, this paper applies the lens of management fashion theory, which is a perspective that is well suited to the examination of the lifecycles of management accounting concepts and ideas.

This paper pursues a bibliographic approach to better understand the past and present state of activity-based thinking. Thus, this paper attempts to piece together a mosaic picture by synthesising existing research on activity-based thinking from a wide range of academic and practitioner-oriented sources.

While the original activity-based costing (ABC) model has evolved and broadened and has generated new related concepts, studies suggest that it is not as successful as accounting concepts such as the balanced scorecard. The overall popularity trajectory of activity-based thinking can be considered to be negative, and it is currently not receiving much attention in accounting journals.

This paper is based on desk research and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources. In addition, it may be subject to the authors’ own biases when it comes to defining relevant articles studied.

This paper provides more insight into the evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking and discusses some of the reasons why it is not more widely used in practice.

Although many studies have examined the diffusion of ABC-related techniques, most are quite dated. More than 30 years have passed since the coining of the ABC term, and the time is ripe to provide a historical re-examination of the impact of this type of thinking in the field of accounting and to consider the latest developments and trends.

The setting of private finance companies that failed in New Zealand during 2006-2012 was characterized by weaker corporate governance and enforcement of securities law. This paper aims to explore audit failure in this setting and examine whether auditors erred in their audits of the failed finance companies and whether the audit failure rate of Big N auditors was different from that of non-Big N auditors.

This paper adopts the archival research method and uses three sets of evidence to assess audit failure – the frequency of going concern opinion (GCO) prior to failure, misstatements in the last audited financial statements, and the violation of the Code of Ethics.

The study finds that only 41 per cent of the sample companies received the GCO in their last audit prior to failure and provides evidence of material misstatements in the financial statements of a number of failed finance companies that received clean audit opinions prior to failure and breaches of the Code of Ethics by a number of auditors. These results strongly indicate audit failure for a number of failed finance companies. The audit failure rate, however, appears less for Big N auditors than for non-Big N auditors.

The study draws attention of the stock market regulator and the accounting profession to an area, the audit of private finance companies, that needs better quality audits.

This paper provides systematic evidence of audit failure in failed finance companies in New Zealand. It also furnishes preliminary evidence of Big N auditors compensating for weaker corporate governance.

Mr. Robert F. Ashby's article in the Autumn number on the provision of fiction in libraries encourages us, as consumers who are not librarians, to make a suggestion about the criteria used in selecting from one kind of popular fiction, crime stories. The element of something more than a puzzle and a story has always intrigued us in these books, and our interest in them is now almost exclusively in their discussion of this other factor. So we read crime fiction at random, from the local library; and recently we took the first six thrillers which neither of us had read from the Latest Additions shelf so as deliberately to consider them from this point of view.

An external management audit is an independent examination of an organization resulting in a statement to external users on the performance of the management function. A simulated corporate overdraft decision was posted to 354 bankers with three groups of 118 bankers receiving the same package of information but with different audit reports namely a financial audit report only, a favourable management audit report and an adverse management audit report. The response rate was 58 per cent (205 respondents). Conclusion overall that the bankers′ overdraft decisions were statistically significantly related to the addition of an adverse management audit report. The reasons given by the bankers for their corporate overdraft decisions also suggest that bankers would be interested in and would use external management audit reports.