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Machine learning methods have recently gained attention in business applications. We will explore the suitability of machine learning methods, particularly support vector regression (SVR) and radial basis function (RBF) approximation, in forecasting company sales. We compare the one-step-ahead forecast accuracy of these machine learning methods with traditional statistical forecasting techniques such as moving average (MA), exponential smoothing, and linear and quadratic trend regression on quarterly sales data of 43 Fortune 500 companies. Moreover, we implement an additive seasonal adjustment procedure on the quarterly sales data of 28 of the Fortune 500 companies whose time series exhibited seasonality, referred to as the seasonal group. Furthermore, we prove a mathematical property of this seasonal adjustment procedure that is useful in interpreting the resulting time series model. Our results show that the Gaussian form of a moving RBF model, with or without seasonal adjustment, is a promising method for forecasting company sales. In particular, the moving RBF-Gaussian model with seasonal adjustment yields generally better mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values than the other methods on the sales data of 28 companies in the seasonal group. In addition, it is competitive with single exponential smoothing and better than the other methods on the sales data of the other 15 companies in the non-seasonal group.

As a financial policy, dividend policy significantly affects firm value. This chapter analyzes how stock prices react to dividend decisions. First, a dividend payment is an extraction of value; therefore, stock price theoretically drops by the dividend amount on the ex-dividend day. In practice, the price drop and the dividend magnitude are not equal because of tax clientele, short-term trading, and market microstructure. Investors are indifferent in trading stocks before and after stocks go ex-dividend if they obtain equal marginal benefits from the two trading times. The difference in tax rates on dividends and capital gains leads to the gap between the price drop and the dividend amount. Moreover, if transaction costs are considerable, investors have high incentives to short-sell stocks until they cannot obtain more profits. The final outcome of this short-term trading is the difference between the price drop and the dividend amount. Furthermore, market microstructure factors such as limit orders, bid-ask spread, and price discreteness also create this gap. Second, dividend announcements convey valuable information to outsiders. When firms announce increases (decreases) in dividends, their stock prices tend to increase (decrease). Third, dividend policy is negatively related to stock price volatility. This negative relationship is explained by duration effect, rate of return effect, arbitrage realization effect, and information effect. Empirical evidence for this relationship is found in many countries. Finally, dividend smoothing is also considered as a signal about firms' future earnings. Consequently, firms with stable dividends have higher market value. In other words, dividend stability has a positive effect on stock prices.

Recent U.S. Treasury yields have been constrained to some extent by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. Therefore, we compare the performance of a standard affine Gaussian dynamic term structure model (DTSM), which ignores the ZLB, to a shadow-rate DTSM, which respects the ZLB. Near the ZLB, we find notable declines in the forecast accuracy of the standard model, while the shadow-rate model forecasts well. However, 10-year yield term premiums are broadly similar across the two models. Finally, in applying the shadow-rate model, we find no gain from estimating a slightly positive lower bound on U.S. yields.

This paper analyzes what factors drive a company’s decision to align financial and management accounting policies as a measure of integration of management accounting and financial accounting at the highest hierarchy levels of a company.

Research hypotheses for six different determinants are developed: company size, number of operating segments and subsidiaries, internationality of the business, business strategy, company life cycle stage, and leverage. The hypotheses are tested using International Financial Reporting Standards 8 (IFRS 8) segment report data from a large sample of 175 German publicly listed companies.

A higher internationality of the business causes companies to choose a lower degree of integration. Companies with a prospector (defender) strategy choose a lower (higher) degree of integration. Companies in later life cycle stages and with higher leverage choose a lower degree of integration as well. Company size does not impact integration.

Companies have to decide whether, and to what extent, to integrate financial and management accounting and align the two sets of accounting policies. German companies have traditionally kept the two sets separate. As the research reported in this paper sheds light on when companies do not consider integration to be beneficial, it is useful for practitioners.

The legal reporting requirements in Germany as well as German accounting traditions make the German setting particularly suited for examining the integration of management accounting and financial accounting. Using the number of adjustments to financial accounting policies made for management accounting purposes is a novel approach, and the number of adjustments is a more fine-grained measure of integration at the highest hierarchy levels of a company than the measures used in prior literature.

We construct a new consumer price index for Canada covering the period from 1870 to 1900. Unlike previous indexes, it includes prices of clothing and household furnishings. This is important because these previously neglected components accounted for roughly 20% of consumers' expenditures. Moreover, the price of cotton goods, the most important textile product used for clothing and household furnishings, fell by half between 1870 and 1900 (much faster than other components of the price level). This has ramifications for both the level and trend of Canadian GDP. Because the largest changes in estimation concern the 1870s, we show that the country grew substantially faster than generally believed. It outpaced the United States so much that it entered the twentieth century with an improved economic standing relative to its southern neighbor.

This study sets out to shed light on those infrastructures underlying the ubiquitous, yet contested nature of governing by numbers. Investigating the 30-year long emergence of Germany’s “external quality assurance system” for hospitals, the authors show how methods for quantifying quality align with broader institutional and ideational shifts to form a calculative infrastructure for governance. Our study focuses on three phases of infrastructural development wherein methods for calculating quality, institutions for coordinating data and reform ideals converge with one another. The authors argue that the succession of these phases represents a gradual layering process, whereby old ways of enacting quality governance are not replaced, but augmented by new sets of calculative practices, institutions and ideas. Thinking about infrastructures as multi-layered complexes allows us to explore how they construct possibilities for control, remain stable over time and transform the fields in which they are embedded. Rather than governance being enacted according to a singular goal or value, we see an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support multiple modalities of control, including selective intervention, quality-based competition and automatized budgeting. Infrastructural change, instead of revolving around crises in measurement, is shaped by incubation periods – times of relative calm when political actors, medical practitioners, mathematicians, and many others explore and reflect past experiences, rather than follow erratic reforms fads. Finally, analysing infrastructures as multi-layered constructs underlines how they produce multiple images of care quality, which not only shift existing power relations, but also change the ways we understand and make sense of public services.

Purpose – We ask how far the Kemp–Wan Pareto-improving result can hold without inter-country transfers.

Methodology/approach – Assuming that the standard revenue and expenditure functions exist, we consider tariff adjustments for some group of countries such that they makes member countries better off without affecting non-member countries (a la Kemp–Wan).

Findings – Any group of countries can engage in a Pareto-improving non-discriminatory tariff reform without income transfers, if (i) there are more than two tradable goods and (ii) the initial tariff vectors of the member countries satisfy the non-proportionality condition. We then show that if these two conditions hold then countries can form a Pareto-optimal customs union. Depending on initial conditions, transfers may be necessary for the customs union to be Pareto-improving.

Originality/value of paper – The Pareto-improving result of this chapter is based on tariff reform only.

The chapter contains a methodology for formalized evaluation of the role of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Bank of Russia) in ensuring monetary and financial sustainability with the help of the monetary policy transmission mechanism and its inflation target regime. The significance of the research of the Bank of Russia operations to ensure financial sustainability is due to a number of circumstances: the uniqueness of the Bank of Russia that appeared only 27 years ago and experienced several devastating events related to the 1998 financial crisis, the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, and the stagnation of the Russian economy in 2014–2016, as well as high volatility of world prices for Russian commodity exports and the latest contra-Russian sanctions that significantly affected the volatility of the Russian ruble. Taking into account all the above, the issue of the Bank of Russia’s effective activities in the long run is aggravated by the fact that there are still more open questions than proven relationships of causes and effects regarding the potential of specific monetary policy instruments in the context of low-growth and high-volatility environment. The modeling of the Bank of Russia strategic and operational targets has been based on the parameters’ dependencies presented by the money (credit) multiplier in the interpretation of G. Schinasi (2006) and on the instability of stable economy hypothesis of H. Minsky (2008). As a result, there have been established the marginal levels of definite indicators of the banking system performance that could allow the Bank of Russia to ensure financial sustainability in the low-growth and high-volatility environment.