Costing systems including activity-based costing generate average cost data. When these average costs are used for decision-making it is implicitly assumed that they approximate marginal costs. (In other words it is assumed every cost is strictly proportional to activity they are entirely...

Using data from hospitals in the state of Washington, we examine the time-series behavior of overhead costs. We find that more accurate predictions of changes in costs are usually generated by assuming a cost will not change at all (except for inflation) than by assuming that the cost will...

The most widely accepted empirical dividend model is that proposed by Lintner, who argued that firms smooth dividends over time. Many theoretical dividend models, however, either predict that dividends should be highly variable, or at least offer no support for the smoothing hypothesis. We use a...

In 2002, the European Union (EU) Parliament passed a regulation that requires consolidated and simple accounts for all companies listed in the EU to use International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for fiscal years starting after January 1, 2005. This change in accounting systems will have...

We examine the interaction between two forms of hospital regulation and their effect on hospital behavior. Because reimbursement under federal Medicare regulation is a fixed fee per diagnosis, hospitals are encouraged to behave more like cost centers and reduce cost through shorter average...

A significant portion of CEOs in publicly-listed Chinese state-owned enterprises receive zero pay from the companies for which they work. Instead, they are paid directly by their controlling shareholder who can be the Chinese government or parent firms controlled by the Chinese government. While...

We examine the impact of government commitment to combating climate change on firm value in relation to a firm's climate risk exposure. We identify major recent regulatory events around climate change that are not fully predicted, including the surprise election of Donald Trump to President of...