Georg Schneider , Andreas Scholze , Fabian Meißner
{"title":"Asymmetric taxation, limited liability, and agency conflicts","authors":"Georg Schneider , Andreas Scholze , Fabian Meißner","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2021.100739","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2021.100739","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Current income tax systems are characterized by an asymmetric treatment of gains and losses. This implies that the (effective) tax rate on profits exceeds that on losses. We study the contractural relationship between two parties (the principal and the agent). For example, such a relationship occurs if a franchisee (agent) contracts with a franchiser (principal) or when a new partner (agent) enters a partnership (principal). We focus on the effect of the agent's asymmetric taxation on the principal's optimal contract and show that the principal's expected profit is a non-monotonous function of the agent's loss tax rate. In particular, we show that the principal can be strictly better off if the agent is taxed more heavily. This result stands in contrast to the existing literature, which has only shown that lower taxation at the agent's level increases the principal's expected profit.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"51 ","pages":"Article 100739"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2021.100739","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46643037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The effects of an enabling approach to eco-control on firms’ environmental performance: A research note","authors":"Campbell Heggen , V.G. Sridharan","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100724","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100724","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This research note provides additional empirical evidence relating to the performance effects of diagnostic and interactive control, both in isolation and in combination with an enabling approach to control. Drawing on data from a survey of 221 Australian firms, the findings suggest that while diagnostic eco-control has no direct influence on environmental performance, its interaction with an enabling approach yields a positive complementary effect. However, while interactive eco-control and an enabling approach are independently associated with environmental performance, their interaction effect is not significant, which implies that their combination may not necessarily be value-adding. Finally, the results also indicate a non-linear (inverse U-shaped) association between an enabling approach to control and environmental performance, which implies that an increased emphasis on an enabling approach may lead to diminishing marginal returns.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"50 ","pages":"Article 100724"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100724","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43867543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sharing sustainability through sustainability control activities. A practice-based analysis","authors":"Marion Ligonie","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100726","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100726","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>How can sustainability control change organizational practices dominated by the business-as-usual paradigm? This paper offers a practice-based perspective on the question with the aim of approaching sustainability control tools as something organizations do rather than something they have. Using data from an ethnographic study of a gambling company, the study explores how sustainability actors put into effect sustainability control tools. It shows that actors enacted sustainability control tools in different ways, each of which carried out through distinct arrays of control activities: (a) by capturing an existing tool in another practice, (b) by adding a new hybrid tool to another practice, or (c) by capturing a tool that was already shared between several practices. Through these control activities, they attempted to interlock the sustainability practice with other practices and produced distinct types of links – respectively, (a) reassembling, (b) expanding and (c) rippling. These findings contribute to unpacking sustainability control by highlighting that sustainability tools can only become <em>control</em> tools when they are supported by arrays of activities tying practices together, and that these interrelations can happen in different ways. These ways of enacting control enable sustainability controlling to various extents and they affect practices differently. The paper also contributes to practice theory by specifying how particular configurations of practices emerge and alter the practices involved.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"50 ","pages":"Article 100726"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100726","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42879984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Management accountants and strategic management accounting: The role of organizational culture and information systems","authors":"Wael Hadid , Mahmoud Al-Sayed","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100725","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100725","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study aims to contribute to the scant contingency theory<span> literature on the determinants of strategic management<span> accounting (SMA) practices and the role management accountants play. We develop and test a more complex theoretical model than in prior studies, to simultaneously examine the role of three variables: management accountant networking, information systems (IS) quality and organizational culture. These have not been examined in a single model before in the SMA literature. Using data from 149 UK manufacturing business units and the partial least square structural equation modeling, our findings document a positive relationship between management accountant networking and the implementation of SMA practices. However, this relationship is positively moderated by IS quality, which further enables management accountants to implement SMA practices. Unlike IS quality, we do not find empirical support for similar moderating effects by the outcome-oriented culture and innovation-oriented culture. Instead, the innovation-oriented culture has a significant indirect positive effect on SMA implementation through management accountant networking but not a direct one. In contrast, we find a direct positive impact of outcome-oriented culture on SMA implementation but not an indirect one through management accountant networking. These results suggest that in outcome-driven business units, the implementation of SMA practices may not be limited to the accounting function. Managers in other functions may be motivated to implement SMA practices even when management accountants are not part of the process.</span></span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"50 ","pages":"Article 100725"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100725","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43236733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mood and honesty in budget reporting","authors":"Martin Altenburger","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100707","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100707","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this paper, I investigate whether the honesty of managers’ budget reporting depends on the state of their mood. The results from a laboratory experiment demonstrate that managers in a positive mood report their budgets more honestly than managers in a negative mood. Attaining a neutral mood state, however, does not increase honesty sufficiently to balance out the effects of a negative mood state. The hedonic contingency theory<span> suggests that the cognitive process underlying a display of higher honesty when the manager is in a positive mood stems from the manager’s desire to maintain this mood by reporting the budget more truthfully. The results of supplemental analyses show that the effect of the manager’s mood on honesty remains stable over multiple reporting periods. By examining the expected firm profits, I reveal that a contract based on the assumption that a manager will be honest is more beneficial than a truth-inducing contract derived from economic theory. If the manager is in a more positive mood, this relative advantage increases due to the effect of mood on honesty.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"50 ","pages":"Article 100707"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100707","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49345941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Management accounting systems in institutional complexity: Hysteresis and boundaries of practices in social housing","authors":"Aziza Laguecir , Anja Kern , Cécile Kharoubi","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100715","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100715","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper examines how organizational actors use Management Accounting Systems (MAS) in a public social housing organization in a context marked by institutional pressures for both social and financial accountability. More specifically, we use practice theory to examine the articulation of <em>practical intelligibility, i.e.</em> how actors make sense of competing institutional pressures in their day-to-day practices while being informed by less financially loaded MAS. Our findings underline that, despite increased institutional pressures on social aspects, actors’ compromises reveal the predominance of financial concerns. We show that this might be due to, not only the current institutional pressures or the MAS, but also to the hysteresis of a structuring element of practice: the financially oriented teleo-affective structures imposed by previous NPM reforms. This study also describes the role of ABC/M and practice boundaries in the articulation of practical intelligibility for conflicting institutional pressures and in the way actors compromise.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"49 ","pages":"Article 100715"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100715","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44345488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shannon W. Anderson , Henri C. Dekker , Karen L. Sedatole , Eelke Wiersma
{"title":"When one size does not fit all: Using ex post subjective ratings to provide parity in risk-adjusted compensation","authors":"Shannon W. Anderson , Henri C. Dekker , Karen L. Sedatole , Eelke Wiersma","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100706","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>Firms typically use a ‘one-size-fits-all’ (OSFA) compensation contract that specifies a common formulaic relation between performance and compensation (i.e., a performance bonus) for non-executive managers in similar jobs. However, a contract that is appropriate on average, may be suboptimal for individual managers if heterogeneity in the operating environment creates varying compensation risk. We use field data from a retail firm that introduced an OSFA bonus compensation plan for its store managers. The common bonus formula is based on a weighted sum of objective measures of performance and a subjective rating made by supervisors. The firm intended the supervisors’ discretionary subjective rating to evaluate performance on dimensions that are difficult to measure (e.g., store appearance). We test and find that supervisors give uniformly higher subjective ratings to managers whose objective measure of sales performance is measured with greater noise, and to managers who face higher performance target difficulty, the latter assessed both prior to (</span><em>ex ante</em>) and subsequent to (<em>ex post</em>) the evaluation period. These results obtain after controlling for manager ability and performance, and for alternative mechanisms to mitigate differences in compensation risk (e.g., salary changes, sales target changes, and bonus adjustments). The evidence suggests that supervisors use discretion in subjective ratings to provide manager-specific risk premiums for non-executive managers who are subject to an OSFA contract.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"49 ","pages":"Article 100706"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100706","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"137274673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Organizational Performance Matters for Personnel Decisions: Executives’ Career Patterns in a Conglomerate","authors":"Jonghwan Kim (Simon)","doi":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100695","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.mar.2020.100695","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This study examines whether the performance of a business unit affects the likelihood of employees’ promotion in an organization and explores potential moderators of the relationship. Using a sample of 4,657 executive-years in Samsung Group affiliates, it finds that promotions are more likely with good organizational performance, as measured in terms of employment growth and return on assets (ROA). The main finding is robust to alternatively specified ROA variables. The results reveal that the association (i) exists only for rank promotions with a substantial increase in compensation but not for function promotions involving substantial job changes, (ii) is significant only for executives at relatively lower ranks, and (iii) is stronger in business units that allow more frequent internal transfers. The findings from the conglomerate suggest practical enabling mechanisms by which large, decentralized, and growth-decelerating firms can overcome a tradeoff between the maximization of promotion-based incentives and the efficient operation of a hierarchy.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51429,"journal":{"name":"Management Accounting Research","volume":"49 ","pages":"Article 100695"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.mar.2020.100695","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48196588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}