China Science

This work explores the efficacy of using students as surrogates for experienced managers in escalation studies. Participants were 222 managers with substantial project planning and evaluation experience and 146 undergraduate business students. Our results show that the experienced managers exhibited a strong tendency to continue projects, with this tendency being positively related to the degree of project completion. Read the rest of this entry →

This article examines preparers’ consolidation judgments and how they are impacted by the precision of accounting standards (substance-over-form versus rules-based). The examination is performed via two laboratory experiments in a consolidated accounting setting. Read the rest of this entry →

This article analyses the eighteenth-century accounting practices of the Japanese trading station or factory of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC). The factory’s trade and its reported profits declined during the eighteenth century, but because of the complexity of the accounting issues involved, contemporaries held different views on whether the accounting data supported a continuation of the factory’s operations. For similar reasons, some historians have argued that the maintenance of the factory in the face of declining profits illustrates the poor quality of the VOC’s management, while others have argued in favour of the economic viability of the factory. The purpose of this article is to a more comprehensive analysis of the accounting issues facing the Japanese factory present in the eighteenth century than offered to date, in order to propose a way in which the accounting records may be approached as a source of data for historical research. :The conclusions are twofold. First, there were three main accounting issues facing the factory that should be considered when interpreting the accounting records. These issues can be summarized as transfer pricing, currency translation and overhead allocation. Read the rest of this entry →

This study examines investor response to three events that help define a federal class action securities lawsuit, specifically, the announcement that names an issuer as a defendant in the lawsuit (at the class action filing date), the disclosure or accounting restatement that ‘corrects’ the information deficiency (at the end of the class period), and the date at which the fraud on the market allegedly begins (at the beginning of the class period). Read the rest of this entry →

This article is a study of the introduction of a modern costing technology – activity based costing (ABC) – into a health care organization which is undergoing change. The transformation of this organization is of particular interest as it focused on the experience of a service which had always existed by collecting blood, which is given as a free donation (the gift), and which is then converted into a variety of health care products. Read the rest of this entry →

This article reviews the author’s acquaintance with the literature of economic development, with particular reference to Africa, over the last 50 years. The belief that this development is propelled by the supply of capital, effectively of international aid, is criticized, and emphasis put instead on the effective demand for capital. This demand has been low in Africa; hence much capital investment has been of low or no productivity, and aid has generally failed to fulfil expectations. Aid continues nonetheless, since it serves donor as well as recipient interests and political opposition to it is weak. Read the rest of this entry →

This paper argues that warlord or ‘non-state’ politics have not brought about as fundamental a political transformation as recent discourses about violent ‘state collapse’ in Africa seem to suggest. In the context of the territorial break-up of the central state in the DR Congo, it examines the reconfiguration of political power in North Kivu Read the rest of this entry →

Events or occurrences perceived as miracles are a feature of all religious traditions, although not to the same degree. The perception of a miracle is closely connected to ideas that are extant concerning the relations between the material world and the invisible world. Recent decades appear – at least from fragmentary evidence – to have seen an increase in the number of occurrences perceived as miracles in Africa, in Christian, Muslim and indigenous traditions. Read the rest of this entry →