This paper examines how, if at all, managers engage in cost management around periods of loan financing. Compared with matched benchmark firms, loan financing firms report lower operating costs prior to financing, while the difference in costs is insignificant post-financing. Loan financing...

We synthesize the growing literature on asymmetric cost behavior — a new way of thinking about costs and, by extension, earnings. While the traditional cost behavior model describes a mechanistic relation between activity and costs, this alternative view recognizes the primitives of cost...

The effect of Information Technology (IT) on employment is a crucial question in today's economy given the increased digitization of work. To analyze the relationship between IT use and firm-level employment, we examine the longitudinal role of IT use in the firm's total number of employees. Our...

Central to the economic theory of sticky costs is the proposition that managers consider adjustment costs when changing resource levels. We test this proposition using employment protection legislation (EPL) provisions in different countries as a proxy for labor adjustment costs. Using a large...

Almost 30 years after the introduction of the CIO position, the ideal CIO reporting structure (whether the CIO should report to the CEO or the CFO) is yet to be identified. There is an intuitive assumption among some proponents of IT that the CIO should always report to the CEO to promote the...

Cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis is based on a linear model of earnings behavior. However, recent research documents two potential sources of asymmetry in earnings: cost stickiness and conditional conservatism. We examine the implications of these asymmetries for CVP analysis and develop an...

This paper presents an empirical study of the strategic contributions of automated tellermachines (ATMs) to improving a bank branch's local deposit market share at the expense of itscompetitors. By extending previous models of deposit market share in branch banking to incorporateATM technology...

This paper presents a new approach for evaluating the quality ofmanagerial choices in information technology (IT) deployment. Theapproach involves measuring the extent to which deployment sitesperform in accordance with the firm's objectives, given theconstraints of their competitive...

This paper makes the business case for automating the collection ofsoftware metrics for gauging development performance in integratedcomputer aided software engineering (CASE) environments that arecharacterized by an object-oriented development methodology and acentralized repository. The...

Traditionally, software management has focused primarily upon cost control.Today, with the emerging capabilities of computer aided software engineering (CASE)and corresponding changes in the development process, the opportunity exists to viewsoftware development as an activity that creates...