Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate which factors stimulate or hinder the influence management accountants operating at the business unit (BU) level have on the decisions taken by their BU manager(s). Design/methodology/approach: The authors collected data from 119 management...

Purpose: In this paper, we concentrate on the use of research assessment (RA) systems in universities in New Zealand (NZ) and the United Kingdom (UK). Primarily we focus on PBRF and REF, and explore differences between these systems on individual and systemic levels. We ask, these days, in what...

Purpose: During choir rehearsals, a conductor continuously holds choir members accountable for what they do and how they sing. Hence, members are held accountable through action. This allows a conductor to emphasize his/her expertise and underline his/her authority. Choir members typically...

There is conflicting evidence about the current stance of the controller profession. Some researchers say that controllers have evolved into strategic partners of their managers, while others assert that they are still mainly concerned with internal and external reporting. In order to assess the...

The control mechanisms and instruments that eventually emerge in an organization are the result of a number of interrelated factors and processes. The design and construction of control instruments, the communication about them, the way in which the instruments are actually used, the processes...

The presence of structural breaks can seriously affect the outcome of standard regression methods like OLS. Although there are many methods available to deal with them, we focus here on a particular linear filtering method, namely the Kalman Filter. Its results vis a vis a regular OLS approach...

R&D based models relating technical change and economic growth have been unsuccessful in explaining the recent productivity paradox: R&D efforts have risen continuously in advanced countries during the postwar period whereas productivity growth has, if anything, declined. Several explanations of...

The cost-minimization part of a specific factors model with perfect capital movements and production externalities for both perfect and imperfect competition is used here to explain the growth rate of wages as a function of technical change, terms of trade or import changes, interest rate...

The cost-minimization part of a specific factors model with perfect capital movements and both perfect and imperfect competition is used here to explain the growth rate of wages as a function of technical change, terms of trade changes, interest rate changes and the growth rate of the labour...