Focusing on a sample of US retailers, I study the management control systems (MCS) that firms introduce when they first invest in controls, and identify four categories of initial MCS, which are defined in terms of the purposes these MCS fulfill. The first category, Basic MCS, is adopted to...

We examine how the threat of litigation affects an entrepreneur's reporting behavior when the entrepreneur (i) can misrepresent his privately observed information, (ii) pays legal damages out of his own pocket, and (iii) is optimistic about the firm's prospects relative to investors. We find...

While some of the modern performance measures used in managerial accounting rely on cash flow based figures others try to take advantage of the information content of accounting figures. However, whether the additional information content in the accrual components of earnings improves the...

We derive and present the formula for optimal debt under the assumption that tax shields are discounted at the cost of levered equity, Ke and cash flows are on perpetuity. The formulation is consistent and is derived from basic financial principles. This formulation is valid for non-growing...

In this article we use a real life case from an emerging country to illustrate the valuation with discounted cash flow methods that include complexities such as unpaid taxes, losses carried forward, foreign exchange debt, presumptive income and inflation adjustments to the Financial Statements....

This paper presents the derivation of non-circular formulas for the calculation of the cost of equity, WACC, equity value (as a function either of initial debt or leverage), and levered firm value, using some previous results and showing their consistency with other well-known expressions....

This paper presents a formal derivation of general expressions for Ke and WACC in perpetuities with constant growth, which do not make any assumption on what the proper discount rate is to be applied to the firm's tax shield, and are complemented with numerical examples of its application....

In this paper we propose an analytical solution to the circularity problem between value and cost of capital. Our solution is derived starting from a central principle of finance that relates value today to value, cash flow, and the discount rate for next period. We derive a general formulation...

Activity-Based Costing insists on the necessary homogeneity of cost pools to provide more reliable cost data than traditional systems. This condition forces cost system designers to distinguish between a large number of activities and may hence induce overwhelming complexity. ABC supporters...