1,720,955 research outputs found
Local Government Accounting Standard-Setting in Australia:\ud Did Constituents Participate?
No full textThe Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (PSASB) has developed accounting standards for the public sector in Australia. A procedural 'due process' has been developed to protect the openness, neutrality and independence of Australian accounting standard-setting both in the private and public sectors. Prior research into constituent participation in the 'due process' for specific cases in the public sector has raised doubts as to whether the 'due process' operated in an open, neutral and independent manner. It has found that account preparers were under-represented in their responses and used less sophisticated lobbying strategies than other respondents. The research also concluded that some constituents had favourable access to the 'due process', and that standard setters did not receive all pertinent information from constituents. This paper examines constituent participation in the 'due process' for the first public sector accounting standard, that for local government (AAS 27). The submissions made on the exposure draft preceding the standard - ED 50 - have been analysed using content analysis. The findings suggest that account preparers were well-represented in their responses and adopted the lobbying strategy of weighting their responses with supporting argument for the most controversial issues. Contrary to prior research, the paper concludes that in the case of ED 50 there is no evidence that the 'due process' failed to operate in an open and neutral manner
The value of public sector annual reports and annual reporting awards in organisational legitimacy
No full textDespite considerable diversity in Australian public sector organisations, annual reports have been promoted as an appropriate tool to discharge the accountability of all government agencies. Further, annual reporting competitions have been promoted as a means of ensuring the quality of those annual reports. The limited prior research which addresses these positions ignores the possibility that there may be a variation in the value of both the annual report and the competition depending on the type of public sector organization. This study applies institutional theory, informed by accountability theory, to understand the influence of stakeholders on the annual reporting practices and policies adopted by organisations. It focuses on the Queensland public sector and the Queensland Annual Reporting Award (QARA) and uses a series of case studies to examine the value of the annual report. Consistent with institutional theory, the results indicate that both the annual report and competition entry were used as legitimising tools. Further, cross sectional variation in the perceived value of the annual report and the entry into the annual reporting competition was found
Public regulatory reform and management earnings forecasts in a low private litigation environment\ud
No full textWe examine the impact of continuous disclosure regulatory reform on the likelihood, frequency and qualitative characteristics of management earnings forecasts issued in New Zealand’s low private litigation environment. Using a sample of 720 earnings forecasts issued by 94 firms listed on the New Zealand Exchange before and after the reform (1999–2005), we provide strong evidence of significant changes in forecasting behaviour in the post-reform period. Specifically, firms were more likely to issue earnings forecasts to pre-empt earnings announcements and, in contrast to findings in other legal settings, those earnings forecasts exhibited higher frequency and improved qualitative characteristics (better precision and accuracy). An important implication of our findings is that public regulatory reforms may have a greater benefit in a low private litigation environment and thus add to the global debate about the effectiveness of alternative public regulatory reforms of corporate requirements
Accounting for goodwill in an Australian context
Get PDFThis article empirically documents the impact of regulation of goodwill accounting practice in Australia. Using a sample of 84 firms over the period 1983 to 1989, this study investigates changes in accounting practice in response to both professional regulation (AAS 18) and statutory-backed regulation (ASRB 1013). Evidence presented reveals that the diversity of accounting practice was reduced after the imposition of AAS 18 and was reduced further after the imposition of ASRB 1013. The findings support the contention that statutory regulation was relatively more effective than professional regulation in the promotion of uniformity of practice. Previous writers have suggested that the effectiveness of the regulation was limited because firms avoided the application of the goodwill standards by making discretionary changes to their treatment of identifable intangibles. This study confirms that the average balance of identifiable intangible assets increased subsequent to the imposition of accounting regulation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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