In view of the increasing coronavirus death toll around the globe, centralized governments have been put under the spotlight to account for the deaths in the sovereign states they represent. But could it be a problem if we simply hold governments accountable for deaths by demanding accurate and transparent accounting of the total? Is there a better way to account for deaths in a pandemic without ignoring the pathos of loss and undermining our capacity to act spontaneously? I engage with these questions by looking at how the ethics/politics of death, as two sides of the same coin, affect our understanding of accountability in the time of COVID-19. I distinguish between two types of accountability that correspond to the two meanings of “account for”: “to explain the reason or the cause of something” and “to form part of a total” (Cambridge Dictionary1). The second type of accountability, informed by a Deleuzian ethics of death, is explored through an interpretative case study of accounting for the deaths in Wuhan, where the global pandemic began. It shows that accountability is essentially a freedom-enabled endeavour to account for deaths through our repetition in mourning, which forms part of honouring the dead, the dying and the living. This new configuration implies that a more radical form of accounting is needed in order to appreciate the value of life and be mindful of the socio-psychological costs associated with deaths.

This study adds to the literature on accounting incompleteness and instability an understanding of how accounting acts upon an object that is practised as a multiple. It explores how accounting, in the form of a sales and operations planning (SO this adds new accountings onto existing ones, all of which exist simultaneously.

CEOs of retirement age are likely to exhibit a “horizon problem,” whereby they are reluctant to make decisions that are beneficial to the firm in the long term but potentially costly to the CEOs' personal wealth in the short term. We predict that a CEO with strong organizational identification (OI) will be less likely to behave opportunistically. Our results are consistent with our expectation when we examine three types of decisions that reflect the CEO horizon problem. Specifically, we find that retiring CEOs with strong OI are less likely to reduce research and development investments or decrease the firm's commitment to corporate social responsibility. Retiring CEOs with strong OI also behave less opportunistically when making voluntary disclosures; namely, they issue fewer management earnings forecasts in their last year of employment. Our findings indicate that cultivating a CEO's OI can be an effective way to mitigate her horizon problem.

Management-issued linguistic tone is, on average, positively associated with future earnings and incrementally priced by the market. However, prior capital markets research also shows that linguistic tone is difficult to process, while lab-based findings establish that less sophisticated investors are more susceptible to the use of heuristics in their interpretation of tone. Taken together, these findings motivate us to examine whether investors disagree on the valuation implications of linguistic tone and whether small investors are subject to differential, and notably less efficient, trading in response to the linguistic tone in these corporate announcements. We measure “residual tone” (i.e., that portion of linguistic tone that is not associated with contemporaneous economic news or current valuation fundamentals) for a sample of publicly-released management forecasts. We find that abnormal trading volume is increasing in the residual tone of management forecasts after controlling for the price reaction to forecasts, suggesting that there is significant investor disagreement over the implication of this tone for firm value. Further tests show that the net buying behavior of small investors is positively associated with residual tone, while larger investors tend to sell on this signal. The negative relation between residual tone and future stock returns found in prior work on earnings announcements holds in our sample of management forecasts as well, implying that this differential buying behavior involves an economically significant wealth transfer from small to large investors. We show in an extended analysis that any success that might accrue to small investors from trading positions taken during the event period is decreasing in residual tone.