This article continues the five-year review of cost accounting on the Uniform CPA Examination. It also compares the historic weighting of Cost Questions to the proposed weighting presented in the Exposure Draft of the AICPA Board of Examiners entitled "Proposed Content Specification Outlines for the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination."

Reviews the book "Applications of Statistical Sampling to Auditing," by Alvin A. Arens and James K. Loebbecke.

This paper examines and clarifies the applicability of APB Opinion No. 29 to (1) "trade-in" transactions that involve a dealer, and (2) exchange transactions that involve a "significant" amount of monetary consideration (boot). Principal findings are: The APB intended that the exception to the general accounting rule (as reflected in paragraphs 21 and 22 of the Opinion) apply to exchanges of similar nonmonetary assets only in instances where both parties to the transaction are either (a) dealers or (b) non-dealers. If an exchange involving similar nonmonetary assets results in the culmination of an earnings process for either party, the general rule applies to both parties. In addition, the Board's intent was that the exception to the general rule should apply to exchanges of similar nonmonetary assets irrespective of the amount of monetary consideration involved in the transaction.

This paper evaluates whether the primary and secondary dissemination of earnings forecast revisions by security analysts is reflected in security prices. Security prices were used to determine the profitability (before the cost of search) of trading strategies based on the nonpublic knowledge of forecast revisions. For a sample of 288 weekly earnings forecast revisions, the results were consistent with the hypothesis that early knowledge of forecast revisions could be used to form profitable trading strategies. Furthermore, the secondary dissemination of forecasts continued to have information content at the point of disclosure. These results are inconsistent with the strong form, but consistent with the semi-strong form, of market efficiency. Furthermore, the information contemporaneously available from public sources did not generate equivalently profitable trading rules, indicating that forecast revisions were not deducible from other publicly available information. Finally, some general public policy implications concerning mandatory disclosure of forecasts were drawn.