One purpose of an accounting system, or any information system, is to provide a set of signals designed to communicate descriptions of certain past phenomena believed to be decision relevant in the future.' However, it is difficult to evaluate a given or proposed information system because of its complexity. This complexity arises in part because of the interrelated problems of which phenomena to describe and how best to describe them. Since complexity hinders information system evaluation, decomposition of the total interrelated system into a number of less complex subsystems for evaluation purposes is often desirable. Unfortunately, most decomposition will introduce errors into the analysis. But if we can predict the resultant errors, decomposition can still provide a useful surrogate evaluation method. The purpose of this paper is to explore the decomposition approach to information system evaluation, at the conceptual level, relying heavily on Feltham's recently proposed model for predicting the value of information in the single decision case.2

Performance Measurement, Direct costs, Absorption costing, Ex post optimum model

Inventory, Inventory valuation, Quantity and Price effects, Inventory write downs

Books partly or wholly devoted to giving instruction in the art of keeping accounts date from 1494 when Luca Pacioli's Summa was published in Venice. It is reasonable to suppose, however, that manuscript expositions of bookkeeping were in existence before then, for use within commercial schools, by individual instructors, or possibly for circulation among those interested in acquiring mercantile knowledge. Several early manuscripts on other aspects of mercantile practice have survived,' but only one which includes some discussion of bookkeeping is known to us, although not in its original form. Manuscripts on bookkeeping continued to be written and presumably used even after the first books on the subject had been published. It may be assumed that these were compiled by their writers for the limited purpose of instructing their own pupils, though no doubt they came to the notice of others. In this article the various manuscripts on mercantile accounts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are described and discussed.2 Its scope

Double-entry bookkeeping, Accounting history

The term sounds like a reference to the simple business event of one business combining with another. A perceptive look at the process of combining, however, reveals a series of complex problems, accounting and otherwise. Valuation and disposition of intangible assets are inherent in almost every combination as are the problems of specific asset revaluations and price level adjustments; usually differences between tax accounting and general accounting arise. Unfortunately, these problems all appear simultaneously and beg for answers. The accounting profession's interest in business combinations is, in part, evidenced by Accounting Research Bulletins 40, 43, and 481; these necessarily lack the color provided in the following description:

Investors, regulators, academics, and researchers all emphasize the importance of financial statement comparability. However, an empirical construct of comparability is typically not specified. In addition, little evidence exists on the benefits of comparability to users. This study attempts to fill these gaps by developing a measure of financial statement comparability. Empirically, this measure is positively related to analyst following and forecast accuracy, and negatively related to analysts? dispersion in earnings forecasts. These results suggest that financial statement comparability lowers the cost of acquiring information, and increases the overall quantity and quality of information available to analysts about the firm.

Laureen A. Maines, Linda S. McDaniel, Mary S. Harris, Implications of Proposed Segment Reporting Standards for Financial Analysts' Investment Judgements, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 35, Studies on Experts and the Application of Expertise in Accounting, Auditing, and Tax (1997), pp. 1-24

We examine the effect of personal taxes on CEOs’ decisions to sell their equity, controlling for diversification, managerial overconfidence, and other determinants. While CEOs frequently sell large amounts of their unrestricted firm equity, the tax burden associated with the sale significantly deters them from selling equity even after controlling for other determinants like diversification. We also find that both taxable institutional investors and CEOs respond to taxes in their selling of equity, although CEOs appear to be less tax-sensitive. Our findings underscore the importance of taxes in corporate and managerial decisions and they have implications for executive compensation policies.

The solution to the problem of portfolio choice is relevant in a positive financial economics context because it provides models of individual maximizing behavior which when aggregated to the level of the market provide models of equilibrium asset pricing. These models generally assume that the parameters of the probability distribution of security returns are known to individual investors. In practice, however, the individual has to estimate these parameters. To the extent that there is parameter uncertainty or “estimation risk”, what are the observable implications of a market equilibrium derived on the assumption that the information set of all investors is equivalent to a given set of sample data?