Reviews the book "Surviving Your Dissertation: A Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process," by Kjell Erik Rudestan and Rae R. Newton.

Reviews the book "Quantitative Planning and Control: Essays in Honor of William Wager Cooper on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday," by Yuji Ijiri and Andrew B. Whinston.

This paper examines the relationship between the ownership control status of firms and the accounting methods they adopt. The arguments of Watts and Zimmerman's positive theory are integrated with those of managerial economists to generate the prediction that management controlled firms are more likely than owner controlled firms to adopt accounting methods which increase reported earnings. This prediction is inconsistent with Fama's hypothesis that the market for managerial talent will prevent management controlled firms from acting differently than owner controlled firms. This paper compares the depreciation methods used by a sample of management and owner controlled firms for financial reporting purposes. The comparison considers and controls for the factors of firm size, leverage, and the depreciation method used for tax reporting purposes. The comparison reveals that there is a significant difference in the depreciation methods adopted by management controlled and owner controlled firms for financial reporting purposes.

This paper presents a model of optimal tax-motivated intertemporal income shifting given a quadratic cost function that relates the costs associated with shifting income to the amount of income shifted. By formally modeling the income-shifting decision, we: (1) show how parameter estimates of the income-shifting cost function can be extracted from a linear regression where a proxy for income shifted is the dependent variable, (2) provide insight into prior tax-motivated income-shifting research, and (3) clarify the interpretation of independent variables that capture the interaction between tax incentives and nontax costs. We then provide an empirical application of our method for quantifying the costs to shift federal taxable income by investigating the income-shifting behavior of firms in the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry following the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Our results suggest that the parameters of the cost function are negatively related to firm size, the cost to shift a significant amount of income is nontrivial, and the marginal cost to shift income increases as more income is shifted.

The article presents comments of authors on the article "Prediction Achievement and Simulated Decision Makers As an Extension of the Predictive Ability Criterion," by Robert Libby published in the July 1975 issue of the periodical "The Accounting Review." Libby maintains that predictive ability is an inadequate information evaluation criterion because it does not consider explicitly the ability of the decision maker (DM) to utilize information. Libby argues that the prediction achievement index of the Brunswik Lens Model is a useful extension of the predictive ability criterion because it incorporates predictive ability as well as the DM's ability to utilize information. High prediction achievement demands not only high predictive ability, but correct utilization of information. Objectives of this comment are to identify those areas of accounting where prediction achievement is clearly an inappropriate index of usefulness and to question whether prediction achievement is an unqualified extension of predictive ability in any area accounting. The comment is organized around the two-part framework for the evaluation of accounting numbers used by the Committee on Asset Valuation Bases which originally proposed the use of the Brunswik Lens Model in the evaluation of accounting alternatives.