This article presents a study conducted to compare published accounting research and qualities of accounting faculty and doctoral programs. Recently, two studies have been published in which accounting departments were ranked according to some perceived criterion of excellence. Neither of these studies described the criterion of excellence to be utilized in the development of the rankings; rather they allowed the respondents to use their own subjective criteria. Objective criteria would be preferable as a basis for assessing the quality of the various accounting departments. One such criterion is the amount of research which is attributable to each department, and an indicator of research output is the number of articles published in the accounting journals. The results of this study are subject to several limitations. The study only analyzed the research which has been published in four accounting journals, one of which is published by the University of Chicago. No attempt was made to evaluate the effect of differences in the sizes of accounting faculties or doctoral programs.

This article presents a straightforward decision rule for selecting an inventory valuation price at lower-of-cost or market. This decision rule avoids the complexities of decision tables and algebraic equations; thereby, allowing students of accounting to concentrate on mastering the concepts of lower-of-cost or market valuation. Accounting educators concerned with student achievement continually seek decision tables and algebraic equations which clarify or hasten an understanding of accounting concepts. Usually, such educators prefer straightforward decision rules which do as good as or better than these devices.

This article explains the rationale of controlling the risk of a type II error for substantive tests in auditing. The risk of attesting to a materially misstated amount is defined in one of two ways depending on the combination of decision strategy and sampling plan in use. When employing difference estimation, the auditor makes an interval estimate of the amount of error in an account balance. If the upper precision limit is less than the amount considered material, the book value is accepted. Here the risk to be controlled is one minus the confidence level employed, i.e., the probability of a Type I error. The more popular strategy, at least as far as textual treatments are concerned, involves making an interval estimate of the audited value of an account balance and accepting the book value if it falls within the interval. The audit examination is quite analogous to the quality control example. If an auditor accepts a book value only if it falls within his interval estimate of the "true" value, the adverse consequences of a Type I error are primarily the costs of extended audit procedures.

A survey of the empirical work involving interest rates indicates an almost universal use of seasonally unadjusted rates, apparently due to a conviction that seasonal factors are not important in interest rates. Studies by V. Kerry Smith and Richard Marcis (1972), Stanley Diller (1969) and William Gibson (1970), however, provide evidence showing that interest rates exhibit seasonal variation. Seasonality in interest rates merits careful consideration for at least two reasons. First, as noted by Gibson, An aim of the Federal Reserve System is to accommodate seasonal swings in the financial needs of trade, and the system tries to do this by removing seasonal fluctuations from interest rates. The seasonal variations remaining in interest rates suggest that the system is not wholly successful in these efforts. . (Gibson, 1970, p. 442). Second, from an econometric point of view, any model, such as a money demand model, which contains an interest rate as an independent variable should also contain seasonal dummy variables; otherwise, the coefficient of the interest rate variable may be both biased and inconsistent.' These issues underscore the importance of determining whether there is seasonality in interest rates. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the Federal Reserve does not report seasonally adjusted rates, apparently because the Board does not recognize the existence of a seasonal component. The purpose of this paper is to provide additional information regarding seasonality in interest rates. Unlike earlier studies, both daily and monthly data are analyzed. And, whereas Smith and Marcis employed spectral analysis to detect seasonality, ordinary least squares techniques with seasonal dummies are employed here. Using this technique, we find, in contrast to the findings reported by other investigators, no evidence of a significant seasonal component in monthly rates. Seasonality is, however, present in the daily rate. The plan of the remainder of the paper is as follows. In section II, the magnitude and the importance of seasonality in three interest rates are assessed. Section III contains a discussion of seasonal variation in a short-term rate employing daily as opposed to monthly data. A summary and the conclusions are presented in the last section.

This article describes a generalized quantitative approach to the presentation of percentage-of-completion method for recognizing profit on long-term construction contracts. This method has two distinct advantages over the non-quantitative approach. First, the use of a programmable symbolic language permits the student to be appraised of the potential for determining profit on many contracts virtually instantaneously. Such an environment is realistic to many actual business situations. Second, this method permits attention to be focused on the conceptual aspects of the percentage-of-completion method and avoids the danger of centering attention on the arithmetic busy-work which is inherent in the non-quantitative approach. Essentially, the percentage-of-completion method is an attempt to recognize income in proportion to progress on a project for each year in which construction occurs. Relevant data for this calculation include estimated project life in years, contract price, expenditures in year i, and the estimated cost to complete the contract made in year i.

Keith B. Johnson, T. Gregory Morton, M. Chapman Findlay, III, An Empirical Analysis of the Flotation Cost of Corporate Securities, 1971- 1972, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Sep., 1975), pp. 1129-1133