Discusses the report of the Committee on Accounting for Social Performance of the American Accounting Association which explored the state of social accounting in the United States in 1975. Analysis of the practices in accounting and the reporting of corporate social performance; Investigation of corporate charitable contributions; Issues concerning the place of social accounting in accounting education.

The article reports on recommendations made by the 1964 American Accounting Association Committee on Teacher Development regarding methods and approaches for development of individuals with no teaching experience who aspire to be career accounting instructors. A good teacher should restrict subject matter to be presented in a course to the level of the students' comprehension. At the same time he should stress the relationship of accounting to other fields of business and economics. Accounting teachers must be able to explain accounting. The explanation must be clear, to the point, and adequate. Teachers can identify significant concepts that should be understood and remembered, so that student learning efforts can be channeled to subject-matter areas of major importance. The committee was charged to be primarily concerned with three groups of teachers--doctoral candidates, beginning part-time teachers, and newly-employed staff members with no prior experience in teaching. Doctoral candidates who expect to become teachers should have some carefully supervised teaching experience when pursuing graduate studies.

The article presents matters related to accounting for students of accounting. The students of today will be the practitioners of tomorrow. One of these is the trend toward a constantly increasing proportion of fixed to total costs. The article presents theory cases for undergraduate courses. After some examination, the writers have found a means of achieving, in part, some of these goals. In a two-hour undergraduate course called "Current Accounting Topics," an effort is made to give students something other than conventional text-book material and to encourage the discussion of matters of theory in a framework that differs from the usual problem-solving approach. The article also presents a simplified three variance technique. The basic concepts involved in calculating the three components that make up the difference between manufacturing expenses incurred and the amount that is charged to production under a standard cost system are difficult matters for most students of cost accounting. The article describes about helping accounting students to learn how to analyze a business transaction.

Standardized information disclosures aim to help people compare complex financial products and make better choices. We investigate the extent to which information shown in a regulator-mandated dashboard helps retirement savers choose between alternative pension plans. We conduct incentivized experiments that collect participants’ repeated choices between two pension plans using the mandatory dashboard, and subsequently test whether an even simpler dashboard improves choices, and by how much. Participants switch quickly from a high- to a low-fee pension plan when they see explicit nominal fees but are significantly more confused by percentage fees and adjust slower. When differences between plan performance arise from gross returns, not fees, we find that complex information formats can seriously hinder participants’ recognition and reactions. We present a Bayesian updating model which estimates the relative noisiness of the signals from fees and gross returns across different treatments and use this model to show how better information presentation raises retirement savings.

We examine the relation between a board' decision to reject antitakeover provisions of Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1310 and subsequent labor market opportunities of those same board members. Compared to directors retaining all provisions, directors rejecting all protective provisions of SB1310 are three times as likely to gain additional external directorships and are 30 percent more likely to retain their internal slot on the board of that same Pennsylvania company. For external board seats, the results are driven by nonexecutive directors who are not members of the management team; for internal board seats, the results are driven by executive directors.

We use a sample of 800 firms in eight East Asian countries to study the effect of ownership structure on value during the region's financial crisis. The crisis negatively impacted firms' investment opportunities, raising the incentives of controlling shareholders to expropriate minority investors. Crisis period stock returns of firms in which managers have high levels of control rights, but have separated their control and cash flow ownership, are 10–20 percentage points lower than those of other firms. The evidence is consistent with the view that ownership structure plays an important role in determining whether insiders expropriate minority shareholders.

This paper examines the relationship between book‐to‐market equity, distress risk, and stock returns. Among firms with the highest distress risk as proxied by Ohlson's (1980) O‐score, the difference in returns between high and low book‐to market securities is more than twice as large as that in other firms. This large return differential cannot be explained by the three‐factor model or by differences in economic fundamentals. Consistent with mispricing arguments, firms with high distress risk exhibit the largest return reversals around earnings announcements, and the book‐to‐market effect is largest in small firms with low analyst coverage.

This article establishes efficient lattice algorithms for pricing American interest-sensitive claims in the Heath, Jarrow, Morton paradigm, under the assumption that the volatility structure of forward rates is restricted to a class that permits a Markovian representation of the term structure. The class of volatilities that permits this representation is quite large and imposes no severe restrictions on the structure for the spot rate volatility. The algorithm exploits the Markovian property of the term structure and permits the efficient computation of all types of interest rate claims. Specific examples are provided.

This article establishes efficient lattice algorithms for pricing American interest‐sensitive claims in the Heath, Jarrow, and Morton paradigm, under the assumption that the volatility structure of forward rates is restricted to a class that permits a Markovian representation of the term structure. The class of volatilities that permits this representation is quite large and imposes no severe restrictions on the structure for the spot rate volatility. The algorithm exploits the Markovian property of the term structure and permits the efficient computation of all types of interest rate claims. Specific examples are provided.