Reviews the book "Planning for Innovation Through Dissemination and Utilization of Knowledge," by Ronald G. Havelock

The article focuses on innovations in an elementary accounting program. The rapid growth of student enrollment at Northern Illinois University has initiated a challenge to the Department of Accounting to provide effective and yet progressive instruction in elementary accounting for a prospective 1,250 students per year. The article summarizes 6 major innovations of the program. Assisting the Director in planning and organization of the Elementary Accounting Program and in the teaching and evaluation of student performance is a staff of 20 carefully selected graduate assistants who are pursuing the MBA or MS in Accountancy. In conjunction with their teaching assistantship, the graduate assistants enroll in Accountancy 539, a three-hour graduate seminar entitled, Improving Instruction in College Business Courses. The seminar commences with a four 4-day, preschool workshop. The workshop includes instruction in the mechanics of the program, objectives of accounting education, the learning process, various teaching methods and aids, techniques of teaching, handling student differences, and demonstrations on the various teaching approaches

I. Introduction: Managerialism, behavioralism, and the competitive model, 237. — II. Firm decision processes and the "as if" argument, 240. — III. Selection, decision rules, and competitive outcomes, 244. — IV. A competitive industry: Orthodox analysis, 248. — V. A competitive industry: Assumptions of the selection model, 249. — VI. Proof of the theorem, 254. — VII. Extensions and generalizations, 257. — VIII. Schumpeterian competition, 259. — IX. Concluding comments, 260. — Appendix: Proof of the existence of competitive equilibrium, 261.

I. The problem, 580. — II. Characteristics of the data, 583. — III. Indications derived from time series, 587. — IV. Cross-section relations of labor share to capital intensity, 590. — V. Cross sections involving input prices and measures of technological progress, 594. — VI. Conclusions, 602.

There are many economic activities where the cost function can be approximated by a fixed initial cost and a constant (sometimes zero) marginal cost as with book publishing, public utilities, and innovations. In the absence of technical advance, an economy that grows in scale could nevertheless exhibit growth in per capita income by taking advantage of the economies of scale afforded. To the extent, however, that these production processes are in the public domain, overinvestment, manifested either in premature entry or in duplication of resources, will occur, and the growth potential, to a large extent, will be lost

An alternative procedure would be to apply some knowledge of economic history to the problem and see if changes in the financial factors affecting adjustment speeds can explain the changes in investment expenditures by themselves. If so, and my results reported in the original article indicate it is so, then a test for the relative significance of changes in financial factors compared to changes in the gaps between desired and actual capital stocks would be to see which model produces the most stable coefficients for subperiods. One of the things I noted in my article was the stability of the coefficients of the financial variables (the effective yield on railroad bonds and the level of retained earnings), whether estimated for the entire period 1897-1914 or the subperiod 1897-1907. I had no more luck than Morgan, however, in finding stable coefficients for any version of the accelerator model. The net effect of Morgan's work is to give independent support to my original argument that the accelerator model in any form is inappropriate for explaining investment behavior of American railroads during this period of volatile financial changes. lished Ph.D. dissertation Growth, Stability and Financial Innovation in the American Economy, 1897-1914. University of California, Berkeley, 1968

One of the major criticisms of accountants in recent years has been their failure to present financial statements which have current relevance. Several individuals and groups have published theoretical descriptions of accounting systems based either partly or wholly on some form of current value. This, however, has not completely solved the problem since little or no work has been done to investigate the feasibility or practical implications of these models. There are several reasons for the lack of innovation aimed at improvement of the relevance of published financial statements. The public, investors, analysts and small creditors, do not have the direct power that management and large lenders have to demand more relevant statements. Corporate accountants have in large measure tended to concentrate on refining existing techniques rather than developing basic new methods of presenting information. For these reasons, the lead in determining the feasibility of the current-value-based models has fallen mainly to the academic accountant, who has a minimum of vested interest in maintaining the status quo and a maximum interest in improving statement presentation

PLANNING for agricultural development usually places primary emphasis on an efficient allocation of resources. Programming models have been used extensively for this purpose in recent years [2, 9, 11, 13]. However, for many developing countries with export oriented agricultures, the problem of agricultural policy formulation is further complicated by uncertain foreign demand. In these cases, policy makers must take into account both international demand factors, such as trade restrictions and block trading agreements, and domestic factors affecting internal resource allocation such as technological innovation and structural changes which may alter relative production costs and supply possibilities. This paper illustrates the use of a programming model as a tool for the evaluation of price policies t necessary to meet alternative hypothesized foreign demand situations for Argentina. The measurement of the resultant interrelated side effects of these policies is also presented. The inclusion of international factors in the analysis is particularly relevant for Argentina given that (1) balance of payments restrictions have been shown to be a major bottleneck to growth [4, 5]; and (2) recent developments in traditional Argentine markets, such as the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the incomplete implementation of the Latin American Common Market, have raised important questions regarding alternative export strategies. If the agricultural producers are reasonably responsive to relative product prices as recent evidence suggests [4, 13, 14], general price policies may be one of the simplest and most effective tools at the disposal of government to manage production to meet expected domestic and foreign demands. But it also must be recognized that price policies have other wide and varied impacts on an agriculturally oriented export economy. Among these are the impact on farm incomes and resource use in agriculture, foreign exchange earnings and government export revenues, consumer prices and agriculture's contribution to national growth. Given these multiple effects, the policy maker is forced to examine trade-offs between the potentially undesirable as well as desirable effects of an agricultural price policy. The approach contained here gives some insights into the trade-off process. Specifically, vectors of demand quantities, representing alternative export strategies in 1975, are introduced into a spatial equilibrium programming model as quantity restraints. The r sults of the analysis are then used to investigate the following series of related questions: (1) What constellation of product prices (minimum price guarantees) would be necessary to induce an efficiently organized Argentine agriculture to produce the alternative quantities once possible technological innovations have been accounted for? (2) How much land would be required for these levels of production? (3) What would be the labor requirements for each strategy? (4) How would each strategy affect consumer food costs? (5) How would each strategy affect agriculture's contribution to national product? (6) What would be the effects on governmental export earnings? Section I of this paper describes the method of analysis and the model used. Section II presents the alternative output specifications. Section III discusses prices required to meet specified demand levels while section IV describes the resulting impact on the agricultural sector with respect to farm incomes, land use, and labor requirements, and the indirect impacts on consumer welfare, net real aggregate value of production, and government export revenues and earnings. Section V draws some tentative conclusions. The major objective of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analytical method for the analysis * Research upon which this article is based was supported by the Agricultural Development Council and the University of California. It appeared as Giannini Foundation Research Paper No. 305. 'The use of programming analysis for output price determination has been largely restricted to the United States [9, 101