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Rapid changes in the technological and competitive environment are posing serious challenges to accounting education. Meeting these challenges will require accounting educators and programs to undergo fundamental changes and to continuously seek ways to increase the value of their contributions. This article illustrates how the balanced scorecard may be used by accounting educators to stimulate, guide and sustain such continuous improvement efforts. Survey and interview responses from 69 accounting department heads are generally supportive of the balanced scorecard's potential applicability and benefits to accounting programs. These department heads also provide suggestions on the items that can comprise an effective balanced scorecard for an accounting department, as well as factors that can affect its successful implementation.

Providing proper incentives to firm managers is increasingly important in the current competitive environment. Analytical research has suggested that evaluating a manager's performance relative to that of a peer group, in conjunction with standard‐based pay, can induce efficient risk‐sharing between firm owners and managers while maintaining the latter's incentives to exert effort. To date, direct empirical tests of this proposition have not been reported.This study uses a laboratory experiment to test the effect of relative performance evaluation on the risk‐aversion of delegated investment decisions. Project‐specific risk is operationalized using operating leverage, in part because the variability of a project's operating profits generally increases with this variable, and in part because many of the new manufacturing approaches held to be important to competitive advantage require significant capital investments and attendant increases in operating leverage. Across two levels of environmental uncertainty, subjects under a relative (as opposed to absolute) performance standard selected investments with significantly higher project‐specific risk. Also, as environmental uncertainty increased, subjects under an absolute standard significantly reduced the riskiness of their investments. In contrast, subjects shielded from environmental uncertainty by a relative standard chose investments of about equal riskiness under both low and high uncertainty conditions. If supported by future research, these findings would suggest that relative performance evaluation may reduce managers' reluctance to adopt risky capital investments, especially in firms operating in high‐risk economic or technological environments.

ABSTRACT: This study explores the current use and performance effects of management accounting and controls (MACs) by Chinese firms, as well as some potential facilitators and impediments. Data on 219 listed Chinese firms are obtained from a survey, supplemented by the firms' publicly available financial reports. On average, the sample firms have at least moderate use of 12 specific MAC techniques, including ones that are of relatively recent vintage (e.g., economic value-based performance measures). However, there is substantial variation across firms in the use of each technique. The extent of MAC usage is positively associated with firm attributes (e.g., activism of corporate governance participants, management support), as well as characteristics of the environment (e.g., competition). There also is a positive association between usage of some MACs and firm performance.

This study explores the extent to which an article's value or contribution can be proxied by the ranking of the journal in which it is published. Following an approach commonly applied in prior journal ranking studies, we obtained eight-year citation counts for all articles published in 1992, 1994, 1996, and 1997 in nine accounting journals covered by the Social Science Citation Index®. For these four years combined as well as individually, we found that articles from the journals most often considered to be the top three (Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, and The Accounting Review) do tend to be cited much more often than those from the other journals. However, across three different criteria for defining top articles, there were substantial classification errors from using publication in a topthree journal as a proxy for an article's contribution. The same patterns were obtained for major accounting sub-areas (e.g., financial accounting, auditing), and from a Google-based citation search covering 20 accounting journals. These findings strongly support the need to evaluate each article on its own merits, rather than abdicating this responsibility by using journal ranking as a proxy for an article's value or contribution.

This study seeks insights into determinants of Chinese audit firms' ability to ensure high quality financial reporting. Its scope of investigation encompasses the extent to which Chinese audit firms employ structured audit processes, their evaluation of potential clients, factors that impact their risk assessment, and the stringency of the reporting standards that they seek to impose on clients. The factors investigated include ones suggested as being important by extant research, as well as unique characteristics of the Chinese setting (e.g., the importance of interpersonal relationships ["guanxi"] and most listed companies' origins as state-owned enterprises). Structured interviews and questionnaire surveys are used to solicit quantitative and open-ended responses from 102 Chinese auditors at the partner, manager, and senior levels of Big 4 affiliates and local public accounting firms.