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During the first 10 years of Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), Fall 1984 through Spring 1994, 313 articles and discussions were published. The main research methods reported in these articles were empirical data analysis, analytical modeling, and behavioral experimentation. The main topic areas were financial accounting, managerial accounting, and auditing. CAR considers for publication any papers of interest to the Canadian accounting research community, so this mix of methods and topics is not surprising and reflects the mix of papers submitted to CAR over the years. The articles and discussions in CAR represented 523 listed authors. A number of authors have appeared more than once, with the result that, over the 10 years, 358 different authors from 142 institutions have contributed to CAR. The great majority of the authors were university professors; at the time of authorship, slightly more authors were assistant than full or associate professors. Eighty-eight percent of the authors were male, but the percentage of female authors has steadily increased. CAR serves the Canadian accounting research community through the array of articles and discussions it publishes. Additional aspects of its Canadian service are the facts that 26 percent of the authors of the articles and discussions were resident at Canadian institutions, 17 percent of the articles dealt explicitly with a Canadian accounting issue or used Canadian data, and French abstracts of all articles plus articles completely in French represent 9 percent of the total pages of articles. As of June 1994, 696 members of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association and subscribers to CAR, as well as 286 institution libraries received the journal, representing 408 institutions. The majority of the individual member/subscribers were resident in Canada; the majority of the institutions were outside Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the effects of alternative methods for documenting business models on audit risk assessment behavior. We consider tabular versus diagrammatic representations of the relationship between business model components such as environmental factors, strategic goals, internal processes and resources, and financial statement accounts. Multiple scenarios based on a real company were constructed and 24 participants, including audit partners, managers, and novice auditors performed a risk assessment for each scenario, presented in either a diagrammatic or a tabular format. The participants' verbal discussions as they performed the risk assessments were tape recorded, transcribed, and coded. A content analysis of the participants' coded verbal behavior indicates that the tabular presentation appears to elicit more frequent mention of accounts by the participants, while the diagram format leads to more mentions of other business model components. There is also some evidence of expertise effects. This study indicates that a tabular presentation can possess many of the benefits often associated with a diagrammatic representation. However, in our study, obtaining such benefits involved the deliberate structuring of the tabular presentation to organize the components of the business model and the links between them and financial statement accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript develops an investment model that incorporates the joint consideration of income shifting by multinational parents to or from a foreign subsidiary and the decision to repatriate or reinvest foreign earnings. The model demonstrates that, while there is always an incentive to shift income into the U.S. from high-foreign-tax-rate subsidiaries, income shifting out of the U.S. to low-tax-rate countries occurs only under certain conditions. The model explicitly shows how the firms' required rate of return for foreign investments affects both repatriation and income shifting decisions. We show how the model can be used to refine extant research. We then apply it to a novel setting--using e-commerce for tax planning. We find firms in manufacturing industries with high levels of e-commerce have economically significant lower cash effective tax rates. This effect is magnified for firms that are less likely to have taxable repatriations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine group response systems (GRS) as an educational tool. We use an experimental approach and student survey data to assess vendors' claims that GRS improve student engagement and feedback, and thus improve learning. A key part of our design involves controlling for effects of moving to a more interactive pedagogy that have been found to affect learning. For a management accounting course, we find only limited GRS learning effects, as proxied by exam performance. Contrary to our expectations, we find a decline in engagement, as proxied by student oral participation, when GRS are used. We also find little evidence that GRS lead to greater student satisfaction with the course. We do find support for student satisfaction with GRS, from which we infer that implementation problems are not driving our results. In summary, we find little support for vendor claims, when controlling for changes in pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article, the author expresses his opinion on the paper "An analysis of the group dynamics surrounding internal control assessment in information systems audit and assurance domains," by E. O'Donnell, V. Arnold and S. G. Sutton. The study makes a valuable contribution to an issue that has significance for the efficient and effective provision of information systems assurance services. It has been stated that a part of the rationale for the study as deriving from the fact that "the increased complexity of the information systems internal control evaluation dictates that decision making be made by groups (an already common trend in practice)." Presumably part of the reason groups are utilized is that each member of the group can provide some particular expertise that is not possessed by others in the group. An alternative explanation for the use of groups in this context is that large tasks can be divided into subtasks, which are then delegated to individual group members. In either case, group members do not contribute the same information to the decision being made. The group members in the study appear to have roughly equivalent domain knowledge (with individual differences controlled for), and are provided the same knowledge of the problem. As a consequence, a key aspect of the setting of interest is not replicated in the experiment. Given there were no apparent time constraints, it might have been interesting to try to measure the extent to which the group decision-making time was changed by having individuals make decisions first before participating in the group process in comparison to the traditional group decision process.

The article presents the author's comments on the paper "Holistic, Continuous Assurance Integration: e-Business Opportunities and Challenges," by M. Greenstein and A.W. Ray, which appeared in volume 16 of "Journal of Information Systems." She thinks that the article brings together a number of interesting issues related to the challenges of providing assurance services for organizations with a significant web-based e-business component. It provides a good overview of specific problems potentially encountered in providing assurance to e-business firms, and works to lay the ground work for future research by providing a series of propositions on how these issues might be addressed.