Previous research has shown that accountants may be inadequate moral reasoners. Concern over this trend caused the Treadway Commission (1987) and the Accounting Education Change Commission (1990) to call for greater integration of ethics into the student's training. Ponemon and Glazer (1990) found a difference in cognitive moral development (CMD) between accounting students at a public university and a private university with a liberal arts emphasis. This study expands Ponemon and Glazer's research by examining two liberal arts universities, one a private, secular institution and one a Catholic institution. The primary research question asks if Catholic university accounting students manifest greater CMD growth than secular university accounting students. Additionally, this study examines and compares the priority that accounting students from the different institutions place on ethical values versus economic values. It was expected that Catholic university accounting students would manifest both greater CMD growth and a greater concern for ethical values over economic values when compared with non-Catholic university accounting students. The study utilized a two-phase approach. In the first phase, an organizational study of two institutions was made to determine how each strives to integrate moral development into their accounting students' education. In the second phase, lower-division and senior …

Auditors form judgments by integrating the evidence they gather with information stored in memory (knowledge). As they acquire experience, auditors have the opportunity to learn how different patterns of evidence are associated with particular audit problems. Research in experimental psychology has demonstrated that individuals with task-specific experience can match the cues they encounter with patterns they have learned, and form judgments without consciously analyzing the individual cues. Accounting researchers have suggested that auditors develop judgment templates through task-specific experience, and that these knowledge structures automatically provide decisions in familiar situations. I examined whether auditor knowledge leads to reliance on judgment templates. To test this thesis, I synthesized a theoretical framework and developed research hypotheses that predict relationships between task-specific experience (my surrogate for knowledge) and (1) measures of cognitive effort, (2) accuracy of residual memory traces, and (3) performance with respect to identifying potential problems. To test these predictions, I provided senior auditors with comprehensive case materials for a hypothetical client and asked them to use analytical procedures to identify potential audit problems. Subjects acquired information and documented their findings on personal computers using software that I developed to record their activities.

This dissertation attempts to provide an exploratory structure to respond to, and tries to resolve, an existing void in international accounting research. The void is a lack of coherently structured, nation-specific, descriptive research to investigate socio-economic phenomena which may influence financial accounting. This dissertation's salient features include a political economy theory, an exploratory, sociological method, and a case study format. The political economy of accounting, introduced by Tinker [1980] and refined by Cooper and Sherer [1984], emphasizes a persuasive social relations dimension. This theory motivates selection of three countries (the United States, France, and Japan) that appear to have divergent socio-cultural environments. An exploratory and analytical approach of modified (enlarged) exogenism, developed by Smith [1973, 1976] and adapted to accounting by McKinnon [1986], provides an analytic structure for this exploratory investigation. Modified exogenism focuses upon an open, dynamic social system (the process of financial accounting), and provides analysis reflecting four major areas (the environment, intrusive events, intra-system activity, and trans-system activity). After examining the nation-specific financial accounting (socio-economic) structures for each country, an analysis of selected financial disclosures attempts to gain a better understanding of how socio-economic factors have influenced the development of financial accounting. My primary objective is to …

This study used protocol analysis to identify key variables in the venture capital investment decision-making process. The study used a fictional business plan which was based on six actual business plans. This fictional business plan was presented to ten venture capitalists who were asked to review it to decide whether to interview the investee. The protocols obtained from these subjects were analyzed to determine patterns within the subjects' review. The sections of the business plan which were commonly reviewed first were the deal structure, the executive summary, and the management section. The management section was used by the greatest number of subjects. The market section was used the greatest number of times. The data were also organized by type of operators used in each subject's protocols. Information Search/Retrieval operators were most common, followed by Task Structuring/Set Goal operators. When classified into the four major categories of Task Structuring/Set Goal, Information Acquisition, Analytical/ Inferential, and Choice operators, Analytical/Inferential operators were used most frequently. Choice operators were least used. The phrases were analyzed by the relevant section in the business plan. The market received the greatest number of references, followed by references to the product and to management. However, when references to …

This research examines how experience and missing information affect judgments of tax return preparers. Tax return preparers may often be faced with the problem of incomplete information, and their responses to this problem may be conditioned by whether or not they recognize information is missing. Based on the Holland et al.'s cognitive theory of induction as applied to tax judgment by Marchant et al., it was hypothesized that experienced tax preparers would correctly classify more items as to their relevance to a specific tax issue than novice tax preparers. Additionally, it was hypothesized that the strength of recommendations of tax preparers who had no relevant information missing would be greater than the strength of recommendations of tax preparers who had relevant information missing and were prompted that information was missing. Lastly, it was hypothesized that prompting that relevant information was missing would have a greater effect on the strength of recommendations of tax return preparers with lesser specific experience than it would on the strength of recommendations of tax return preparers with greater specific experience. The results suggest that experienced tax preparers do recognize the relevance of information to a greater degree than novice tax preparers. There was no significant …

This research was undertaken to test the effects of conservatism on the decisions made by auditors. The evaluation of the research results provided by the two psychological tests indicated that, when measured on the construct of resistance to change, auditors as a group are essentially heterogeneous and slightly conservative. However, the auditors' test scores on the construct of aversion to risk reflected a homogeneous group who were distinctly conservative. Based on these results, this research seems to indicate that the firm effect is more important in auditors' decision making than personal characteristics except, perhaps, in the area of compliance testing decisions. If this is indeed the case, it could be said that the different audit philosophies held by the public accounting firms and instilled in their auditors may be the prime cause of the substantial differences that have been continuously found in auditor judgments.

This historical study examines the evolution of the accounting system of the Quincy Mining Company between 1846 and 1900. The external financial reporting practices and internal accounting procedures of the firm are defined and interpreted in the context of three time periods that portray the formation, growth and maturation of the firm. Each period reflects unique economic and social conditions that are associated with changes in the firm's accounting system. A cross temporal analysis of these changes highlights three factors: the relationship between the accounting system and the labor force, the emergence of accounting as a control mechanism and the diminishing informational content of the firm's annual reports. Primary sources are used to document the perspectives of the Quincy management and to assess the motivations for accounting processes such as internal control, auditing procedures, responsibility centers and other managerial practices. This study addresses the inherent nature of accounting information and its relationship to the economic and social environment of an individual firm in the nineteenth century.

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a theory that helps explain the conditions under which firms select certain project evaluation techniques. This study uses contingency theory to analyze the impact of environmental uncertainty on the choice of project evaluation techniques. In addition to a direct measure of uncertainty, several dimensions of uncertainty are included in this study. These dimensions of uncertainty include control structure, method of financing, foreign assets, method of growth, and product domination. This study also analyzes the use of project evaluation, management science and risk management techniques in US firms over time and in UK firms over time in order to compare to prior research. A comparison of firms in the two countries are also provided. The primary method of data collection was a survey instrument. Data were also collected from annual reports and various other public sources. The variables that appear significant in the choice of project evaluation technique in US firms are environmental uncertainty, control structure, method of financing, foreign assets, and product domination. The variable that appear significant in the choice of project evaluation technique in UK firms is method of financing. US firms favor discounted cash flow techniques although this study …