ABSTRACT Financial and managerial accounting (FMA) courses are critical courses that give first‐year students their first taste of technical accounting content. This paper surveys 20 years of literature in five specialist accounting education journals to draw out research‐informed instructional strategies and associated recommendations on their use and development. The findings follow Anson's instructional design model, identifying five categories of research‐informed instructional strategies that target FMA: experiential learning; software; content or exam design/delivery; in‐class activities; and games. First, the study recommends the use of experiential tools to teach FMA. Second, firms should develop software tools that go beyond multiple choice questions and leverage tools like Excel spreadsheets, data analysis, and visualization, as well as media, such as videos and podcasts. Finally, universities should build communities of practice to encourage a greater level of discourse around teaching FMA. One of the contributions of this paper is to systematically filter, organize, and present the academic peer‐reviewed literature that describes research‐informed instructional strategies in FMA.

ABSTRACTGiven the strong financial incentives embedded in participative budgeting, the creation of budgetary slack is prevalent and constant. Research has shown that peer influence is related to budgetary reporting. However, such an effect is likely to be moderated by other factors. We argue that the effect of peer influence on budgetary slack depends on budget‐setters' affect. In an experiment where participants set budgets and work on production tasks, we find that positive affect leads to a greater decrease in budgetary slack under honest peer influence compared to negative affect—specifically, budget‐setters create the least amount when they are in positive affect and peer influence is honest. We also find that participants' moral judgment and moral obligations are negatively associated with the amount of budgetary slack created.

ABSTRACTThis case can be used in a graduate assurance or financial reporting class or an undergraduate capstone course. It incorporates more traditional financial reporting and auditing issues with current topics, including Indigenous perspectives, sustainability considerations, and data visualization. The student, in the role of an auditor of a small but growing organization with progressive goals, is asked by the partner to analyze the audit and financial reporting issues. The client is also considering entering a new agreement with a local First Nation and has asked for the firm's advice on the strategic fit.

ABSTRACTIn incentive contracts, supervisors often set targets for employee performance, while employees decide the effort they are willing to exert to meet the target and earn the incentive. Both supervisors and employees make judgments about the value of incentives in terms of effort required or expended. Recent research on incentive types investigates employee effort in response to tangible and cash rewards under the premise that they may be valued differently by employees. We extend this research by investigating whether supervisors and employees make different effort‐related decisions in response to tangible and cash rewards. Specifically, relying on construal‐level theory, we predict that supervisors will favor tangible rewards relative to cash more than employees will. We conduct a lab experiment where we ask participants to take the role of either supervisor or employee. We manipulate the reward type (tangible or cash) and measure how much work supervisors demand and employees are willing to provide to obtain the reward. As predicted, we find that the tangible rewards, relative to cash, increase supervisors' target setting significantly more than employee effort levels. Our results offer implications for real‐world incentive compensation design.

ABSTRACTIn capital budgeting, management accountants may have their own agendas when they are creating cash flow forecasts and recommending particular capital investments. What are the mechanisms management accountants can use to influence cash flow forecasts in capital budgeting? This field study investigates how management accountants prepared cash flow forecasts for product development investment decisions at a car company. We describe in detail two instances of the technical design of new cars, the preparation of cash flow forecasts, and decisions on capital investment projects. When management accountants monetarily quantify various kinds of inputs, they not only make pragmatic choices as part of their normal work of dealing with complexity and uncertainty, but they also purposefully intervene in various ways to make their cash flow forecast support a particular capital investment. These interventions can be differentiated in terms of their nature (qualitative or quantitative) and timing (initiating or counteracting). This field study contributes a conceptualization and empirical evidence on accounting tactics in the context of capital budgeting.

ABSTRACTThis case exposes students to an intriguing industry: film production and distribution. The focus on relevant costing allows students to make recommendations about keeping, dropping, or expanding a distribution channel and about venturing into a new technology for film distribution. The analysis requires critical thinking. Because students are provided with relatively sparse financial information, they are less likely to be fixated on data and more likely to think critically about how to structure analyses to address strategic and operational issues being weighed by the studio. In addition, the case requires students to communicate their recommendations and the underlying assumptions effectively. This case is suitable for use in undergraduate and graduate managerial and cost accounting courses, introductory MBA courses in managerial accounting or strategic thinking, or undergraduate or graduate courses that are specific to the entertainment industry.

Abstract While sustainability has been a subject of growing inquiry in the accounting literature, biodiversity loss, an issue of critical societal importance, has not received the same attention. Furthermore, despite corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and the public sector all having distinct influences on biodiversity loss, the role of the public sector remains largely unexamined. Mobilizing Cuckston's (2022) framework for analyzing disclosures as calculative spaces, our study examines the framing of public sector reporting on biodiversity conservation. Specifically, through discourse analysis, we scrutinize the mandatory annual reports prepared by the Canadian federal government under the 2002 Species at Risk Act (SARA), which is aimed at preventing species extinction. The disclosures within these reports present discussions on the government's administration of SARA, thereby offering insights into the government's efforts to discharge accountability over the protection of species at risk. Our findings examine the significance of public sector reporting in enabling accountability for species conservation and discuss the ways in which mandatory disclosures contribute to this process.

Abstract The online response to customer complaints (i.e., service recovery) is a central feature of modern organizations' customer‐focused performance management systems. Motivated by the lack of descriptive information related to complaint handling that can be used in assessing managerial performance, we collect organizations' responses to consumer complaints via Twitter and apply Zemke and Schaaf's (1990) traditional service recovery model to explore these. We collected 10,305 tweets that describe the use of Twitter for service recovery by organizations across four industries: airlines, casual dining chain restaurants, hotels, and fast‐food restaurants. The findings show that in our sample, the traditional service recovery model with five service recovery elements (apology, urgent reinstatement, empathy, symbolic atonement, and follow‐up) is implemented to various degrees. Furthermore, we identify three additional service recovery elements not previously discussed by prior research: channel transfer, feedback acknowledgment, and information request. Our findings have research implications and highlight the importance of incorporating online customer complaints into managerial performance systems.