AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

The scope of the current doctoral research is twofold. Firstly, to provide support to the inference that cost behavior is driven by managerial incentives. More specifically, it aims to contribute to the accounting literature by expanding our understanding of how deliberate commitment decisions and particularly decisions that are driven by Earnings Management incentives, affect the asymmetric cost behavior. According to the literature, managerial discretion is intricately linked with Earnings Management which is an essential dimension of earnings quality (Dechow, and Schrand, 2010). There are different methods available to isolate the effects of managerial discretion on Earnings Management. Drawing on the earnings quality literature we build on the concept of Sticky Costs by examining the following research question: “Are the differences on the degree of cost asymmetry attributable to firm-level and cross-country differences on earnings quality?” The first subject of the doctoral study is the impact of the different management accounting practices on managerial cost behavior and as a result on Cost Stickiness.A managerial implication of this inference is that a better understanding of firm-level and cross-country differences in cost behavior, through Sticky Cost phenomenon, contributes to the recognition and control of Earnings Management practices. Our evidence is also useful for investors in forming their beliefs about firm’s value. Literature suggests that investors misvalue firms with intense earnings manipulation. They should consider Sticky Cost behavior in their investment decisions, since low (high) level of Cost Stickiness could be a negative (positive) signal about firm’s accounting quality, suggesting higher (lower) pervasiveness of Earnings Management. Our findings endow the growing Sticky Cost theory with an additional significant factor, by providing large sample empirical evidence for the influence of earnings quality in moderating the SG&A Cost Stickiness. By documenting the asymmetric cost behavior for a panel dataset of the G-7 countries, the analysis presented here also introduces an empirically grounded discussion on the global nature of the Sticky Cost phenomenon. Secondly, the current doctoral research is centered in studying the role of incentives stemming from factors that improve the firm’s value generating process, in affecting cost behavior. Firm’s orientation towards intangible related resource consumption is one of the most important factors that coins firms’ ability to deliver and sustain superior performance (Lev et al., 2009). This study focuses on firms’ internal view for intangible related resource consumption as investments versus expenses and shed light on some aspects of the value generating process associated with intangibles. Organization Capital, which is selected as a control variable that improves firm’s value generating process, is one of the most important unreported intangible assets. Σκοπός της παρούσας διδακτορικής διατριβής είναι να εντοπίσει καινούργιους παράγοντες…