Vedran Capkun

On the relationship between inventory and financial performance in manufacturing companies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between inventory performance, both total inventory (INV) and its discrete components (raw material (RMI), work‐in‐process (WIP), and finished goods (FGI)), and financial performance in manufacturing companies.Design/methodology/approach – Statistical analysis is applied to the financial information of US‐based manufacturing firms over the 26‐year period from 1980 to 2005.Findings – The paper finds a significant positive correlation between inventory performance (total as well as the discrete components of inventory) and measures of financial performance (at both the gross and operating levels) for firms in manufacturing industries. The correlation between the performance of discrete types of inventory and financial performance varies significantly across inventory types. RMI performance has the highest correlation with all financial performance measures. Between WIP inventory and FGI performance, the former is more highly correlated with gr...

The Effect of IAS/IFRS Adoption on Earnings Management (Smoothing): A Closer Look at Competing Explanations

Prior research provides mixed evidence on whether the transition to IAS/IFRS deters or contributes to greater earnings management (earnings smoothing). The dominant explanation for the conflicting results is self-selection. Early voluntary adopters had incentives to increase the transparency of their reporting in order to attract outside capital, and, therefore, earnings management (smoothing) went down after adoption, while those firms that waited until IFRS adoption became mandatory in EU countries lacked incentives for transparent reporting leading to increases in earnings management (smoothing) after IFRS adoption. We argue that IAS/IFRS standards changed substantially from the early voluntary adoption period to the mandatory adoption year (2005). Compared to earlier IAS/IFRS standards and many countries’ domestic GAAP standards, we maintain that the IFRS standards that went into effect in 2005 provide greater flexibility of accounting choices because of vague criteria, overt and covert options, and subjective estimates that are allowed under these principle-based standards. We argue that this greater flexibility coupled with the lack of clear guidance on how to implement these new standards has led to greater earnings management (smoothing). Consistent with this view, we find an increase in earnings management (smoothing) from pre-2005 to post-2005 for Early Adopters and Late Adopters in countries that allowed early IAS/IFRS adoption, and for Mandatory Adopters in countries that did not allow early IFRS adoption. Our major findings hold after eliminating firms more likely to have mechanically-induced increases in earnings smoothing properties as a result of IFRS adoption and across countries with and without concurrent improvements in enforcement of accounting standards. We also find that firms from countries with less (more) local GAAP flexibility exhibit greater (less) evidence of increases in earnings smoothing following mandatory adoption of IFRS standards in 2005. Collectively, our results suggest that the increased flexibility of new IAS/IFRS standards and lack of clear guidance in implementing these standards are major factors that explain earnings management (smoothing) changes around IFRS adoption.

Service specialization and operational performance in hospitals

The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between service specialization and operational performance in hospitals. Existing literature has mostly been concerned with the performance effects of operational focus, which can be seen as an extreme form of specialization. It is not clear, however, whether an effect similar to the focus effect can be observed also in cases where specialization takes on less extreme forms. The authors analyze this effect up to and above the effects of volume, learning and patient selection. Design/methodology/approach - Ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage regression models were used to analyze patient data from 142 Austrian hospitals over the 2002-2006 period. The sample contains 322,193 patient groups (841,687 patient group-year observations). Findings - The authors find that increased specialization in a service leads to a more efficient provision of this service in terms of shorter length of stay. The analysis shows that this effect holds even after controlling for volume, learning, and patient selection effects. The authors suggest that the pure specialization effect is due to the increased administrative and medical attention that is given to a service when the relative importance of that service increases. Practical implications - The papers results indicate hospital managers should pay attention to the impact of specialization when making service-mix decisions. If two services have the same or a similar level of operational performance, then this does not mean that hospital managers should be indifferent as to the relative volume of these services. Originality/value - The paper provides additional insights into the impact of service-level specialization not examined in prior literature.

The Impact of Incorporating the Cost of Errors into Bankruptcy Prediction Models

The current methodology to evaluate default and bankruptcy prediction models is to determine their precision - the percentage of firms predicted correctly. In this study we develop a framework for incorporating Type I (the amount lost from lending to a firm which goes bankrupt) and Type II (the opportunity cost of not lending to a firm which does not go bankrupt) error costs into the evaluation of prediction models. We then test this new framework by comparing the prediction model with a naive model of lending to all firms in the population based on the net profit each would generate. Our results indicate that prediction models can outperform naive models or other models only under certain conditions. This supports our hypothesis that the usefulness of prediction models cannot be fully assessed independently of the costs of forecast errors.

The Effects of IFRS Adoption on Observed Earnings Smoothness Properties: The Confounding Effects of Changes in Timely Gain and Loss Recognition

Ball and Shivakumar [(2006), The role of accruals in asymmetrically timely gain and loss recognition. Journal of Accounting Research, 44, 207–242] show that the observed smoothness of earnings (i.e. negative contemporaneous correlation between accruals and cash flows) is the joint product of the role of accruals in smoothing out transitory fluctuations in operating cash flows (noise reduction role) and the role of accruals in providing timely recognition of economic gains and losses (contracting role). These two roles of accruals have opposite effects on earnings smoothness properties. Using a regression framework that allows us to simultaneously consider both roles, we show that failing to control for changes in timely gain and loss recognition as firms shift to IFRS can lead to erroneous inferences regarding the effects of IFRS adoption on earnings smoothness, and consequently on researcher’ conclusions about how IFRS adoption has affected accounting quality. Our results are consistent with mandatory (2005) IFRS adoption resulting in a change in the contracting role rather than the noise reduction role (or smoothness role) of accruals. A decrease in timely loss recognition, an increase in timely gain recognition, and a net decrease in asymmetric timely loss recognition are what drives the change in observed smoothness properties of earnings around mandatory IFRS adoption.

Microcomputations as Micropayments in Web-based Services

In this article, we propose a new micropayment model for nonspecialized commodity web-services based on microcomputations. In our model, a user that wishes to access online content (offered by a website) does not need to register or pay to access the website; instead, he will accept to run microcomputations on behalf of the service provider in exchange for access to the content. These microcomputations can, for example, support ongoing computing projects that have clear social benefits (e.g., projects relating to medical research) or can contribute towards commercial computing projects. We analyze the security and privacy of our proposal and we show that it preserves the privacy of users. We argue that this micropayment model is economically and technically viable and that it can be integrated in existing distributed computing frameworks (e.g., the BOINC platform). In this respect, we implement a prototype of a system based on our model and we deploy our prototype on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate its performance and usability given a large number of users. Our results show that our proposed scheme does not affect the browsing experience of users and is likely to be used by a non-trivial proportion of users. Finally, we empirically show that our scheme incurs comparable bandwidth and CPU consumption to the resource usage incurred by online advertisements featured in popular websites.

Measuring the Effects of Improvements in Operations Management

This paper examines the relationship between a managerial focus on reducing inventory and improvements in value added. We analyze financial information on large non-service US based firms over the 25 year period from 1980 to 2004. Our results show a very strong correlation between the increase in value added and the decrease in days of inventory speed across all manufacturing industries. The results strongly support the operations management literature which claims a managerial focus on efficiency, in particular increasing the speed of operations, will result in significant value creation for firms. The results also imply that the concept of competition based on operational speed has not been transferred across all firms and the potential for improvement still exits in most industries.