Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand the growth of a quasi-market industry and the distribution of capital generated by the industry’s private companies. Methodology: Using a longitudinal case study approach, descriptive panel data and a regression analysis highlight the development of medium-sized Swedish companies within the personal care assistance (PA) industry. Findings: This study demonstrates a quasi-market growth cycle and how the hierarchical organizational dimension explains key figure differences between the business types of independent firms (undivisionalized) and conglomerate subsidiaries. Originality: This study is the first to reveal that quasi-market conditions open up for broad redistributions of capital to non-related conglomerate-owned industries. Thereby, non-intended industries receive public funding advantages.

This essay explains why cost accounting, ethical accountability, and accounting principles are interrelated concepts. During the past two decades, the relationship between accounting systems and discharge of accountability has increasingly drawn the attention of researchers. However, researchers have shown a marginal interest in the inclusion and examination of the theme of cost accounting, and in particular, no interest has been oriented to explore the potential role of cost accounting in serving presentation of the trustful cost information as regards the discharge of accountability. In this essay, we will reason that the traditional discourse of cost accounting is fundamentally different from the managerial discourse of cost accounting. The traditional cost accounting is built upon the ethical, legal, professional, and principle-based discourses. By exploring the differences between the two cost accounting discourses, this essay will reduce the effect of current skeptical views with which quality of our academic education, relevance of our research, and our understanding of the potential role of cost accounting in serving the provision and presentation of trustful information have been eriously undermined.  

Accounting principles are a set of ethical constructs that primarily serve to shift accounting towards the locus of ethical judgment. As such, principles help putting the ethical accountability at the “fields” of the entities and provide judgmental relationships or “fit” between ethical consideration and standards as well as various practices of accounting in innumerable ways. However, the current research debates of the ethical issues in accounting have been discursively shaped upon a set of distinctions that researchers make between two sets of dominant standards. These standards are drawn from the contexts of U.S, respectively International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) codifications. This notion should be added that these standards are uncritically defined as being either rules-based or principles-based. In fact, the current accounting debate treats the ethical issues in accounting through the focus on the technical features of the standards. This study will argue that the ethical problem of accounting cannot be adequately approached by the repeated references into the technical natures of the rules-based and principles-based standards. By highlighting the ethical roots of the accounting principles, we will emphasize that analysis of the standards and ethical issues in accounting needs to be judgmentally associated with the propositional promises of the accounting principles.

Using transactions data on apartment sales in Sweden, and taking in consideration the decision made by Swedish Riksbank, we examined the effect of mandatory mortgage amortization on apartment prices. In addition, we examined the effect on apartment demand preferences. For this purpose, we created indices of apartment prices using traditional hedonic models. We applied the spatial model in estimating a zone level apartment price index. With the created indices, we studied the effect on apartment prices by using the traditional panel data method. The propensity score model was used to analyze the effect of the decision on the property prices. We applied different time periods as the event window (quarter, 2 quarters, 1 year, 2 years). Finally, we tested several cut-off time points. We found no effect of the Riksbank decision on apartment prices, however we found a change in apartment preferences.

During the past decades, explanation of capital structures through firm-specific performance variables has increasingly drawn the attention of researchers (for example Kester, 1986; Friend and Lang,1988; Titman & Wessels,1988; Rajan and Zingales,1995: Wald,1999: Ozkan,2001; Zou & Xiao, 2006). In fact, the researchers have attempted to explain how selected firm-specific performance variables - often drawn from the context of annual reports - have affected the outgrowths of various capital structures. The resulting capital structures have often been used to make either comparisons between the two sets of companies or explaining the changes of capital structure over time. However, a focus on the processes of these researches reveals that for the studies of capital structures different methods were applied. In addition to this, the choice of variables was not methodologically reasoned. As a consequence, explanations of the outgrowth of the capital structures appeared being highly ambiguous and paradoxical. This study examines the problem attached to the choices and definitions of variables. It has the intension to demonstrate that rules applied for the selection, definitions, and measurements of the variables are the main causes to the ambiguous and paradoxical results of the past research on capital structure. By reviewing a number of prior empirical researches, this study reveals some inconsistency arising from the failure to apply a common rule in definitions, selections and measurement of the variables.