As price, quality, reliability, delivery date, and function of a product created by Target Costing (TC) will be estimated by customers finally, the information on cost, quality, function, and technology of the product is required for effective TC. Furthermore, delivering of this information timely enables them to develop product promptly. Cost management at the mass production stage can be performed using only a cost-table of materials and components, but the cost management at the stage of development and design requires the cost-table of function. Furthermore, the cost management at the stage of development and design requires not only the cost-table of materials, components, and function, but also a table of quality and technology. Therefore, in this paper, first, a novel methodology to construct a database for cost-table of materials, components, function and the table of quality and technology using value engineering (VE) and quality function deployment (QFD) to support TC is described. Second, the database for cross-reference of the tables of component-cost, function-cost, quality, technology to support the design of product effectively was suggested. Third, our database was deployed through Internet to provide designers in the development of product or supplier with mutual sharing of the component-cost, function-cost, quality, and technology without time-space limitation.

The purpose of this research is to examine the relation between the quality of earnings and the mispricing of accruals persistence, and accruals anomalies proposed by Sloan (1996). While Ahmed et al. (2004) uses the degree of earnings management as the measure of quality of earnings, this study uses estimation errors of accruals proposed by Dechow and Dichev (2002). In the paper, I divide the samples into high quality and low quality groups. Following Herrmann et al. (2001) and Sloan (1996), I perform the efficiency test and the hedge portfolio test to each partial period. As a result, the hypothesis of this study is supported and I generally confirm that the estimation errors of accruals as the quality of earnings are significantly correlated to the mispricing of accruals persistence and the accruals anomalies.

Risk assessment of privacy breaches is an important component in IT security management. However, it has been said that a decrease of long-term sales and brand value is unfathomable, while a direct expense, such as technical and customer issues, is assessable. This study tries to measure reductions of firms' value in the stock market immediately after privacy breach incidents as the estimated damage using the event study methodology. The research analyzes reactions of the stock market for 118 events of listed firms from 1997 to 2004. The result shows a significant negative abnormal return of -0.667% is observed on the average. Incidents in recent years OR with larger-scale breaches lead to more negative abnormal returns. The average of abnormal returns in recent years AND with larger-scale breaches is -1.726% and one third of the variance is explained by a regression model.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine and to analyze the accounting policy selection behavior among Japanese firms in respect of discount rates applied for pension accounting. To be more specific, this paper examines the aspect of pension accounting standards in selecting discount rates. In addition, this paper presents the case studies of Japanese firms, and shows that to what extent discretion is exercised in the process of selecting the discount rates. By reviewing time-series data about the selection of the discount rates, this paper builds the hypotheses (herding behavior and standardization behavior) based on my experiences from practicing. As a result, this paper empirically finds that the managerial discretion in selecting discount rates diminishes over time and the discount rates are being standardized over time.