The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usefulness of management plans. Recently, management plans have been regarded as a basic component of management control systems. This is suggested by the fact that many textbooks of management accounting, we have reviewed, refer to management plans. However, there is little empirical evidence on the usefulness of management plans as a component of management control systems. So that, some description about management plans lacks consistency between textbooks. Then in this paper we explore the relations between the elements of management plans and firm performance. As a result, it appears that the purpose of planning and the method of updating have significant relations to return on assets (ROA) which is a measure for evaluating appropriateness of resource allocation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of intangible investments on earnings management in Japanese finns. To this end, we hypothesize that intangible-intensive firms tend to make income-increasing accounting decision. We call this the “profit signaling hypothesis”. Alternatively, we hypothesize mat these firms tend to make income-decreasing accounting decision. We call this the “tax benefit hypothesis”. The empirical results show that managers of intangible-intensive Japanese firms tend to use negative discretionary accruals to manage reported earnings downward. Overall, we conclude that the data is ccmsistentwim the tax benefit hypothesis.

This paper aims to explore the process of management accounting change from the view point of the institutional framework and the organizational knowledge creation theory. A case of a large Japanese manufacturing company demonstrates that changes took place through the interactions between rules and routines under the pressure of justification criteria. The organizational knowledge creation theory shed light on enabling factors which was not well explored in management accounting change studies. That contributes to understand unintentional aspect of change process.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the current state of utilization of ROA (Real Options Approach) and to explain the environmental factors that urge the firms to use ROA with regard to investment decision making of Japanese firms. Previous studies pointed out DCF had a tendency to underestimate profitability of investment plans, meanwhile ROA tended to urge overinvestment.

Referring to those studies, this article found a certain environmental factors such as the extent of uncertainty and the types of governance could urge firms to evaluate the properties of real options in investment plans.