The Stock Exchange in Japan requires Japanese firms listed on the exchange to report management earnings forecasts in their annual press releases. Recent questionnaire surveys on management forecasts have revealed that they are closely linked with internal budgets. This finding calls for the management accounting perspective when studying management earnings forecasts. The purpose of this study is to explain the management earnings forecasts and forecast errors based on the idea of budget ratcheting. The empirical analysis indicates that budget ratcheting has an impact on management earnings forecasts and forecast errors, suggesting that management accounting approach enriches our understanding of management earnings forecasts.

This paper investigates whether and how managers affect their business-unit's performance. Although it is often assumed that managers can exert idiosyncratic influence on their business-units' performance, this is neither theoretically consistent nor empirically tested. Using proprietary archival data from a bakery firm, DONQ Co., LTD., I estimate the shop managers' effect on the units' performance and find them to be statistically and economically significant. I further show that the estimated manager-specific effects are associated with their career and age.

This paper investigates asymmetric cost behavior in Japanese firms. Particularly, I examine cost anti-stickiness in Japanese firms following research conducted by Banker et al. (2014). I document whether a magnitude of a decrease in costs associated with a decrease in sales is greater than a magnitude of an increase in costs associated with an equivalent increase in sales. The results show that in Japanese firms, current Selling, General and Administrative Costs are sticky conditional on a prior sales increase and anti-sticky conditional on a prior sales decrease. Furthermore, Japanese firms have sticky and anti-sticky behavior only when prior periods show a trend of continuous increases or decreases in sales, respectively. For a given magnitude of a current sales increase, costs rise to a greater extent on average following a prior sales increase than following a prior sales decrease. I examine cost stickiness and anti-stickiness in three industries and find observation of cost anti-stickiness is industry-dependent.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of advertising expenses on brand value. I select top 200 companies' corporate brand value (CBV) calculated by the model named 'CB valuator' during 2006 and 2011 and analyze the relationship between advertising expenses and CBV. Based on the previous studies, I assume a four-year lagged relation between advertising expenditures and CBV. The result of structural equation modeling (SEM) indicates that the effects of the advertising amount on the corporate brand value is positive and statistically significant.

Previous studies show that the effectiveness of advertising expenses varies. I set a hypothesis that the effectiveness of advertising expenses on CBV is larger in companies with an increase in their CBV than companies with a decrease in their CBV. This hypothesis is not supported.