The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of management accounting in the collaboration of health care and elderly care service. The focus of this research is the management control of facilities, especially mid-term-management plan. The contribution of this paper is to reveal the role of accounting not only within corporation, but beyond boundary of corporation. To reveal the extent of collaboration, we refer to D’Amour et al. (2008) indicator of collaboration. And to evaluate the implementation of management control systems, we evaluate the content of mid or long-term-management plan practice and budgetary control in facilities. Findings show facilities include response to community-based integrated care system in their mid or long-term plan and budget tend to positively work on collaboration.

Managers often use current budget variances when setting subordinates' subsequent budgetary targets. However, this type of target setting practice generates “ratchet effect” problems. In order to mitigate the ratchet effect, managers intentionally conduct “commitment”: they increase achievability of subordinates' targets by making them less challenging. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the firm-specific factors on commitment. Based on the argument of “budget culture” and its four constructs: budget firmness, target difficulty, management attention, and reward link, we use them as firm-specific factors and empirically investigate their effect on commitment. Our findings indicate that the three constructs other than “reward link” affect commitment, suggesting that the managers deal with the ratchet effect by setting subordinates' targets in consideration of characteristics of budgetary culture.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal influences on the production activities by combining MPC system and JIT production system, which attracted attentions as Japanese management systems. To achieve this purpose, we conducted a field study on a company (manufacturing industry), which has been introducing JIT production system recently, while implementing MPC system. As a result, we showed that JIT production system can contribute as a solution to solve the problems of MPC system. On the other hand, the combined use of the MPC system and the JIT production system also pointed out the possibility of causing reverse machines in several respects.

The purpose of this study, by using a computer simulation, is to examine the effect of informativeness and controllability on a dynamic process where an agent with limited rationality repetitively updates his/her effort level for doing a task under an optimized incentive plan, leading to an equilibrium in the end. The results show differences in the agent's effort level and the process of arriving at the equilibrium among the different combinations of the two characteristics of informativeness and controllability, and the significant effects of a feedback frequency on the number of steps until the agent does not change the effort level anymore.

In this paper, based on the method of Lavia Lòpez and Hiebl (2015), I conducted a systematic review on management accounting research of SMEs in Japan. As a result, first, it was confirmed that there are only a few management accounting studies for SMEs in Japan. Secondly, few studies have clarified general trends in the factors and outcomes of management accounting in SMEs. Thirdly, in Japan, SMEs have obtained various outcomes through the use of management accounting. The future research policy suggested by the review is the following three points. Firstly, it is to conduct research that is not conducted in the management accounting research of SMEs in Japan, such as a time-course study. Secondly, it is to advance the knowledge gained from qualitative research methods and field surveys to theorization. Thirdly, it was shown that there is a need to clarify the impact on the performance of adopting individual management accounting systems.

The Japan Real Estate Investment Trust (J-REIT) is practically exempt from corporate taxation as it satisfies certain conditions under the Act on Special Measures Concerning Taxation. For J-REIT to receive this preferential treatment, it is necessary to satisfy the conduit requirements that it distributes 90% of its taxable income as dividends to common shareholders. In addition, because J-REIT has a high proportion of depreciable tangible fixed assets owing to the nature of its business, the depreciation expenses have a significant impact on its income. Given such characteristics of J-REITs, I investigate the factors influencing earnings management through an adjustment of the depreciation expenses of J-REITs. Using a sample of J-REITs for the period 2005–2017, I find that (1) income-increasing earnings management through the management of depreciation expenses is implemented as the share of non-individual shareholders increases and the influence of creditors increases and (2) income-decreasing earnings management through the management of depreciation expenses is implemented as the investment opportunity sets and the corporation's size increases.

The financial data disclosed by companies are useful research resource. For example, cross-sectional financial data can be used to measure the performance of management accounting systems. However, cross-sectionally sampled financial data may include different accounting periods because firms adopt different months as their fiscal year-end. This study examines how variation among accounting periods affects the homogeneity of the sampled financial data. One way to eliminate this problem is to use only the financial data of companies that employ the same accounting period. Therefore, we also examine the sampling bias that can occur due to this extraction method. The results suggest that financial data samples including both companies whose accounting periods ended in March of the current year and those whose periods ended in December of the previous year can be more homogeneous, and that samples that include only financial data of companies whose fiscal year-end month is March can be biased in terms of industry diversification and company size.

Strategic management accounting proposed by Simmonds has been studied by many researchers as a field connecting strategic management and management accounting. However, no clear definition has been formed even today. This paper will clarify the situation of strategic management accounting research in Japan. I conducted two types of content analysis on 120 papers from 1986 to 2018 on strategic management accounting in Japan. First, I research the management accounting techniques regarded as strategic management accounting. As a result, eight techniques (target costing, strategic cost management, balanced scorecard, activity-based costing, quality costing, life cycle costing, competitor analysis, customer profitability analysis) were mentioned by a certain number of researchers. Second, I classified the 120 papers into three research categories; case studies, survey studies, and other studies. As a result, I found that the number of case studies and survey studies were few.