​Earnings forecasts are ubiquitous in today's financial markets. They are essential indicators of future firm performance and a starting point for firm valuation. Extremely inaccurate and overoptimistic forecasts during the most recent financial crisis have raised serious doubts regarding the reliability of such forecasts. This thesis therefore investigates new determinants of forecast errors and accuracy. In addition, new determinants of forecast revisions are examined. More specifically, the thesis answers the following questions: 1) How do analyst incentives lead to forecast errors?...

Understanding cost behavior is a fundamental element of cost accounting and the management of a firm. Deviating from the traditional assumption of symmetric cost behavior, numerous recent research studies show that costs are sticky, that is, they decrease less when sales fall than they increase when sales rise. Daniel Baumgarten comprehensively analyzes the cost stickiness phenomenon by discussing its development and all relevant findings presented in the research literature. Furthermore, he provides several suggestions for future research and discusses important implications of cost...

Ausgehend von den wesentlichen Charakteristika einer wertorientierten Unternehmensfuhrung entwickelt Cordula Ebeling unter Berucksichtigung von Erkenntnissen der Organisations- und Motivationsforschung Anforderungen und Merkmale, deren Erfullung als Voraussetzung fur eine erfolgreiche Umsetzung einer wertorientierten Unternehmensfuhrung angesehen werden kann.

Basierend auf der Prinzipal-Agenten-Theorie analysiert Peter Stebel Anreizprobleme aus Sicht des Dienstleistungsunternehmers beim Mitarbeiter und beim Kunden. Er leitet Empfehlungen zur Verhaltenssteuerung bei Dienstleistungen ab und uberpruft diese anhand einer empirischen Studie.

The stylized facts that firms pay and investors react to dividends disregard dividend neutrality. Taking on the perspective that informational asymmetries are the central determinant for dividend value relevance, Christian Muller assumes that firm's dividend decision conveys useful information to investors. He shows that investors use dividend changes to revise their a priori expectations about the persistence of a current earnings change. While his theoretical and empirical analyses generally imply that dividend changes constitute informative, but imperfect information signals, he further...

Financial analysts provide information in their research reports and thereby help forming expectations of a firm's future business performance. Thus, it is essential to recognize analysts who provide the most precise forecasts and the accounting literature identifies characteristics that help finding the most accurate analysts. Tanja Klettke detects new relationships and identifies two new determinants of earnings forecast accuracy. These new determinants are an analyst's "general forecast effort" and the "number of supplementary forecasts." Within two comprehensive empirical investigations...

Auf der Basis geeigneter Residualgewinnverfahren konzipiert Matthias Wei Produktlebenszyklusrechnung und Prozesskostenrechnung so, dass durch ihre Anwendung ein Beitrag zur Steigerung des Unternehmenswertes im Sinne der wertorientierten Unternehmensfuhrung geleistet werden kann. Aufbauend auf einer mehrstufigen Wertbeitragsrechnung entwickelt er einen Target-Costing-Ansatz, der die Instrumente zu einem wertorientierten Kostenmanagement zusammenfuhrt.

Using simulations, a benchmark firm (first-best solution) perfectly allocating cost to products is compared to firms implementing heuristic cost-allocation schemes (second-best solution) to identify the profit gap resulting from decisions based on limited information.

An Empirical Analysis of the Accounting and Economic Implications