School of Accounting, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Business and Law
Title: ETHICS EDUCATION: Approaches to the development and maintenance of professional values, ethics and attitudes in accounting education programs
Team: Professor Pilomena Leung, ProfessorB. Cooper, Associate Professor S. Dellaportas, Associate Professor B. Jackling, H. Leslie and Greg Tangey
Funding body: International Federation of Accountants (IFAC)
Description: This project aims to develop a flexible framework of ethics education and provides some well researched academic literature for an International Education Guideline for Professional Accountants (IEG) in respect of the development and maintenance of professional values, ethics and attitudes. The project results and the IEG will assist and support IFAC member bodies and academics to adopt a range of appropriate approaches to the development and maintenance of professional values, ethics and attitudes in accounting education programs, at pre- and post-qualifying stages for all professional accountants and their institutions.
The deliverables of the project include:
Title: Environmental Management Systems, reporting systems, stakeholder engagement processes and environmental performance in Australian companies
Team: Professor Carol Adams, Professor R L Burritt and Dr. G Frost
Funding body: ARC Discovery
Description: The achievement of an environmentally sustainable Australia requires improved environmental performance of Australian companies which have significant environmental impacts. This work will lead to improved environmental performance, more effective stakeholder engagement and accountability and reporting systems along with better environmental management systems. This in turn will reduce environmental impacts, create more responsive corporate cultures and increase the competitive advantage of Australian industry.
Title: Measuring and Reporting Performance of Government Departments in Australia
Team: Professor Zahirul Hoque and Professor Carol Adams
Funding body: CPA Australia
Description: The research project will identify current economic, social and environmental performance measurement and reporting practice within state government departments in Australia. It will link internal organizational factors (such as strategic choice and authority structures) to external institutional factors (such as recent public sector reform in Australia and increased pressure from society to improve social and environmental performance).
Title: Predicting Change in Management Accounting and Control Systems: Size, Decentralisation, Competition, Technology and Organisational Capacity Effects
Team: Professor Zahirul Hoque
Funding body: CPA Australia
Description: In today's business world, organisations experience dramatic change from time to time. Organisational change literature elaborates on the causes of change - in particular the multidimensionality of causes and the way one interacts with another. Organisational change often needs the adoption of innovative ideas and behaviour to achieve the desired change based on the strategic orientation of the organisation. The change process within the organisation frequently brings about changes in appropriate organisational structure and internal systems with different ramifications. New accounting and control systems can be essential to implement strategies in a changing situation at the organisational level. However, until recently, management accounting research has tended to neglect such an important phenomenon, with the exception of the studies by Libby and Waterhouse (1996) and Williams and Seaman (2001). As one would expect no significant variation in national culture between Australia and Canada, the proposed study will focus mainly on replicating the Libby and Waterhouse' study in the Australian context.. To do so, it will conduct a mail-out survey of a sample of manufacturing organisations using the determinants of size, organisational capacity, competition, decentralisation and technological development.
Title: Corporate Governance and Corporate Performance: A Simultaneous Equations Analysis of Australia's Top 100 Firms
Team: Chris Doucouliagos, and Saaed Askary
Funding body: AFAANZ
Description: The project explores the links between several aspects of corporate governance and corporate performance. A number of dimensions of performance are investigated, including market valuation (stock prices and Tobin’s q), profitability, accounting measures of performance, as well as several dimensions of economic efficiency (scale, scope, technical and allocative efficiency). A panel dataset will be constructed for the top 100 publicly listed Australian firms, for the period 1992-2003. OLS estimates will be supplemented by a model of nine equations allowing for the endogeneity between corporate governance, executive remuneration, dividends, stock prices, profitability and economic performance.
Title: Financial Planners in Australia a Critical Evaluation of Competency Gaps
Team: Bev Jackling, and Colin Sullivan with technical assistance from Tom McDonald
Funding body: AFAANZ
Description: The project analyses the skills of financial planners in meeting the needs of their clients. The objective of the research is to measure the skill sets of financial planners relative to the competency standards developed for the profession by Birkett (1996). The research will be conducted in two phases with a qualitative assessment of planner/client interviews, and a quantitative approach to surveying clients post plan preparation By assessing the financial planner competencies, this project aims to assist in developing, where appropriate, amendments to training programs, ensuring that the profession more adequately meets the needs and demands of clients.
Title: Career Aspirations and Destinations of Accounting Graduates: Implications for Course and Career Development Strategies
Team: T. Mc Dowall and Associate Professor Beverley Jackling
Funding body: AFAANZ
Title: Measuring the Effectiveness of On-Campus Seminars - a Comparison with Recent US Research
Team: Associate Professor Bruce Clayton and Mike Kerry and Marc Olynk
Funding body: UniSuper
Description: To Measure the effect of member education delivered through on-campus seminars around Australia amd to compare the results with those of comparable research recently undertaken by UniSuper's sister fund the United States, TIAA-CREF.
Title: Policy Options for Improving the Value of Land Use in Smallholder Agriculture in the Fijian Islands
Team: Phillip Hone, Henry Haszler and Hristos Doucouliagos from Deakin; Sakiusa Tubuna, Paula Taukei, Apenisa Tuicakau, and Waisiki Gonemaituba from the Fiji Islands Ministry of Agriculture, Sugar and Land Resettlement; Epeli Waqavonovono from the Fiji Islands Bureau of Statistics; and Chris Ryan and Garth Parry from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community based in New Caledonia
Funding body: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research(ACIAR)
Description: Following a recent WTO ruling, the price support for Fiji's sugar production under the current EU sugar regime is set to be phased out with possibly devastating effects on the industry and the economy in general. The chances of developing and implementing appropriate agricultural policies in Fiji to deal with this and related problems are currently constrained by the lack of the fundamental economic information required for informed decision making. For example, policy makers do not have access to reliable information on critical market parameters such as the responsiveness of producers and consumers to food price changes. Nor is there is any framework for quantifying the likely impacts of food and agricultural policy changes on community well-being. And at the most fundamental level, policy makers have no reliable information on the production, sales and consumption of smallholder or subsistence farmers and fishermen who are generally counted among the poorer people in Fiji. This means there is no basis for reliably estimating either the present size of the agriculture and fishing sectors as a whole, or the full dimension of the impacts of policy changes on these sectors. This project is aimed at building the capacity of the local policy community to deal with these problems through a series of targeted collaborative research projects.
Title: Impact of Policy Changes on the Fiji Islands food Sector
Team: Associate Professor Philip Hone
Funding body: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research(ACIAR)
