Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn the public administration literature, research on performance measurement has recognized the important place of cost accounting in relation to performance. Extant research, such as the North Carolina Benchmarking Program, supports the proposition that performance and cost accounting naturally complement each other to increase trust in performance information and increase organizational learning. Other statements about cost accounting suggest that performance measurement and cost accounting compete as systems of control. This research uses general cost accounting plan information and performance measurements in the budgets of large U.S. cities to test the competing and complementary control relationship at the organizational and service levels. It finds that performance measurements and cost accounting are negatively related at the service level, which supports the competing control system hypothesis. At the organizational level, performance and cost accounting are positively related but not at traditional levels of significance.

Research on U.S. government cost accounting has received little attention in recent years. This article analyzes four of the main reasons why large cities use cost accounting: performance management, grant overhead recovery, rate setting, and cost management to reduce fiscal stress. Using a cross section of 81 cities with populations over 100,000 people, it finds that cost allocation plans are correlated with lower fund balances and are positively correlated with enterprise expenditures. These correlations suggest that the use of cost accounting is related to fiscal stress and rate setting. Research limitations and policy implications are addressed.

AbstractCost accounting in public organizations is not often studied from a comparative perspective,particularly at the national level of government.While it is often claimed that factors such as New Public Management (NPM) and fiscal stress are the primary drivers of government cost accounting,an important but understudied factor is the administrative tradition of the government,which may influence the use of cost accounting and tools like it.This article examines the perceptions of top public executives regarding cost accounting use across 19 European countries.It focuses on three key factors identified in the literature as potentially being associated with cost accounting use—administrative traditions,NPM instruments,and fiscal stress.Findings show that administrative tradition and the use of NPM instruments are related to cost accounting use,but fiscal stress is not related to cost accounting use in the countries in our study.