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An event study is a statistical regression analysis that examines the effect of an event or events on the market prices of a company 's publicly traded security. The event study methodology is well established in academia and is used extensively in economics, finance, and accounting research. The key contribution of the event study methodology is its ability to separate stock price fluctuations due to various market forces from the price impact due to the event under study. Over the past two decades, event study methodology has been used increasingly as a valuation technique in various litigation contexts, including securities fraud litigation. This paper provides a primer on how event studies are conducted and used in securities fraud litigation and their limitations.

On January 22, 2002, Kmart Corporation filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy laws. While under Chapter 11 protection, Kmart renegotiated its debt, shed some of its non-performing assets, and issued new equity. Financier Eddie Lampert of ESL Investments bought much of Kmart's debt for less than$1 billion while it was in bankruptcy. As part of the reorganization plan, virtually all of Kmart's debt was converted into shares, and ESL Investments emerged as Kmart's largest shareholder. Subsequent to its emergence from bankruptcy on May 6, 2003, Kmart's stock has gone up from around $ 15/share to nearly $80/share over a period of one year. The case requires students to analyze Kmart's financial performance prior to the bankruptcy, identify the circumstances leading to the bankruptcy, use projected financial statements to derive Kmart's value post-bankruptcy, and explore issues related to Kmart's adoption of Fresh Start reporting upon its emergence from bankruptcy. The case questions fall into five categories: (1) pre-bankruptcy evaluation, (2) reorganization plan and Kmart in bankruptcy, (3) Fresh Start reporting, (4) bankruptcy valuation analysis, and (5) post-bankruptcy performance. The questions are largely independent, allowing instructors the flexibility to adopt only the sections relevant to their courses.

This article examines the application of activity-based costing to hospitals using current health care practices and procedures such as diagnosisrelated groups, patient-activity systems, case management; and critical path analysis.

Professional and nonprofessional employees of accounting firms frequently have access to private information that could dramatically affect the price of the client's securities. Trading on such private information is a violation of federal insider trading prohibitions. Accounting firms can be held liable for inside trading violations of their employees and are encouraged to establish policies and procedures to prevent the abuse of insider information. The law of insider trading and its possible impact on the accounting profession are examined, and compliance polices and programs designed to prevent insider trading are suggested.

As accountants' functions continue to expand to include new and challenging functions within organizations and society, practitioners are faced with an ever-increasing need for current information on companies as a means to obtain significant competitive advantage. Online databases provide quick and a relatively low-cost access to up-to-date information. Information available from online databases include financial reports on public and private companies, directory information and credit reports. For public companies, all of the data submitted to the SEC are available and are repackaged in various different ways by different database producers. Finding data on companies that are not publicly traded can be difficult since they are not subject to the reporting requirements of the SEC. Financial statements for privately owned companies can be found through Dun & Bradstreet's Financial Records Plus. For directory information on US private companies, several files are available, including Dun & Bradstreet's Dun's Electronic Business Directory.

The Balanced Scorecard, by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, is reviewed.

In this paper, I examine the impact of insider trading prior to an earnings announcement on the stock price response to earnings. The hypothesis is that insider trading prior to an earnings announcement might provide an additional source of predisclosure information to market participants to make inferences about forthcoming earnings. If so, I expect the stock price response to earnings announcements of firms whose earnings announcements are preceded by insider trading to be smaller compared with that of firms whose earnings announcements are not preceded by insider trading. I use two metrics to examine the impact of insider trading on the stock price response to earnings--earnings response coefficient (the coefficient mapping unexpected earnings into security returns around quarterly earnings announcements (denoted ERC)) and a measure of the variance of returns. The ERC is estimated for the period 1980-1984 as a coefficient from a regression of returns on unexpected earnings using the seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) methodology. Insider trading is incorporated into the empirical model as a dummy variable which equals one when there is insider trading and zero otherwise. The stock return variance measure is computed by deflating the cumulated squared two-day announcement returns by an estimate of the variance of returns from the period prior to the earnings announcement. I classify firms into portfolios for each quarter from 1980-1984 based on the sign of the earnings surprise ( (Actual EPS - Forecast EPS) $\\sbsp{<}{>}$ 0) and the direction of insider trading (Purchases $\\sbsp{<}{>}$ Sales). Briefly, my results provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that insider trading prior to an earnings announcement provides additional interim information about a firm's forthcoming earnings.

This paper suggests an activity-based cost (ABC) system as the appropriate cost accounting system to measure and control costs under the microstatistical episode of care (EOC) paradigm suggested by D. W. Emery (1999). ABC systems work well in such an environment because they focus on activities performed to provide services in the delivery of care. Thus, under an ABC system it is not only possible to accurately cost episodes of care but also to more effectively monitor and improve the quality of care. Under the ABC system, costs are first traced to activities and then traced from the activities to units of episodic care using cost drivers based on the consumption of activity resources.