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This paper aims to explore the increasing role of financialisation on investment decisions in the power generation industry in Great Britain (GB). Such decisions affect society, and the relative role of financialisation in these macro-levels decisions has not been explored from a historical perspective.

The paper draws on historical material and interview data. Specifically, we use an approach inspired by institutional sociology drawing on elements of Scott’s (2014) pillars of institutions. Applying concepts stemming from regulative and normative pressures, we explore changes in investments over the analysis period to determine forces which institutionalised practices – such as accounting – into investment in power generation.

Investments in electricity generation have different levels of public and private participation. However, the common logics that underpin such investment practices provide an important understanding of political-economics and institutional change in the UK. Thus, the heightened use of accounting in investment has been, to some extent, a contributory factor to the power supply problems now faced by the British public.

This paper contributes to prior literature on the effects of financialisation on society, adding power generation/energy supply to the many societal level issues already explored. It also provides brief but unique insights into the changing nature of the role of accounting in an industry sector over an extended timeframe.

This paper aims to investigate the association between the level of voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital (COEC).

Two disclosure indices following Botosan and Hail are developed and applied in an OLS regression on 95 listed companies from Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark; the indices are defined according to the temporal context (historical, forward‐oriented) of information provided in annual reports.

An expected negative relationship is found between the level of forward‐oriented information and COEC, and an unexpected positive relationship is found between the level of historical information and COEC.

The sample is restricted to 95 listed companies in 2005. The disclosure index and COEC are not directly observable, and thus rely on constructs. Methodological drawbacks might include an endogeneity bias as well as investors not having homogeneous expectations and knowledge about capital markets.

Traditional financial reporting models might not provide enough information in order to reduce information asymmetry and COEC. The findings provide insight into the impact of a required increased level of additional corporate information on corporate metrics, especially to standard setters and academic researchers as well as practitioners.

The current research contributes in three ways: the application of a disclosure index on an international sample; the employment of a new approach to computing COEC, explicitly matching input variables to a pre‐specified estimation date; and the provision of evidence on the different impact of the temporal context of voluntarily disclosed information.

The purpose of this paper is to construct and propose a definition for intangibles derived from the resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm for use in academic research and practical applications.

Intangibles are defined as a subset of corporate resources. In this paper, various definitions for intangibles are tested against the RBV framework.

The majority of definitions in the extant literature are (implicitly or explicitly) in synchronization with the RBV. Thus, it is possible to find and propose a common definition for intangibles.

Some researchers argue that the field is still in its embryonic stages and thus the concepts might still be too fresh in order to find a stable common definition.

The paper offers a conceptual lens through which one can clearly link intangibles to strategy and offers a proposed definition of intangibles that incorporates a meta‐review of the literature.

The paper shows that it is in fact possible to accommodate various definitions of intangibles under one common framework and propose a unified characterization.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the initiation of accounting information system projects. Specifically, it examines the role of the predictive analytics (PA) project initiator in the integration of financial and operational sales forecasts.

The study uses a field study method to address the studied phenomenon in eight Finnish companies that have recently adopted PA systems. The data are primarily based on 19 interviews in the companies and five interviews with the PA consultants.

The authors found that initiators appear to play a major role regarding the degree of integration of financial and operational sales forecasts. The initiators from an accounting function have a tendency to pay more attention to the integration than the representatives from other functions, such as operations and sales.

The study also makes a practical contribution to companies in showing and discussing the important role of the accounting department as an initiator of a project if the target is to achieve a tight coupling of financial and operational forecast figures, i.e., “one set of numbers”.

Even though companies have increasingly adopted PA systems in recent years, we still know little about how the initiation affects the design of accounting information systems overall. The central contribution of the paper, therefore, is to show that if a PA project is initiated by the accounting department, data integration becomes more likely. It contributes also to the discussion related to the appropriateness of data integration in the context of forecasting.