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Mandatory disclosure of a firm’s intellectual capital (IC) is restricted by accounting regulations, leading companies to use voluntary disclosure to inform their stakeholders about their IC. However, voluntary IC disclosure (ICD) is costly and may lead to a leak of knowledge. Consequently, firms should only engage in voluntary ICD if it really reduces information asymmetries and leads to reduced cost of capital or a better reputation. The purpose of this paper is to review, integrate and critically discuss the results of studies examining various effects of voluntary ICD.

The authors use a structured literature review approach.

The results mainly support the expected positive effects of voluntary ICD on monetary value for disclosing firms, e.g. lower cost of capital, higher firm value or increased analysts’ following. Nevertheless, the studies mainly represent second stage IC research.

Additional studies concerning effects of voluntary ICD outside capital markets are recommended. Future studies should be based on an improved study design concerning the theoretical underpinning and concept of value relevance, sufficient sample sizes and alternative sources of ICD.

Due to positive monetary effects, firms should engage in voluntary ICD.

The paper reviews and integrates the state-of-the-art of empirical research of effects of voluntary ICD. It contributes to and enlarges the debate concerning the value relevance of voluntary ICD with respect to the different stages of IC research.

Job advertisements are important means of communicating role expectations for management accountants to the labor market. They provide information about which roles are sought and expected. However, which roles are communicated in job advertisements is unknown so far.

With a text-mining approach on a large sample of 889 job ads, the authors extract information on roles, type of firm and hierarchical position of the management accountant sought.

The results indicate an apparent mix of different role types with a strong focus on a classic watchdog role. However, the business partner role is more often sought for leadership positions or in family businesses and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME).

The main limitation is the lack of an agreed-upon measurement instrument for roles in job offers. The study results imply that corporate practice is not as theory-driven as is postulated and communicated in the management accounting community. This indicates the existence of a research-practice gap and tensions between different actors in the management accounting field.

The results challenge the current role discussion of professional organizations for management accountants as business partners.

The authors contribute the first study, which explicitly analyzes the communication of roles in job offers for management accountants. It indicates a discrepancy between scholarly discussion on roles and management accountants' work from an employer's perspective.

Many observers believe that industry experience of entrepreneurs drives successful new entrepreneurial firms. However, whenever it comes to disruptive digital ventures such as Financial Technologies (Fintechs), the picture may be different due to the cross-industry nature of digital firms. The purpose of this study is to disentangle the impacts of finance, banking and information technology (IT) experiences of founders on performance of European Fintechs around venture capital (VC) investment.

Based on a data set of 105 Fintechs from European countries, including UK, which are involved in 201 VC rounds between 2006 and 2019, the authors adopt a Bayesian quantile approach to link founders’ experience with two performance measures that identify market success (return on sales) and investment outcome (return on equity).

The findings indicate that finance and IT-specific experiences seem to matter more often than banking experience and that the extent of their impact depends on level and metric of performance. More specifically, Fintechs in Europe and UK are more able to achieve market success with both finance and IT experiences of their founders, but that does not necessarily transform into higher returns for investors.

This study provides new evidence that not all aspects of industry experience matter for digital ventures, as they must fit to a certain firm, cycle and industry. For Fintech, as the name says, finance and IT experiences matter.

Accounting and decision making rely heavily on forecasts. For several reasons, we should expect ongoing increases in forecasting accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis of improved forecasts over time.

The paper analyzes original monthly sales plans and current data for three different car models in six different countries over 15 years and over several product life cycles (PLCs). Forecasting accuracy is calculated as one minus forecasting error. Forecasting error is measured with MAD/MEAN for periods of years or relative deviations per month. The hypothesis of decreasing forecasting errors is tested with the non‐parametric Mann/Kendall trend test. Additional interviews with managers were conducted to elicit details of internal forecasting organization and instruments.

The paper finds no evidence of increased forecasting accuracy in general over 15 years or over subsequent PLCs. This seems surprising, given improved statistical methods and software in general, and experience and learning effects of the organization itself. However, there is evidence from the case, that the reason lies in environmental uncertainty and volatility and not in internal factors within the control of the company.

Evidence from one case study is limited in its external validity. Future studies should analyze the forecasts of more companies, more industries and different forecasting objects, the latter including consumer, industrial goods and services. In the absence of further research, the results seem to negate the common assumption, that companies are generally able to make accurate forecasts, including those for accounting purposes. This hypothesis is clearly confuted.

The paper describes a methodology for companies to analyze their own forecasting accuracy and to identify possible reasons for a lack of accuracy, or basic approaches to increasing it.

Most studies on forecasting accuracy rely on interviews and questionnaires, entailing bias that is difficult to control. Few studies analyze archival data in order to measure forecasting accuracy; so that our study avoids much of the bias mentioned above. Despite the inevitable limitations of case studies, a study such as the present one at least allows us to dispute a common hypothesis about forecasting accuracy in practice.

IT would be quite impossible adequately to report a Dublin conference of any kind in purely professional terms. The warm friendliness of its people demands an equally personal reaction from its visitors and for public librarians certainly this is as it should be, because we are ourselves, above all, involved with people. So professional affairs at this conference were kept in their proper place—as only a part of the whole and merely providing a framework round which the business of renewing contacts and making friends could take place.