International Journal of Finance and Managerial Accounting
Volume:2 Issue: 7, Autumn 2017

We consider an asset-liability management (ALM) problem for a defined benefit pension fund (PF). The PF manager is assumed to follow a maximal fund valuation problem facing an extended set of risk factors: due to the longevity of the PF members, the inflation affecting salaries in real terms and future incomes, interest rates and market factors affecting jointly the PF liability and asset portfolio. The problem is formulated as a stochastic programming problem in discrete time and with a discrete set of relevant future economic and demographic scenarios. In real world applications, this class of decision problems under uncertainty leads to very large scale and complex management problems, due to pending regulatory constraints and the need to preserve the PF funding conditions. Dynamic stochastic programming is shown under such conditions to provide a natural and effective mathematical and numerical approach.

The real challenge of business environment is derived from a situation where organizations need to find opportunities on how to introduce ideas and new products to market that provide future earnings stream. Management accounting is used as a tool in this process and provides information on opportunities and threats.
The purpose of this research is to explain the role of management accounting information system in the process of strategy formulation with actors’ network theory approach. Actor network theory is a valuable approach to improve understanding the power of each actors in management accounting system in the process of strategy formulation and helps to increase our understanding of the actors, intermediaries hidden in it and how they interact in making the network.
This research is a descriptive correlational study and its required data have been collected through a questionnaire conducted among 400 financial managers of commercial companies at Tehran in 2017 and the hypotheses testing was performed using non-parametric binomial test. The results obtained show that actors in management accounting system play a key role in the process of formulating organizational strategy. This result suggests that the actors are regarded as interventionists able to influence and change strategic decisions in actor approach contrary to the traditional approach where management accountants are simply considered a scorer or historian.

The purpose of this research is predicting the stock prices using the Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Box-Jenkins method. In this way, the information of 165 corporations is collected from 2001 to 2016. Then, this research considers price to earnings per share and earnings per share as main variables. The relevant regression equation was created using two variables of earnings per share and price to earnings per share, and stock prices were predicted through particle swarm optimization algorithm in MATLAB. IBM SPSS was used to predict stock prices with Box-Jenkins time series. The Results indicate that particle swarm optimization algorithm with 4% error and Box-Jenkins time series with 19% error, have the potential to predict stock prices of companies. Moreover, PSO algorithm model predict stock prices more precisely than Box-Jenkins time series. Also by using EViews 7 software, the results of Wilcoxon-Mann Whitney statistics showed that PSO algorithm predicts the stock price more accurately

This study explores the effect of internal control weakness on investment efficiency of companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange. The statistical population included all companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the time period 2012-2015. Purposive sampling was the sampling method. Given the theoretical principles and the research literature, two hypotheses were proposed which were tested via regression model. Eviews was employed to perform final analyses. The results revealed that there is a significant relationship between internal control weakness and investment efficiency. In other words, in the event that there is internal control weakness or the number of internal control weaknesses is increased, lack of investment efficiency (over-investment and under-investment) will increase.

This research aimed to study the behavior of real earnings management and earnings management based on accruals to achieve an average profitability of listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. In this study, we focus on the optional operating cash flow, optional cost and production cost as real earnings management representatives as well as discretionary accruals as an earnings management accounting representative. The sample consisted of 84 companies out of 454 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period 2011-2016. Multiple regression and combined data and GLS models (generalized least squares) were used to analyze the data. The results show that there is a significant relationship between real earnings management and earnings management based on accruals to achieve an average profitability of stock companies. There is also a positive and significant relationship between accrual-based earnings management and average profitability, a positive and significant relationship between real earnings management activities (production costs and cash flow from operations) and average profitability. Finally, there is a significant negative relationship between real earnings management (discretionary spending) and average profitability

According to agency theory, board of directors plays an important monitoring role in reducing information asymmetry and increasing the transparency of financial statements and social responsibility. This research is concerned with examining board diversity and social responsibility of the firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2011-2015. To do so, a sample of 98 firms was selected using systematic random sampling method. The results indicate that board gender diversity is not significantly associated with corporate social responsibility disclosure at 5% level of significance, whereas the proportion of outside directors is significantly correlated with corporate social responsibility disclosure.

The emergence of economic crises has forced countries to reform the development strategy with a view to improving economic management. The intervention of governments in the free functioning of the market to reduce social problems by paying subsidies in general and fixing prices have a lot of problems Which makes the information provided by the companies unrealistic and unviable. The most important advantage of the capital market is the transparency of information that despite the existence of huge subsidies in the refining industry (which have a huge contribution to Iran's economy) the clarity of information and the real performance of this industry have been distorted. In this research, the oil refining industry has been evaluated and while revising the financial statements in terms of price liberalization and the elimination of government subsidies, the financial performance of the companies has been evaluated. To test the research hypotheses, data were collected from 7 refineries in Tehran Stock Exchange for the period of 2006-2016. The analysis of hypotheses was done using multivariate model and combined data. The results of the research show that financial performance has a significant difference before and after price liberalization.

Bankruptcy prediction is a major issue in classification of companies. Since bankruptcy is extremely costly, investors, owners, managers, creditors, and government agencies are interested in evaluating the financial status of companies. This study tried to predict bankruptcy among companies registered in Tehran Stock Exchange (Iran) by designing imperialist competitive algorithm and genetic algorithm models. It then compared the accuracy of the two models in financial conditions of Iran and sought the best model to predict company bankruptcy one, two, and three years before its incidence. Also uses a model to surveying the financial position and also the subject of continuing operations about them to improve the quality of decision taken by shareholders and stakeholders. The study sample consisted of 38 bankrupt and 38 non-bankrupts companies during 2007-2016. The final variables used in both algorithms were five financial ratios. The results showed that the imperialist competitive algorithm had better accuracy than the genetic algorithm in bankruptcy prediction at the mentioned intervals.