Antonio Davila

• Universidad de Navarra

We study the use of budgets in public organizations with governance shaped by democratic structures. In particular, we examine political variables – electoral cycle, majority government, and ideology – and managerial variables – past performance and peer performance – in the context of city governments. Using data from 170 municipalities over a per...

Prior research provides strong evidence for the association between business strategy and the design and use of management control systems. We complement this research by examining the role of management control systems in situations of strategic change. We report the results of an in-depth longitudinal field study of Henkel, a German multinational...

Organizations are at an interesting inflection point where existing paradigms are insufficient. The focus on execution as the main source of competitive advantage has been the dominant paradigm since the late 19th century. It is not enough. The dynamism brought by billions of people joining the market economy and by the exponential development acro...

Internal control mechanisms are fundamental to organizational governance; particularly, to the agency relationship associated with decentralization of decision rights. Management accounting and organizational literatures provide conflicting predictions on the association between decentralization and internal controls, with some research arguing tha...

Subjective bonuses can reflect implicit contracts entered at the beginning of the period when certain employees commit to more difficult targets and managers use subjective bonuses at the end of the period to reward this commitment. We examine this prediction in a budget-based incentive systems’ setting. We argue that the presence of these implicit...

We use a field research design to examine management control systems in creative teams working in fashion firms. The study is structured as an in-depth case study followed by five additional cases. We find management control systems to be deeply embedded in the work environment of creative teams. They are designed to define, negotiate, and legitimi...

This paper examines organizational learning in target setting. Organizations commonly set targets—explicit and quantitative reference points—for their operational units that reflect top management aspirations for these units. Targets are commonly the outcome of a subjective process where supervisors combine their explicit and tacit knowledge to set...

This study examines the moderating effects of performance measurement systems (PMS), i.e. PMS sophistication (i.e. BSC-like PMS), on the relationships between internal values drivers (internal efficiency, employee commitment, organizational flexibility) and performance outcomes (customer satisfaction, market performance, financial performance). Con...

Manuscript Type Empirical Research Question/Issue This paper addresses the effect of having multiple large shareholders on shareholder protection. More specifically, we examine to what extent this effect depends on whether such large shareholders are beneficiary or fiduciary. Research Findings/Insights Analyzing longitudinal, hand‐collected data...

The question of whether management control systems (MCSs) adopted by start-up companies are valuable is examined. We investigate an international sample of start-ups, including their detailed MCS adoptions and financing histories. We find that higher MCS intensity, which is measured as the number of systems adopted at year-end immediately prior to...

Managers use a variety of information to set performance targets. Using data from 376 branches of a large travel retailer over five years, this study documents supervisors considering the relative performance of comparable units in target setting, which we term relative target setting (RTS). We find evidence of RTS after controlling for individual...

Using a large multi-country multi-industry sample of over 158,000 companies, the early-stage company sector is documented to have sizable destruction of revenues and jobs and as well as sizable gross creation of revenues and jobs. The creation aspect has captured the dominant attention of researchers, commentators, and policy makers. Destruction, d...

At the core of contingency theory, a major theory in management accounting, is the concept of fit. We critically discuss forms of fit as presented in overview articles from the management accounting field, highlighting forms of fit that have not appeared in prior overview articles (matching fit with hetero-performance on the fit line and/or asymmet...

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to present a state of the art of performance measurement and management control systems based on the papers presented in the 6th Conference on Performance Measurement and Management Control in Nice, France, 2011. The chapter is structured around two main topics: performance measurement and control systems. M...

The assistance of Trinet and VentureOne for this research is gratefully appreciated. We are grateful for the comments of participants in the Stanford University research workshop.

The behavior and determinants of market-to-revenue ratios in public and private capital markets is examined. Three samples are analysed: (1) all publicly traded stocks listed at some time on the New York Stock Exchange/American Stock Exchange/National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System in the 1980—2004 period; (2) sample o...

This study considers the impact of organisational learning as endogenous growth driver for technology-based new ventures. Over a period of up to 12 years, the growth path of 44 venture capital backed companies was analysed as critical event series, where the events were the adoption of 50 management control systems. The study shows that the adoptio...

Many startup companies go through the so-called “entrepreneurial crisis” when they reach a headcount somewhere between 50 and 100 employees. At this point, the CEO and her team have to transition from a personal to a professional management style. Management systems play a critical role in managing this transition effectively. Contrary to the popul...

Management accounting and control systems play a relevant role in the creative side of the innovation process. However, the traditional paradigm of this research field focused on optimizing efficiencies in the organization if it runs into problems when confronted with creativity. To progress on our understanding of the role of these systems in crea...

Purpose – Since the introduction of the concept of the balanced scorecard (BSC) in the early 1990s, researchers and practitioners have been discussing its impact on managerial and organizational performance. However, there are still few empirical results available in favor of the effectiveness of the BSC to justify its high rate of diffusion among...

Based on the more than 120 papers presented at the fourth conference on Performance Measurement and Control, this paper examines the current state of research in this field. It examines the diversity in research settings, theoretical backgrounds, research designs, and topics covered. The picture that emerges is that of a dynamic field where differe...

The relevance of accounting and control to entrepreneurship and innovation has become more salient over the last few years. The traditional paradigm that identified accounting and control as nothing else but detrimental to these two aspects of management has been challenged both through new concepts and recent empirical evidence. This paper present...

Recent theoretical and empirical work indicates that management control systems (MCS) are an important element in enhancing innovation. We extend this research thrust examining the adoption of MCS in product development, arguably one of the business processes where innovation plays a major role. Using a sample of 69 early-stage entrepreneurial comp...

Management control systems have traditionally been perceived as detrimental to the entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes start-up companies. However, recent evidence suggests that the opposite holds—these systems are required for these firms to fulfil their growth potential. This chapter discusses the empirical evidence that is starting to accu...

An important purpose of an applied research field, such as management accounting is to be of relevance to organizations and society not only to academic journals. This objective is achieved through the creation and advancement of knowledge regardless of the assumptions about the ontology of the social world, epistemology, methodologies, and human n...

La investigación en el mundo de la gestión levanta opiniones contrapuestas. ¿Qué es? ¿Para qué sirve? ¿Es difícil? ¿Es relevante? El autor ofrece algunas consideraciones para entender mejor cuál es el papel de la investigación en una escuela de dirección.

This paper studies the properties and determinants of managers’ multi-year financial forecasts. Using one- to five-year-ahead forecasts reported by private venture-backed firms, we ask whether, by how much, and why biases in managers’ forecasts of revenues, expenses and profits depend on the forecasting horizon and the verifiability of assets. We f...

Postponement of the point of product differentiation is a potentially powerful strategy to improve supply chain management. The literature offers theoretical arguments supporting the relationship between postponement and improved inventory turns and customer service quality, as well as lower operational costs. This study empirically examines these...

This paper uses a multi-method, multi-case field research design to study the evolving portfolio of the management control systems (MCSs) of 78 early-stage startup companies. We examine 46 individual systems from eight different MCS categories - financial planning, financial evaluation, human resource planning, human resource evaluation, strategic...

¿Cómo será el fútbol de los próximos años? La Premier League de Inglaterra está señalando las pautas que marcarán el futuro del fútbol profesional en sus dos vertientes, la deportiva y la económica. Aún hay tiempo para unirse al club de los negocios multimillonarios.

This chapter analyzes the empirical research literature on management accounting in the manufacturing sector including the development as well and manufacturing phases of the product lifecycle. As managing product development has gained terrain in companies over the last 15 years, management accounting research has contributed to the advancement of...

The relationship between (a) private and public equity market valuations and (b) financial statement information is examined for a sample of 502 venture capital backed companies from six different industries over the 1993–2003 period. Financial statement information explains a sizable component of the levels of and changes in valuation in both the...

Making Innovation Work presents a formal innovation process proven to work at HP, Microsoft and Toyota, to help ordinary managers drive top and bottom line growth from innovation. The authors have drawn on their unsurpassed innovation consulting experience -- as well as the most thorough review of innovation research ever performed. They'll showï¾...

La gestión de la innovación requiere integrarla de modo pleno en la estrategia diseñada por la dirección de la empresa. Los primeros directivos deben saber combinar algunos elementos clave para inspirarla: estrategia, procesos, sistema de medida, incentivos... Del modo de combinar los elementos dependerá la dirección que tome la empresa y los resul...

Adopting management accounting systems are important events in the life of young and growing companies. Using a sample of 78 startup companies, we document cross-sectional differences in the adoption of operating budgets as well as seven other management accounting systems. We find that our proxies for agency costs, perceived benefits and costs, co...

The adoption of management control systems (MCS) is a key element in managing the tension that growth imposes on young growing firms. Despite its importance to a large number of organizations, only recently has the empirical literature devoted attention to the evolution of these systems over the lifecycle of firms [Moores and Yuen, Account. Organiz...

Budgetary slack plays an important role in the functioning of budgets in organizations. While theory has found negative as well as positive elements associated with its presence, the empirical literature has interpreted it as being dysfunctional to organizations. In this paper, we present empirical evidence on how a company purposefully budgeted ad...

Many corporations have annual expenditures in research and development in the range of billions of U.S. dollars. Senior managers have often been frustrated by the lack of innovation in their organizations and have been looking for better ways to implement an innovation strategy. To provide initial evidence on this significant topic, we conduct an e...

This paper investigates the role of non-financial performance measures in executive compensation. Using a sample of airline firms we document that passenger load factor, an important non-financial measure for firms in this industry, is positively associated with CEO cash compensation. This association is significant after controlling for traditiona...

Adopting management accounting systems are important events in the life of young and growing companies. Using a sample of 78 startup companies, we document cross-sectional differences in the adoption of operating budgets as well as seven other management accounting systems. We find that our proxies for agency costs, perceived benefits and costs, co...

We empirically examine how corporate governance affects the structure of executive compensation contracts. In particular, we analyze the implicit weights of firm performance measures in explaining CEO compensation. We find that weaker corporate governance is associated with compensation contracts that put more weight on accounting-based measures of...

A strategy for improving supply chain management is to configure products late in the supply chain and to increase commonality across products. The extreme case is configuration by customers and standardization of end products. This paper presents the concepts required to measure the performance implications of changes in the supply chain strategy....

Research and development at the nanoscale requires a large degree of integration, from convergence of research disciplines in new fields of enquiry to new linkages between start-ups, regional actors and research facilities. Based on the analysis of two clusters in nanotechnologies (MESA+ (Twente) and other centres in The Netherlands and Minatec in...

This study investigates the use of variable compensation to motivate new product development managers and its impact upon the performance of new product development projects. Using data from 56 projects, the paper examines how technology-intensive firms compensate their product development managers. The study finds a positive and significant relati...

This paper reports the results of a research project addressing the current state of e-procurement technologies. The results indicate that the final equilibrium may include several technologies, each one serving a different segment of the market. This multiplicity of solutions is likely to further delay the transition of the industry to its growth...

This paper reports the results of a research project addressing the current state of e-procurement technologies. The results indicate that the final equilibrium may include several technologies, each one serving a different segment of the market. This multiplicity of solutions is likely to further delay the transition of the industry to its growth...

This paper examines the dynamic role of financial resources-available through rounds of venture capital financing-on the growth strategies of startups. We investigate three different roles and their evolution over time. 1) We examine whether financial resources constrain the growth of startups and whether rounds of funding unbind this constrain. 2)...

This paper investigates the role of non-financial performance measures in executive compensation. Using a sample of Internet firms we document that web traffic, an important nonfinancial measure for firms in the Internet industry, is positively associated with CEO total compensation and total change in CEO wealth. This association is robust to cont...

New product development has changed significantly over the last decade and management control systems have played an important role in this transformation. This study draws on Galbraith's concept of uncertainty and investigates the relationship between project uncertainty, product strategy and management control systems. It also explores whether th...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

En este trabajo se busca presentar alguna de las ideas más atractivas que se han desarrollado recientemente en el campo de la información económica de la empresa. La evolución paulatina del entorno está poniendo hoy la información de costos en la primera página de la agenda directiva. Los costos ya no se limitan a la faz productiva, sino que abarca...

Two trade-offs arise in an agency relationship when the same accounting signal is used for both performance evaluation and investment evaluation. Using the signal for performance evaluation, (1) directly influences the informativeness of the signal for investment evaluation, (2) induces manipulation, which, in turn, lowers the informativeness of th...

This paper presents an analytical model to study the trade- offs that managers face when they use accounting signals for multiple uses. We analyze the situation where a signal is informative about the agent's effort (and hence useful for contracting with the agent) and about the attractiveness of an investment proposal. We find that the principal w...

This chapter proposes a framework for analysing the different roles that formal management control systems (MCS) may play in managing various types of innovation, and, the effect that these innovations have on changes in business strategy. Traditionally, MCS have been associ- ated with mechanistic organizations (Burns and Stalker 1961), where their...

Using an in-depth case research extended with multiple case studies in the fashion industry, this paper examines the role of management control systems in creative environments. The data collected indicate that these systems are deeply embedded in the work environment of creative people playing a significant role. Yet, this role is not associated w...

We study the properties of revenue, expense and income forecasts made voluntarily by managers of venture-backed pre-IPO firms, particularly as a function of the length of forecasting horizon. We conclude that income forecasts are optimistic in the short-term and become steadily more optimistic as the forecasting horizon increases. Short-term optimi...

Para crear empresas se necesita más que emprendedores, se necesita también directivos, personas que convierten los negocios en empresas que crecen más allá de las ochenta personas.

Columna legal de la Revista de Antiguos Alumnos del IEEM por el Estudio jurídico Scelza & Montano.