COST ACCOUNTING IN US CITIES: TRANSACTION COSTS AND GOVERNANCE FACTORS AFFECTING COST ACCOUNTING DEVELOPMENT AND USE

Abstract

Cost accounting in government is a topic that has an oddly uncertain place in public financial management. Many people know what it is as an ideal construct but do not know what it is in practice. This uncertainty of practice and strong expectations about what it should be creates a tightrope that must be consciously attended to and exacts a toll on those who study its practice. For example, activity based costing, or ABC, was generally presumed to be the state of the art for cost accounting in government (Geiger, 2010). While there has been much research about cost accounting in the context of private organizations, the literature on cost accounting in public organizations has not kept pace with its development for the past two decades, especially when many public organizations are experiencing fiscal stress and there is a renewed interest in the subject of cost measurement and containment. This thesis reviews the development of cost accounting research and practices, including the practice of a hybrid of traditional cost accounting and ABC. The research then applies transaction cost theory and a variety of contextual factors that are supported in the literature to create a theoretical model of how cost accounting is used in public organizations. The model is tested on a case study of an ABC implementation in a small city. The insights from this analysis are corroborated through the analysis of the cost accounting practices in a sample of 30 large US cities. The hierarchical logistic regression of 1122 services in these cities finds that the transaction cost variables of asset specificity and uncertainty are significant factors that influence which services get measured in the cost accounting plans. The final empirical chapter looks at why cost accounting is used in US cities and shows that fiscal stress is related to US cities using cost accounting. The last chapter draws conclusions from the current research and discusses avenues for future research.