Since coming to the Johnson Graduate School of Management in 1991, Robert J. Bloomfield has used laboratory experiments to study financial markets and investor behavior. He has also published in all major business disciplines, including finance, accounting, marketing, organizational behavior, and operations research. Professor Bloomfield served as director of the Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative (FASRI), an activity of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and is an editor of a special issue of Journal of Accounting Research dedicated to Registered Reports of empirical research. Professor Bloomfield has recently taken on editorship of Journal of Financial Reporting, which is pioneering an innovative editorial process intended to broaden the range of research methods used in accounting, improve the quality of research execution, and encourage the honest reporting of findings.
Managing Business Capacity with Activity‑ Based CostingCornell Course
Course Overview
The key to good managerial reporting lies in deciding which system best helps managers make better decisions, with the shortcomings that cause the fewest problems.
This online course explores one of the most challenging issues in measuring the margins created by individual managers, departments, products and services: allocating the costs that are incurred simply to provide productive capacity. You will learn the pluses and minuses of investing in capacity, the creation of surplus, and the risks associated with fixed capacity costs help you assess and plan for economic downturns or increased competition. In examining the economics of your business, you will understand which costing systems best meet your needs.
The course Measuring and Improving Margins is required to be completed prior to starting this course.Key Course Takeaways
- Identify fixed and variable costs in your organization
- Predict how changes in the quantity of goods or services you produce will affect sales and profit margins
- Determine what types of methods for reporting on capacity are most appropriate for your organization, and for particular types of decisions
- Assess where your accounting system over- or under-states the true costs to your firm of providing products and services
- Identify areas of nested capacity and the hierarchy of costs in place at your organization
- Apply principles of Activity-Based Costing to make more informed pricing and product-line decisions and to identify opportunities to realize greater benefit from your existing capacity

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Not ready to enroll but want to learn more? Download the course brochure to review program details.How It Works
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Who Should Enroll
People at all levels in any functional area in for-profit, not-for-profit and governmental organizations who want to be more effective in:
- Specifying organizational strategy, or implementing the strategies specified by others.
- Linking performance evaluation and incentives to organizational strategy.
- Revising strategy and operations to accomplish strategic goals at lower cost.
- Helping employees collaborate and work together across departments and functional areas, and communicate more effectively with colleagues about the goals and performance of their organization.
Accounting and finance people will also benefit enormously from this program. This series applies the work of accounting, measurement, and thinking strategically about costs and performance in every corner of an organization.
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