Cost Accounting in Anglophone Subsidiaries

Empirical Evidence from Germany

Cost accounting in Anglophone countries is in general less detailed than German cost accounting. Such cross-national differences imply a tension for Anglophone multinationals operating in Germany. These firms have to balance the group-wide application of their home-country traditions and the approval of diverging local cost accounting systems. By the means of a dyadic research design, this study finds empirical evidence for Anglophone cost accounting traditions to prevail in subsidiaries of Anglophone multinationals in Germany. However, the top management teams in these subsidiaries tend to work around such coercive pressures. The findings also suggest that the subsidiaries prefer to deviate from their parent companies’ traditions to ensure the usefulness of information for their cost accounting systems.