Discuss the interpretation of retirement benefit disclosures
INTERPRETING RETIREMENT BENEFIT DISCLOSURES
Firms report extensive information about their retirement plans in notes to the financial statements. Firms cannot currently apply the fair value option to retirement plan obligations. If those provisions did apply, firms would report unamortized items in net income as they arose.
Both the regulatory treatment and the tax treatment of employer contributions differ substantially between postretirement health plans and defined benefit pension plans. Briefly, both regulations and tax treatments create stronger incentives to contribute to the defined benefit pension plans than to postretirement health plans. In general, the regulatory and tax treatments of employer contributions to postretirement benefit arrangements, including pensions, are jurisdiction-specific.
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Ken, whose primary job is supervising a small production group, is not getting cooperation from all members on the cross-functional team he leads. In particular, Bethany, a senior marketing manager, seems to resist his direction and tries to influence team members to go in another direction. The source of conflict in this case may be
A. status differences. B. a personality clash. C. communication failure. D. time pressure. E. ambiguous jurisdictions.
Jackson and Violet are CEOs of competing restaurants. For the past year, they have been exploring the possibility of a merger, but they can’t seem to agree on terms. Before they meet, they need to perform the first step of any negotiation process. Which of the following would be the best first step for each of them?
A. outline the goals and objectives they each would like to achieve B. prepare a new mission for the new combined company C. consider which employees to keep and which ones to let go after the merger D. buy new outfits for their waitstaff
Which of the following strategies should manufacturers follow during the maturity stage of a
product's life cycle? A) In order to maintain efficient distribution and encourage channel participation, firms should offer uniform trade discounts across all distribution channels. B) Firms should differentiate their offerings from those of competitors and avoid "price wars" with competitors. C) The pricing objectives during the maturity stage of a product life cycle should be market skimming. D) During the maturity stage, the distributions strategy should move from being intensive(many channels) to selective (only a few channels).
Before polling the students in Scion School of Business, a researcher divides all the current students into groups based on their class standing, such as freshman, sophomores, and so on. Then, she randomly draws a sample of 50 students from each of these groups to create a representative sample of the entire student body in the school. Which of the following sampling methods is the researcher practicing?
A. Snowball sampling B. Simple random sampling C. Systematic random sampling D. Stratified random sampling E. Cluster sampling