This article explains the motivation, design, and implementation of a real-world business approach to teaching managerial accounting in an M.B.A. program to facilitate a shift in student learning from traditional passive listening to active participation. A teaching methodology requiring students to work through the evolution of a potentially viable business contributes to a long-standing effort in the profession to link practice and theory. The course immerses students in the life of an evolving business in four ways: working assignments based on lectures, discussing costing concepts individually with the instructor, summarizing existing research papers, and most importantly participating in mutual interest groups to develop a realistic business plan based on personal research. This approach integrates learning of cost concepts with developing critical thinking skills. It differs from other student projects because students may choose a business based on interest in any industry, and the instructor provides no cost or industry data. Anecdotal evidence indicates that this approach works to stimulate student learning. This paper also addresses some limitations of this approach.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: x-small;">While most of the capital budgeting situations are typically micro level problems, the introduction of this dual impact of the corporate tax rate on the project acceptance criterion provides an insight into potential tax regime decisions on long term investments in a given tax jurisdiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If we understand this dual behavior well enough, it might be possible for a tax regime to manipulate its corporate tax rate without necessarily jeopardizing acceptability status of capital projects to providers of capital. The present paper is an attempt to model this dual impact of the corporate tax rate on the NPV of projects within the tax regime, and study the implications of the results for policy makers and for corporations facing such policy makers.</span></p>

Our paper analyzes the effects of supply and demand on the affordability of house prices in the San Francisco Bay Area housing market. We use all cities within this market. Based on the 1990 and 2000 census data, we run the ordinary least squares linear regression to examine these effects as well as investigate changes over a ten-year period. As expected, our key demand variable, median household income, significantly affects house prices in this market for both periods. Also, the changes of the effects between periods represent housing appreciation, which in turn may affect affordability. However, not all results in this study are typical due to unique supply and demand effects for this housing market.