Are Selling, General, and Administrative Costs “Sticky” 销售、一般和管理成本是否“粘性”？.pdf

Are Selling, General, and Administrative Costs “Sticky”? Mark C. Anderson Rajiv D. Banker* Surya Janakiraman School of Management The University of Texas at Dallas October 24, 2000 *Corresponding author. Rajiv D. Banker School of Management, JO 43 The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX 75083-0688 Tel: (972) 883-4185; fax: (972) 883-6811 E-mail address: rbanker@utdallas.edu Helpful comments from seminar participants at the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the annual conferences of the European Accounting Association in Munich (2000) and the American Accounting Association in Philadelphia (2000) are gratefully acknowledged. Are Selling, General, and Administrative Costs “Sticky”? Abstract A fundamental assumption in cost accounting is that the magnitude of a change in costs is the same for an equivalent magnitude of either an increase or a decrease in activity volume. In this study, we investigate whether costs are “sticky” – increase more with an activity increase than they decrease with an equivalent activity decrease. We find, for 7,629 firms over 20 years, that SGA costs increase on average at a rate of 0.55% per 1% increase in sales but decrease only 0.35% per 1% decrease in sales. We describe a model of cost behavior in which sticky costs may occur because managers deliberately adjust the resources committed to an activity. 1. Introduction 1 Understanding cost behavior is essential to cost and management accounting.