Nasdaq's selling, general and administrative expense fell by 22% between 2004 and 2007, while revenue quintupled during that period.
The cut was defensible: Coke's selling, general and administrative expense had ballooned to 45% of revenue from 35% in the mid-1980s.
Other examples of profligacy are too numerous to detail but suffice that SandRidge has, by a large margin, at over 7.1% of its market cap, the largest general and administrative expense ratio of all its peer group.
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Still, gross profit declined 2%, principally due to increased building material costs and selling, general and administrative expense rose 14%, primarily due to investments in personnel and other expenses related to plans for growth, including the start-up of its Lexington, Ky.
Sales and marketing expenses moved in the reverse direction of revenues, increasing 10%, while general, administrative and technology expense was up 24%.
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In general larger firms grew at the expense of smaller ones.
For the expense figure, take the "general and administrative" costs disclosed on the income statement.
If the firms that do most of the hiring are not consultancies or investment banks, they may demand different skills: perhaps expertise in engineering or law, rather than a general understanding of business principles, acquired at great expense.
Yet speech codes persist in large part because university general counsels, often far more worried about the expense and bad press of a harassment lawsuit than the comparatively rare and inexpensive free speech lawsuit, have deemed it rational from a cost-benefit standpoint to censor.
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That is because they are targeting the financial support explicitly at newsgathering rather than pouring it into the general budget where it may be frittered away on expense-account lunches and the like, or on trying to keep alive an increasingly obsolete technology, paper publishing.
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In this case, Emmert concluded something was wrong in the Miami case last fall when bills for an outside attorney showed up on an expense list, a hiring normally approved by the NCAA's general counsel.
In general, they say, discrimination is a way to raise profits at consumers' expense.
That General Electric (nyse: GE - news - people ) will expense stock options is not the real news.
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