Consumer education and everyday futures work

The purpose of this article is to draft new tasks for consumer education in a transformed and transforming world and consumption situation. The basic claim is that consumer education needs to become empowering or emancipatory, and that this can be reached through emphasizing the futures aspect and skills concerning everyday futures work. The functions of traditional consumer education can be described as socializative, preventive and corrective. This is not enough in a rapidly changing world in which consumers face completely new challenges. Section 2 of this article studies changes focal to the individual consumer. In Section 3 I define the basic functions of a household as an economic unit, consumption and consumer education. In Section 4 I continue the analysis of the functions of consumer education with the help of the neologism everyday futures work, which is grounded on the application of Joseph Nuttin's theory of action. I also argue that to fulfill an empowering function, consumer education has to emphasize the futures aspect. The core concept here is futures-will, which highlights the dynamic character of human action. In Section 5 I suggest relevant solutions for consumer education in relation to the challenges and functions of consumption described above as well as explain how the enhancing of everyday futures work skills could be applied in the framework of the cycle of human action. I conclude the article by discussing some recent topics in consumer education to show that consumer education thinking is in some measure - even if not often explicitly expressed - converging with futures education.     

tay's as good as cay

The empirical evidence that the consumption–wealth ratio, cay, has strong in-sample predictive power for future stock returns has been interpreted as evidence that consumers take account of future investment opportunities in planning their consumption expenditures. In this paper we show that the predictive power of cay arises mainly from a “look-ahead bias” introduced by estimating the parameters of the cointegrating regression between consumption, assets, and labor income in-sample. When a similar regression is run, replacing the log of consumption with an inanimate variable, calendar time, the resulting residual, which we label tay, is shown to be able to forecast stock returns as well as, or better than, cay. In addition, both cay and tay lose their out-of-sample forecasting power when they are re-estimated every period with only available data.     

Multiple BGPs in a Growth Model with Habit Persistence

This paper establishes multiple balanced growth paths in an otherwise standard, competitive growth model without externality or distortions and with households' preference dependent upon how his/her consumption compares to a habit stock formed by his/her own past consumption. The key feature in our model is that consumption forms habits in combination with existing habits. This model establishes multiple equilibria because habit persistence induces an internal, intertemporal complementarity effect among consumption flows, with current consumption reinforcing future consumption. As a result, there exist two balanced-growth paths, with one path exhibiting low consumption and habits and high economic growth, and the other path exhibiting high consumption and habits and low growth that is not necessarily a development trap. Both steady states are saddles, but global indeterminacy arises where a high balanced growth path co-exists with a low balanced growth path where the two equilibrium paths cannot be pareto ranked and history need not matter for the selection of the equilibrium path.     

Some Evidence on Executives’ views of Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper draws upon the concepts of organizational legitimacy, political economy of accounting and agency theory, and subsequently combines these with stakeholder analysis, in an attempt to analyse the attitudes towards their perceived social responsibility on the part of the executives of a small sample of large, UK companies.In the conceptual model developed, organizational legitimacy is perceived as a way of examining corporate behaviour, whereby a business is visualized as operating under a mandate from society, withdrawable were the organization be seen not to be doing the things society expects of it. There is, however, an alternative political economy of accounting view, suggesting corporate behaviour might be perceived as more proactive, with company directors attempting to ‘set the agenda’, such as to manipulate societal opinion towards a favourable view of corporate activity.Agency theory is then utilized in an attempt to establish the connection between organizations and the various interest groups with whom they interact, whilst, finally,stakeholder analysis is resorted to as a way of establishing the relevant societal interest groups to which businesses might either be considered ‘accountable’, or alternatively whose views they might wish to ‘manipulate’ favourably regarding their (i.e. corporate) actions.The underpinning theory, as delineated, is then examined for validity via interviews with executives representing eight prominent UK companies in four business sectors. The model outlined enables the nature of perceived accountability/influence by the company to be linked to perceived/manipulated stakeholder expectations of the company, with the tentative conclusion being reached that support can be found for both organizational legitimacy and political economy of accounting perspectives, although which predominates is impossible to determine.     

“活在当下”还是“未雨绸缪”？——地震对中国城镇家庭储蓄和消费习惯的长期影响

全球有27亿人口生活在地震带上,但现有经济学文献关于地震对家庭储蓄和消费行为的影响研究并不充分。本文认为,相比“未雨绸缪”,“活在当下”假说更适合刻画地震经历对家庭储蓄和消费习惯的长期影响,并提出如下经济机制:地震经历在长期内并不会影响家庭的收入水平,但它带来的死亡风险和心理冲击会使地震带居民更多地进行享受型消费,从而降低家庭储蓄率。基于国家统计局的城镇住户调查数据,本文实证发现:户主5岁以后经历的地震频率越多,其家庭储蓄率显著越低;户主经历的地震频率显著提高了家庭的享受型消费支出(如文化娱乐、养生保健、美容奢侈品支出等),但是对家庭可支配收入和非享受型消费没有显著影响。本文的研究结论有助于理解地震对城镇居民储蓄和消费习惯的长期影响,并为制定激发居民消费潜力的有关政策提供启示。     

Back to basics: What do we mean by environmental (and social) accounting and what is it for?—A reaction to Thornton

This paper seeks to explore whether mainstream financial accounting when it appears to genuflect to the ‘environment’ actually has anything substantive do with – or to say about – the natural world. It seems important to remember that conventional financial accounting is a predominantly economic – and not very internally logical – practice which has no substantive conceptual space for environmental or social matters per se. It has no space for what Thielemann calls ‘market alien values’ – values such as environmental concern. The paper re-examines why we might account at all and revisits why accounts which explicitly recognise environmental (and social) issues can be potentially very important indeed. What seems clear is that whilst any account that sought to reflect environmental and social exigencies might choose to use the technologies of accounting – notably debits and credits – there is no essential reason why they must do so. If we wish to account for an environment, we almost certainly would not start with the somewhat bizarre and tortured foundations of conventional financial accounting.     

Does greater user representation lead to more user focused standards? An empirical investigation of IASB’s approach to standard setting

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has faced calls to act in the interest of users of financial statements given the perception of the greater influence exerted by preparers and professional accounting firm stakeholders. In response, the IASB has, over more than a decade, sought to increase user centricity, adapting its people and processes to more fully engage the views of users. We report on our empirical analysis from the standard setter’s perspective of user engagement which is a research objective not documented in the prior literature. Our results draw on interviews conducted with 31 IASB representatives, comprised of 26 staff and 5 Board members representing approximately 60% of IASB’s non-support staff as well as publically available archival data. We deploy the Griffiths (1960) citizenship participation framework in reporting on the procedural rigor directed at user utility, to assess IASB’s attempt to enhance its perceived relevance (existential enhancement) as a standard setting body. We explain how a “clash” between new user centric practices and the extant practices led to challenges for the IASB in factoring the views of, and acting in the interest of users, as demanded by regulatory authorities. We discuss some of the tensions this has made evident in IASB’s objective to function as an effective standard setter. Conceptually, our paper clarifies how more embedded representation modes per Griffith (1960) elicited greater user feedback, but that tensions arose in relation to the IASB’s broader objectives to more directly serve users’ interests. Functionally, we offer a more nuanced appreciation for why the IASB might not unilaterally seek to be “user-focused” in the interests of both users and other stakeholders, and in doing so, serve the longer term objectives of accounting standard setting.     

The New Narrative: Applying narratology to the shaping of futures outputs

Both scenario development and design practices incorporate elements of storytelling, but this use remains undertheorised. This paper will draw upon literary theory, film theory and science fiction criticism to develop an analytical model of narrative structure and rhetorics which speaks to the concerns of scenario developers and designers when engaged in shaping the final outputs or deliverables of a futures project.After highlighting the differing role of telos in art and futures and defining the metacategory of “narratives of futurity”, this paper then defines the terms “story”, “narrative”, “narrator” and “world” in the literary context. It then shows how those concepts map onto futures practice, before going into detail regarding the variety of narrative strategies available across a range of different forms and media, and the qualitative effects that they can reproduce in audiences. There follows the construction of a 2 × 2 matrix based on the critical concepts of narrative mode and narrative logic, within which narratives of futurity might be usefully catalogued and compared, and from which certain broad conclusions may be reached as regards the relation between choice of medium and rhetorical effect. The implications of this analysis are explored in detail.     

LAISSEZ-FAIRE,COLLECTIVISM AND 19TH CENTURY COMPANIES LEGISLATION: A RESPONSE TO WALKER (1996)

This paper responds to a critique by Walker (1996) of our article 1995 (BAR, Vol 27, pp. 61–82) which covered the nineteenth century revolution in government and its specific impact on companies legislation. While there are some consistencies in the findings of both papers, the authors fundamentally differ in their views. This paper clarifies some basic misinterpretations that Walker has made, relating to the purpose and content of our study. Clarification of these issues will assist the historian in a more careful and judicious evaluation of the Walker critique, hopefully bring fresh historical issues to the debate, and identify some future directions for research. Specifically, we argue that Walker's critique relates to thebroaderDiceyan framework which was not actually utilised in our study. Furthermore, contrary to Walker's assertions, we argue thatlaissez-fairewas, on balance of historical evidence, adomineeringinfluence on public policy in the mid-Victorian age. Ultimately thelaissez-faire/collectivism debate needs to be addressed in the context of wider cultural factors/events occurring in 19th century Britain. It can not be evaluated, as Walker has attempted to do, by exclusive reference to legislative anomalies and paradoxes alone.     

Why is management a cliché?

This article introduces the term demotics of management by asking why so much management literature reads like a cliché. Typically this question has been approached by seeing the cliché as strategic. This article instead views the cliché as symptomatic. It marks a growing problem—how can management track labor out of the workplace and into the realm of social reproduction, a realm that is increasingly, with the tendency of immaterial labor, directly productive. This problem has produced not only the explosion of popular management literature, particularly in the United States, in the last 20 years, but also what might be called a demotics of management. This term may be understood as the proliferation of places where labor-power might be found. But the term also names management’s growing limits when faced with the dispersion and intensification of what Marx called the social individual. Management cannot adequately measure the labor it finds, and therefore must resort to miraculating what it encounters, to use a concept from the collaboration of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The crisis of measurement brought on by the growing dominance of what Marx named the General Intellect is a profound challenge not only to management but specifically to its recording-machine, accounting. With the mounting crisis in recording, the very frenzy of popular management discourse reveals more than ever the threat that social reproductive labor already possesses the sociality to value itself differently and independently. The demotics of management thus marks both the proliferation of management in daily life, but also the prior, or what C.L.R. James might have called the completed, organization of immaterial labor that management encounters. Left to repeat what is already completed management can only utter the cliché, however, manically. At the same time, the cliché in management literature does mark the accomplishment of the circuit of exchange value, as it has since Taylor, even as it hints at the possibility of the separation from capital of a mass intellectuality where socialized labor may come to account for itself.     

Risk(ing) Metaphors

Metaphors appear in almost every realm of our existence permeating even the supposedly “literal" contexts of high-energy physics laboratories and play a central role in defining and organizing both everyday and scientific realities. Metaphors are not an optional literary device but rather enable us to understand and experience one thing in terms of another. They focus our attention upon particular aspects of a thing that we might otherwise overlook and, in doing so, they also deflect our attention from other aspects. In directing and deflecting our attention, metaphors help us to construct our perceptions of reality in particular ways, guide our actions, and are used to frame issues as problems and to assess the feasibility and appropriateness of various possibilities as solutions. Metaphors are also found within the pages of highly technical texts such as The Original Pronouncements produced by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). In this paper, I begin to examine more closely the metaphors that the FASB has included in its texts. Specifically, I highlight the many different metaphors that have been used in connection with risk by the FASB. These metaphors have included orientational, attribute, and ontological metaphors. I end by commenting that these metaphors have contributed to the thinkability of risk management and to considerations of risk as an opponent that must and should be confronted and managed. I question the blind spots in our thinking about risk that these metaphors may be creating and perpetuating and suggest how different metaphors might lead to different ways of thinking about risk.     

GARCH in question … and as a benchmark

GARCH models of volatility are ubiquitous. Over the past twelve years, the GARCH industry has produced an almost infinite number of volatility time series from an extremely wide range of return series. The main purpose of this paper is to revisit the notion of volatility. Although we stop just short of questioning the necessity (and certainly the success) of GARCH, we demonstrate that for at least one type of data—long term interest rates—it is possible to essentially reproduce GARCH volatility time series with simple moving averages of deviations from mean return. We also demonstrate (empirically) a functional relationship between GARCH(1,1) parameters and the optimal moving average window width. At the present time these results are based on the utilisation of GARCH volatility as a benchmark against which we select the optimal number of terms in the simple moving average representation. One possible avenue of research that might lead to the removal of this requirement is suggested. An interesting applied result that emerged from our analysis is this: from 1952 to the present, USA interest rate volatility has the highest overall cross-correlation with the interest rate volatilities of other countries.     

Measuring and testing for the systemically important financial institutions

This paper analyzes ΔCoVaR proposed by Adrian and Brunnermeier (2011) as a tool for identifying/ranking systemically important institutions. We develop a test of significance of ΔCoVaR that allows determining whether or not a financial institution can be classified as being systemically important on the basis of the estimated systemic risk contribution, as well as a test of dominance aimed at testing whether or not, according to ΔCoVaR, one financial institution is more systemically important than another. We provide an empirical application on a sample of 26 large European banks to show the importance of statistical testing when using ΔCoVaR, and more generally also other market-based systemic risk measures, in this context.     

A financial CCAPM and economic inequalities

This paper considers a wealth heterogeneous multi-agent (MA) financial pricing CCAPM model. It is based on the following observations: (a) A distinction between what agents are willing to pay for consumption and what they actually pay. The former is a function of a number of factors including the agent’s wealth and risk preferences and the latter is a function of all other agents’ aggregate consumption or equivalently, their wealth committed to consumption. (b) Unlike traditional pricing models that define a representative agent underlying the pricing model, this paper assumes that each agent is in fact ‘Cournot-gaming’ a market defined by all other agents. This results in a decomposition of an n-agents game into n games of two agents, one a specific agent and the other a synthetic agent (a proxy for all other agents), on the basis of which an equilibrium consumption price solution is defined. The paper’s essential results are twofold. First, a Martingale pricing model is defined for each individual agent expressing the consumer willingness to pay (his utility price) and the market price—the price that all agents pay for consumption. In this sense, price is unique defined by each agent’s ‘Cournot game’ Agents’ consumption are then adjusted accordingly to meet the market price. Second, the pricing model defined is shown to account for agents wealth distribution pointing out that all agents valuations are a function of their and others’ wealth, the information they have about each other and other factors which are discussed in the text. When an agent has no wealth or cannot affect the market price of consumption, then this pricing model is reduced to the standard CCAPM model while any agent with an appreciable wealth compared to other agents, is shown to value returns (and thus future consumption) less than wealth-poor agents. As a result, this paper will argue that even in a financial market with an infinite number of agents, if there are some agents that are large enough to affect the market price by their decisions, such agents have an arbitrage advantage over the poorer agents. The financial CCAPM MA pricing model has a number of implications, some of which are considered in this paper. Finally, some simple examples are considered to highlight the applicability of this paper to specific financial issues.     

Evolutionary psychology, complexity theory, and quantitative social epistemology

The human brain is the instrument by which we observe the external world (correspondence), and by which we communicate our interpretations of it to each other (coherence). Only a small part of the brain's behaviour is amenable to introspection, and subsequent linguistic articulation to other people. The vast majority of our perception and behaviour is shaped by subconscious compartmentalised functions which are the result of 2 million years of human evolution prior to the last 10,000 years of ‘civilisation.’ Both individually and collectively this behaviour is complex—full of non-linearities, feedback, and emergent effects. There is thus an overlap between evolutionary psychology and complexity theory. However, it may be that our ideas about complexity are not an independent tool with which to appraise evolutionary psychology, because they are instead the products of it. This evolved subconscious brain, about which we know so little, has the greatest channel capacity for both correspondence and coherence. It has evolved as a survival strategy to match our long generational deadtime, but may not be appropriate for new challenges to survival. It is suggested that we need to re-instate mankind and his brain as the central element of study, so that we can learn who we are that threaten our own existence.     

Combining creativity and control: Understanding individual motivation in large-scale collaborative creativity

Recent research has shown that management control systems (MCS) can improve performance in contexts characterized by high levels of task uncertainty. This seems to conflict with a second stream of research, which argues that MCSs risk undermining the intrinsic motivation needed for effective performance in such settings. To solve this puzzle, we build on theories of perceived locus of causality and self-construal and develop an integrative model summarized in 15 propositions. To explicate our proposed solution and to show its robustness, we focus on the class of activities we call large-scale collaborative creativity (LSCC) - contexts where individuals face a dual challenge of demonstrating creativity and embracing the formal controls that coordinate their creative activities with others’. We argue that LSCC requires the simultaneous activation of intrinsic and identified forms of motivation, and simultaneously independent and interdependent self-construals. Against some scholarship that argues or assumes that such simultaneous combinations are infeasible, we argue that they can be fostered through appropriate attraction-selection-attrition policies and management control systems design. We also show how our propositions can enrich our understanding of motivation in other settings, where creativity and/or coordination demands are less pressing.     

The division of expert labour in the European audit market: The case of Germany

The implementation of three EU company law directives in Germany in the 1980s triggered a bitter dispute over the audit jurisdiction. This was fought out between an established “elite” occupational group of state-recognised auditors and aspiring related, but less qualified competitors. It ended with a compromise imposed by politicians. Our paper aims to contribute to the understanding of accounting professionalisation in different local and historical contexts by examining how the dynamics between the competing interest groups shaped the outcome in this particular episode. We base our analysis on the framework proposed by Abbott [Abbott A. The system of professions. An essay on the division of expert labour. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press; 1988], but find that it requires refinement to explain the interactions between all actors, including the state and third parties. These interactions were complicated by simultaneous inter-and intraprofessional conflict, as well as by the peculiar complexity of ambiguous professional and jurisdictional boundaries, both in terms of work performed and professional qualifications held. Our discussion supports prior suggestions that Anglo-American theories may not be sufficient to explain professionalisation projects elsewhere, and considers additional dimensions which may be useful in explaining such projects also in other national and historical settings.     

Economic Risk Factors and Commercial Real Estate Returns

A great deal of research has focused on the links between stock and bond market returns and macroeconomic events such as fluctuations in interest rates, inflation rates, and industrial production. Although the comovements of real estate and other asset prices suggests that these same systematic risk factors are likely to be priced in real estate markets, no study has formally addressed this issue. This study identifies the growth rate in real per capita consumption, the real T-bill rate, the term structure of interest rates, and unexpected inflation as fundamental drivers or state variables that systematically affect real estate returns. The finding of a consistently significant risk premium on consumption has important ramifications for the vast literature that has examined the (risk-adjusted) performance of real estate, for it suggests that prior findings of significant abnormal returns (either positive or negative) that have ignored consumption are potentially biased by an omitted variables problem. The results also have important implications for dynamic asset allocation strategies that involve the predictability of real estate returns using economic data.     

Misintermediation and macroeconomic fluctuations

Individuals plan consumption and production for different point in the future, using interest rates of various maturities as a guide. However, the financial intermediaries individuals work through traditionally do not match the maturity structure of their assets and liabilities. As a result, aggregate production plans and aggregate consumption plans for each period in the future need not coincide. The resulting discrepancy will eventually appear as a recession or boom, involving an unanticipated change in interest rates and production inside the original intertemporal production possibilities frontier. Maturity transformation is therefore not an essential function of financial intermediation, but rather a misfunction, one which we call ‘misintermediation’.     

住房价格、房屋购买与中国家庭杠杆率

本文基于中国家庭追踪调查的微观数据以及相匹配的城市层面的住房价格数据,从住房购买需求的角度,给出了一个近年来家庭杠杆率急剧上升的解释。利用中国家庭追踪调查的微观数据探讨了房价上涨对家庭杠杆率的作用机制以及潜在影响。结果表明,住房价格的快速上涨推动了家庭杠杆率的急剧攀升,从数量上看,房价每上涨1倍,样本期间的家庭贷款数额将会增长288.1%,家庭杠杆率将上升39.2%,而此部分贷款的增加主要来源于银行贷款而非私人借贷,由房价导致的家庭借贷数额和杠杆率的上升大概占到购房家庭总体借贷数额和杠杆率上升的90%左右。机制分析表明,住房价格的快速上涨刺激了家庭必需型和投资型住房需求,并提高了家庭的借贷意愿和风险偏好。分样本的探讨发现,这一效应对于非农户口家户以及有配偶和子女家户的影响更为明显。