Ethics and Executive Coaching: An Agency Theory Approach

In recent years executive coaching has become an important management development practice in many organizations. Executive coaching is a partnership between a management level client and a coach hired by an organization to assist the executive in becoming a more effective and successful manager. While executive coaching has become a frequent and important practice in organizations, there has been relatively little serious consideration of the complex ethical issues that arise for persons and organizations. This study proposes that executive coaching involves an agency relation with specific moral duties that go beyond the usual standards of professional ethics. Agency theory, and in particular a focused understanding of the agency relationship, can provide a needed ethical grounding and basis for moral thinking about executive coaching.     

Fallacies in the Stakeholding Debate

This paper reviews the logic underlying the fashionable stakeholding literature and finds it at variance with received economic theory. It concludes that many stakeholding views are flawed, particularly in regard to the rôle of profit which is seen as a constraint rather than an objective.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Determinants of Interest Rates in Ghana

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of the bank lending rate in Ghana using annual time series data from 1970 to 2013. We found evidence of a long-run equilibrium relationship between the average lending rate charged by commercial banks and its determining factors. In the long run, bank lending rates in Ghana are positively influenced by nominal exchange rates and Bank of Ghana’s monetary policy rate but negatively with fiscal deficit, real GDP and inflation. We also find positive dependence of the bank lending rate on exchange rates, and the monetary policy rate both in the short and long run. Specifically, our findings reveal that the Bank of Ghana’s monetary policy rate and the exchange rate, by far, show strong contemporaneous effects on the average bank lending rate in Ghana.     

Gordon Tullock and Richard McKenzie. The New World of Economics.

The authors extend the literature on the efficacy of high school economics instruction in two directions. First, they assess how much economic knowledge that California students acquired in their compulsory high school course is retained on their entering college. Second, using as a control group some college students from the state of Washington, where there is no mandate for high school economics instruction, the authors evaluate the impact of California's high school economics mandate on students’ economic literacy when they enter college. The testing instrument is the Test of Economic Literacy (TEL).     

Relative price variability: Evidence from supply and demand events

Previous studies of relative price variability assume that all supply changes are unanticipated or that supply elasticities are equal across markets. In this paper, we extend these models by relaxing these restrictive assumptions. Our resulting theoretical expression for relative price dispersion reveals an independent role for unanticipated and anticipated supply events. Subjecting our model to empirical testing, we find that this dichotomy of supply shocks is not rejected by the data for the period 1970–1981.     

Has International Financial Integration Increased?

This paper compares the behavior of real interest rate differentials across the major countries under the Bretton Woods regime and the regime of floating exchanges that replaced it. The primary object is to investigate both the extent of market integration and its changes over time. For all fifteen possible country pairs real interest differentials are mean reverting, and in two-thirds of these cases indistinguishable from zero statistically. For all country pairs on average and for most such pairs individually, moreover, the estimated differentials are not appreciably different in absolute value than the differentials that we estimate for various money-market rates within the United States. Additional evidence points to a narrowing of differentials under floating rates over time and an increase in speeds of convergence.