How did location affect adoption of the commercial Internet? Global village vs. urban leadership

We provide a framework and evidence to confront two contradictory yet common assertions: (1) new technology such as the Internet favors businesses in urban areas and (2) the Internet reduces the importance of distance for economic activity. Controlling for other factors, we show that participation in the Internet is more likely in rural areas than in urban areas. This is particularly true for technologies that involve communication across establishments. Nevertheless, talk of the dissolution of cities is premature. Frontier Internet technologies for communication within an establishment appear more often at establishments in urban areas, even with industry controls.     

Changes in HRM and job satisfaction, 1998–2004: evidence from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey

This paper examines the relationship between human resource management practices and job satisfaction, drawing on data from the 1998 and 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Surveys. The paper finds significant increases in satisfaction with the sense of achievement from work between 1998 and 2004; a number of other measures of job quality are found to have increased over this period as well. It also finds a decline in the incidence of many formal human resource management practices. The paper reports a weak association between formal human resource management practices and satisfaction with sense of achievement. Improvements in perceptions of job security, the climate of employment relations and managerial responsiveness are the most important factors in explaining the rise in satisfaction with sense of achievement between 1998 and 2004. We infer that the rise in satisfaction with sense of achievement is due in large part to the existence of falling unemployment during the period under study, which has driven employers to make improvements in the quality of work.     

In praise of ethnocentricity: Expatriate policies in European multinationals

The international HRM literature identifies different stages of internationalisation (ethnocentric, polycentric, regiocentric, geocentric); with a progression towards the later, most “advanced” stage. This paper uses information from European international companies to argue that most organizations still organize international HRM along ethnocentric lines and that, for a number of reasons, they are right to do so. We argue that a model where nearly all cases fall into one category may have reached the limits of its usefulness.     

Linkages between holiday travel risk and insurance claims: evidence from New Zealand

In recent years there has been a growing literature on linkages between tourism and health. Data from insurance companies has, however, not been readily available for commercial reasons. This paper reports conversations with the managers of New Zealand insurance companies responsible for paying claims on travel policies which indicate the attitudes and the concerns of some managers in the industry, and reveal a pattern which supports the academic literature, namely that most tourists travel safely, and the overwhelming majority of claims are of small value. However, the question can be asked whether the data held by companies might not be used for other than actuarial reasons in helping to provide strategies that would further reduce claims.     

Corporate Social Performance and Stock Returns: UK Evidence from Disaggregate Measures

This study examines the relation between corporate social performance and stock returns in the UK. We closely evaluate the interactions between social and financial performance with a set of disaggregated social performance indicators for environment, employment, and community activities instead of using an aggregate measure. While scores on a composite social performance indicator are negatively related to stock returns, we find the poor financial reward offered by such firms is attributable to their good social performance on the environment and, to a lesser extent, the community aspects. Considerable abnormal returns are available from holding a portfolio of the socially least desirable stocks. These relationships between social and financial performance can be rationalized by multi-factor models for explaining the cross-sectional variation in returns, but not by industry effects.     

Temporary layoffs and split population models

This paper develops and estimates a split population model for the duration of temporary layoffs in the German labour market; the population being split according to whether a layoff is temporary or permanent. A flexible piecewise constant hazard is employed and the recall propensity is used to condition the duration of a temporary layoff. The distinction between factors that influence the recall propensity and factors that influence the duration of a temporary layoff is shown to be of empirical significance. The results of the paper are used to evaluate implicit contract and search theories of temporary layoffs. The paper suggests that implicit contracts can explain the behaviour of unemployed workers with high worker–firm attachment whilst search can explain the behaviour of workers with low worker–firm attachment. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cultural Influences on Judgments of Professional Accountants in Auditor–Client Conflict Resolution

This study examines cultural influences on professional judgments of Australian, Indian and Chinese Malaysian accountants in relation to auditor–client conflict resolution. The study draws on cultural characteristics of, and differences among, these societies to formulate hypotheses that Australian accountants are less likely to resolve audit conflicts by acceding to clients than Indian and Chinese Malaysian accountants, and are also less accepting of resolving audit conflicts in this way. Data are gathered through a survey questionnaire administered to samples of senior accountants from "big-six" (at the time of data collection) firms in Australia, India and Malaysia. The questionnaire comprised an auditor–client conflict scenario, and used both single-item and multidimensional [specifically, the Multidimensional Ethics Measure of Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990)] measures of professional judgment. The results support the hypotheses about differences in Australian compared to Indian and Chinese Malaysian professional judgments. Additionally, the results support the Multidimensional Ethics Measure as having greater explanatory power than a single-item measure. The results have implications for the international harmonisation of accounting and auditing standards, and for audit procedures and codes of conduct in international accounting firms.     

Market Response to Earnings Surprises Conditional on Reasons for an Auditor Change*

Our interest in this study is the relative informativeness of earnings announcements reported before and after Form 8‐K disclosures of the reason for an auditor change. We appeal to several models that predict that the market's response to an earnings surprise is positively related to the perceived precision of the earnings report. We predict that the Form 8‐K reason disclosures aid investors in updating their expectations of earnings precision by providing useful information about the financial reporting process that produces the earnings report. For 802 auditor changes from late 1991 through late 1997, the average price response per unit of earnings surprise is lower subsequent to an auditor change for companies that switched for disagreement‐related or fee‐related reasons and higher for those that switched for service‐related reasons. This paper provides further evidence on the effects of differential earnings quality on differences in the returns‐earnings relation across companies and over time as well as the efficacy of Form 8‐K disclosures of reasons for auditor changes.     

Equilibrium Selection and Public-good Provision: The Development of Open-source Software

Collective-action problems arise in a variety of situations.Open-source software is a recent and important example. Copyrightrestrictions on open-source projects stipulate that any usermay modify the software so long as any resulting innovationis freely available to all. In economic parlance, the innovationis a public good. The economic theory of public-good provisionraises a number of important questions. Who contributes to sucha project, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploitthe interdependence of project components to encourage contributions?Under what conditions will such actions result in successfulprovision? Using a simple game-theoretic framework and recentresults from the study of equilibrium selection, we attemptto answer these questions. Under reasonable assumptions of asymmetryand less than complete information, the most efficient providerswill contribute. Contributions can be elicited by ‘integrating’the provision process when providers are sufficiently optimisticabout the success of the project. Otherwise, the social plannermay be better off ‘separating’ the components sothat individual contributions are independent of each other.The analysis yields recommendations for the leaders of open-sourceprojects and other similar collective-action problems.