Are yield-curve/monetary cycles’ approaches enough to predict recessions?

Business Economics - This paper proposes a new framework that identifies a threshold between the fed funds rate and the 10-year Treasury yield and, when the threshold is breached, the risk of a...     

The sexual division of care in mainland China and Hong Kong

The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the sexual division of domestic labour in Hong Kong and mainland China is influenced by traditional Chinese values and contemporary political and economic factors. It discovers that women in these two societies assume far more caring responsibilities than men. This is similar to women in traditional Chinese society. An important reason is that the political and economic conditions in Hong Kong and mainland China favour the reproduction of traditional Chinese values. Hence it can be argued that the unequal division of domestic labour between men and women will continue as long as the political and economic conditions are unfavourable to women. Le but de cet article est d’explorer jusqu’à quel point les valeurs chinoises traditionnelles et les facteurs politiques et économiques contemporains influencent la division sexuelle du travail domestique à Hong Kong et en Chine. Cet article a découvert que, dans ces deux sociétés, les femmes ont beaucoup plus de reponsabilités sociales que les hommes. Ceci est similaire à la société chinoise traditionnelle. Une raison importante est que les conditions politiques et économiques à Hong Kong et en Chine favorisent la reproduction des valeurs chinoises traditionnelles. On peut donc dire que la division inégale du travail domestique entre les hommes et les femmes continuera tant que les conditions politiques et économiques seront désavantageuses pour les femmes.     

The accounting practitioners/accounting educators dialogue — A short survey

The collective mission of accounting educators in any college or university is to keep the accounting program in-tune with current practices in public accounting, the industrial sector, and in governmental accounting. A Practitioners/Educators Dialogue is one way to meet the challenge of keeping the level of instruction and the accounting program relevant with current practices and standards. This paper reports on a survey of Accounting Department Chairpersons concerning the degree of interest in the concept of a Practitioners/Educators Dialogue Program.     

Trick or Treat? Development Opportunities and Challenges in the WTO Negotiations on Industrial Tariffs

Negotiations on industrial tariffs in the current WTO work programme have turned out to be surprisingly difficult. On the one hand, developing countries, particularly in Africa, are concerned about the potential negative effect on their industrial development of developed country efforts to push them into deep cuts in applied tariffs: after the disillusion of the Uruguay Round, promises of welfare gains seem unconvincing. On the other hand, a number of the more complex formula proposals for tariff‐cutting make it difficult for participants to evaluate what they have to do compared with what they hope to receive. The developing countries may achieve greater exports and welfare gains from the more ambitious proposals, but computations show that these also imply greater imports, lower tariff revenues, some labour market adjustments and reduced output in some politically sensitive sectors. Some way of assisting the developing countries in coping with these adjustments is required to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the negotiations.     

Which Service? How Industry Conditions Shape Firms’ Service‐Type Choices

This article studies the role of industry conditions as determinants of manufacturing and software firms’ decisions to offer services. It draws on the competence perspective on industry evolution and servitization to theorize and provide empirical evidence on how industry conditions affect firms’ choice to offer two distinct types of services—product‐oriented services and customer‐oriented services. It is argued that firms are likely to offer product‐oriented services in Schumpeterian industry environments to address high technological uncertainty by leveraging and reinforcing capabilities in the existing technology. In contrast, firms are likely to offer customer‐oriented services in non‐Schumpeterian industry environments to address value generation uncertainty by building competences in new technological or market areas. Based on longitudinal data on 410 public firms from manufacturing industries and the software industry, empirical evidence suggests that firms are indeed more likely to offer product‐oriented services in Schumpeterian industry environments, such as in the early stage of the industry life cycle and under conditions of high R&D intensity and competition, whereas they are more likely to offer customer‐oriented services in non‐Schumpeterian environments, such as in the later stages of the industry life cycle and in highly cyclical industries.     

In search of lost time: the temporal construction of innovation management

This paper presents a methodology that is new to the field of innovation management research (IMR), and which is founded upon current interest in theories of time and temporality within organisation studies. We argue that although time is of central importance to innovation management, established methodologies treat time as simply the background against which organisation is done. Even when research is conceptually framed to afford greater attention to time, established methodologies only succeed in highlighting the importance of managers' mobilisation of the past, present and future of innovations. In contrast, we present a methodology that affords time (rather than innovation actors) the more prominent role in analyses and explanations of innovation management. While established research methodologies might offer accounts of the social construction of organisational innovation, we elaborate its temporal construction. The paper reviews the ways in which time and temporality have been deployed (conceptually and methodologically) within IMR. Following a detailed account of the new methodology, its value to innovation management scholarship is demonstrated with a short illustration in which new insights are presented into the emergence of novelty during the management of innovation. The paper concludes with suggestions of areas within IMR where this methodology may generate new insights.     

In Memory of Michael Watts (November 3, 1950–December 5, 2014)

In an experimental economics simulation, Ukrainian teachers of economics chose free riding responses at a rate similar to those found by Leuthold in an undergraduate class on public economics at the University of Illinois. The authors speculate that those who become academic economists may do so because they have certain insights in deductive logic.