Formalising Workflow: A CCS-inspired Characterisation of the YAWL Workflow Patterns

We present work concerning the formal specification of business processes. It is of substantial benefit to be able to pin down the meaning of business processes precisely. This is an end in itself, but we are also concerned to do so in order that we might prove properties about the business processes that are being specified. It is a notable characteristic of most languages for representing business processes that they lack a robust semantics, and a notable characteristic of most commercial Business Process Management products that they have no support for verification of business process models. We define a high-level meta-model, called Liesbet , for representing business processes. The ontological commitments for Liesbet are sourced from the YAWL workflow patterns, which have been defined from studies into the behavioural nature of business processes. A formal characterisation of Liesbet is provided using Milner’s Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). In this article, we omit some of the technical details of this characterisation and instead present the essential features by means of an abstract machine language, called LCCS. We also explain how we have facilitated the verification of certain properties of business processes specified in Liesbet , and discuss how Liesbet supports the YAWL workflow patterns. We include a simple three-part example of using Liesbet .     

Job Creation by the Self-employed: The Roles of Entrepreneurial and Financial Capital

The paper reports micro-econometric evidence on the factors that influence the ability of the small businesses to create employment. It uses data on self-employment from a British panel survey. In particular it investigates the contributions of financial and entrepreneurial capital to job creation. Housing wealth appears to be significantly associated with small business job creation. It appears to act as an important source of financial collateral. The parental background of the small business owner is also significantly associated with job creation. Successful entrepreneurs are more likely to have had self-employed parents, and in particular parents who employed others. Educational attainment, in particular at degree level, is also important. The preferred model incorporates individual random effects and the significance of these suggests the importance of unobserved latent entrepreneurial ability. The British Household Panel Survey data used in this paper were made available through the ESRC Data Archive. The data were originally collected by the ESRC Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex. Neither the original collector of the data nor the Archive bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. I am grateful to Reza Arabsheibani for helpful comments at a preliminary stage, and to seminar participants at the Welsh Assembly Government, Cardiff.     

REGULATION,IMPERFECT COMPETITION,AND THE U.S. ABORTION MARKET

The U.S. abortion market has grown increasingly concentrated recently, while many states tightened abortion laws. Using data on abortion providers, I estimate an equilibrium model of demand, price competition, entry and exit, to capture the effect of regulation on industry dynamics. Estimates show regulations played an important role in determining the abortion market structure and evolution. Counterfactual simulations reveal increases in demand‐aimed regulation were the most important observed factor in explaining recent abortion declines. Simulating Utah's regulatory regime nationally shows tightening abortion restrictions can increase abortions in equilibrium, mainly through tilting the competitive landscape toward low‐price providers.     

The role of accounting in supporting adaptation to climate change

The study is one of the first concerned with the topic of accounting and climate change adaptation. It proposes that the accounting role can support organisational climate change adaptation by performing the following functions: (i) a risk assessment function (assessing vulnerability and adaptive capacity), (ii) a valuation function (valuing adaptation costs and benefits) and (iii) a disclosure function (disclosure of risk associated with climate change impacts). This study synthesises and expands on existing research and practice in environmental accounting and sets the scene for future research and practice in the emerging area of accounting for climate risk.     

Is the FHA Creating Sustainable Homeownership?

We produce first estimates of the sustainability of homeownership for recent Federal Housing Administration (FHA) borrowers. Unfortunately, the FHA does not produce its own statistics on sustainability. Neither does it permit researchers access to its data on internal refinances. This imposes significant barriers to entry for researchers who wish to track FHA borrower performance over time. We carefully construct the required tracking data to overcome this barrier. We forecast that no more than 75% of the 2007–2009 vintages of FHA borrowers will be able to successfully exit the FHA system. Our work raises questions about FHA's role, its accounting and its accountability.     

On the Sources of Inflation in Kenya: A Model‐Based Approach

We develop a semi‐structural new‐Keynesian open‐economy model – with separate food and non‐food inflation dynamics to study the sources of inflation in Kenya in recent years. To do so, we filter international and Kenyan data (on output, inflation and its components, exchange rates and interest rates) through the model to recover a model‐based decomposition of most variables into trends (or potential values) and temporary movements (or gaps) – including for the international and domestic relative price of food. We use the filtration exercise to recover the sequence of domestic and foreign macroeconomic shocks that account for business cycle dynamics in Kenya over the last few years, with a special emphasis on the various factors (international food prices, monetary policy) driving inflation. We find that while imported food price shocks have been an important source of inflation, both in 2008 and more recently, accommodating monetary policy has also played a role, most notably through its effect on the nominal exchange rate. We also discuss the implications of this exercise for the use of model‐based monetary policy analysis in sub‐Saharan African countries.     

What makes a die-hard entrepreneur? Beyond the ‘employee or entrepreneur’ dichotomy

The article makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment and as a result avoids the weakness of approaches which categorise an individual as an entrepreneur by observing their occupation at just one point in their career. We outline an econometric methodology to account for this approach and find, via a statistical test of model selection, that it is superior to probit/logit models, which have dominated the literature. While our results indicate that this existing literature is good at explaining an individual’s propensity to try self-employment, we find that entrepreneurial persistence is determined by a different model and unearth some new insights. Early self-employment encourages entrepreneurial persistence. For men, inheritance encourages persistence, and facilitates initial self-employment. Having a self-employed father as a role model makes sons persist longer. However, somewhat surprisingly, early experience of unemployment does not affect the probability of self-employment, while reducing persistence. The popular ‘unemployment push effect’ is thus rejected in our sample.

Experience and a firm's performance in foreign markets: A commentary essay

Wu and Lin (2010) extend several prominent themes in the experience and subsidiary performance literature in their empirical examination of the foreign expansion of Taiwanese MNEs. This commentary essay considers the themes in Wu and Lin (2010) against the backdrop of the considerable volume of research that has been conducted on experiential learning and firm performance in both the international business and strategy literatures. Five weak axioms about the relationships between experience, foreign market entry strategy, and performance emerge in this review. Based on these weak axioms, the commentary concludes that scholars need to concentrate future research on understanding the management and process-related issues that concern the effective management of a firm's experiential learning processes to foster better capability and knowledge development from a firm's experience, as well as translate such developments into improved performance prospects for a firm.