POSSIBLE SOCIAL POLICY DEVELOPMENTS AND CORRESPONDING STATISTICAL REQUIREMENTS

Production maximization, together with an appropriate distribution of income and wealth, can no longer be considered as the exclusive objective of socio-economic policies. Economic and social life is accompanied by numerous hardships, constraints and damages which demand to be minimized. Combining these dual aims is not easy as no single model has yet been set up taking into account all these inter-relations. However, one may try to reduce the uncertainty about the statistical material that could be required for decision-making in this new context.     

The reliability of constructs derived from attitude-behavior theories: an application of generalizability theory in the health sector

Theories of reasoned action, interpersonal behavior and self-efficacy have been frequently used for research into health-related behavior. The present study investigated two methods for assessing the reliability of their theories' constructs: the test-retest method and generalizability theory. Firstly, it is demonstrated with a numerical example that the traditional test-retest coefficient has an anatomical link with the generalizability coefficient. Secondly, generalizability theory was applied in order to identify the number of occasions each construct must be measured to assure its reliability. This procedure was applied to the data collected in a study investigating the psychosocial factors influencing exercising and smoking behaviors among pregnant women. Measuring the constructs of direct attitude, habit, and intention on only one occasion was sufficient to ensure high levels of reliability. Moreover, reliability of the other constructs would be ensured if they were measured on more than one occasion.     

Ethnographic Accounting Research: Field Notes from the Frontier

Ethnographic fieldwork in accounting is scarce and remains a “frontier” methodology, unfamiliar to most accounting researchers. Building on our field research project on corporate accountability and stakeholder engagement, set in the Canadian Arctic, we illustrate in this article the use and explanatory power of ethnographic methods for studying social groups and individual actors in the broader accounting universe. We share our fieldwork strategies and provide a few practical tips for conducting ethnographic research in both corporate and community environments. We then argue that ethnographies provide accounting researchers with untapped opportunities to discover vast reservoirs of knowledge inaccessible to other research methods, and offer a path to humanize accounting research.     

Mixing family with business: A study of Thai business groups and the families behind them

How does the structure of the families behind business groups affect the group's organization, governance, and performance? We construct a unique dataset of family trees and business groups for 93 of the largest business families in Thailand. We find a strong positive association between family size and family involvement in the ownership and control of the family businesses. The founders’ sons play a central role in both ownership and board membership, especially when the founder of the group is dead. Greater involvement by sons is also associated with lower firm-level performance, especially when the founder is dead. One hypothesis that emerges from our analysis is that part of the decay of family-run groups over time is due to the dilution of ownership and control across a set of equally powerful descendants of the founder, which creates a “race to the bottom” in tunneling resources out of the group firms.     

Insurance Market Dynamics: Between Global Developments and Local Contingencies

Insurance markets have changed radically and deeply in the past twenty years. Deregulation, globalization of insurance institutions, intensified competition, electronic commerce, bancassurance, and the emergence of new risks are among the challenges faced by insurance markets. Although important global trends are reshaping insurance markets, the emphasis on globalization overlooks the local diversity of insurance markets worldwide. This article reviews the global developments and local factors affecting insurance markets and evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of globalization. Among the important global trends are the increasing sophistication of insurance products, the globalization of risk diversification through reinsurance, the emergence of mega-financial intermediaries, and the growing importance of supranational agencies such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. On the other hand, there remains significant heterogeneity among countries and regions that has a profound impact on insurance markets. Among the important local differences are political, legal, and cultural components as well as differences in financial markets, taxation, regulatory systems, insurer investment strategies, and insurance distribution systems.     

Building legal indexes to explain recovery rates: An analysis of the French and English bankruptcy codes

The paper analyzes the characteristics of bankruptcy procedures that may impact on creditors’ recoveries. We propose 132 legal indexes accounting for the main functions of bankruptcy codes: namely, the accessibility of the procedures, their ability to disclose information, the protection of debtor’s assets, the coordination of the claimants and their decision power, and the sanction of management. The French procedures are more protective of the debtor’s assets and prioritize the coordination of claims. In England, liquidation procedures protect more secured claims, while unsecured creditors have more decision power under reorganization procedures. Our indexes are then used to explain recovery rates on a set of 833 bankrupt SMEs. Several bankruptcy rules are associated with higher recoveries: namely, accessibility of the procedure, protection of the debtor’s assets, protection of claims, and sanction of faulty management. On the contrary, information disclosure has negative impact on recoveries, probably due to the breach in confidentiality.     

Banking Sector Fragility and the Transmission of Currency Crises

We assess whether, complementary to trade and financial linkages, banking sector fragility helps explain the transmission of currency crises. We attempt to strike a balance between the precision of measurement of banking sector fragility on the one hand and its consistent measurement across various crisis episodes on the other. We find that while the role of trade and financial linkages is robust over time, the independent role of banking sector fragility is rather weak and unstable across crisis episodes. Consequently it is difficult to extrapolate observed banking fragility transmission channels from one crisis to another. As a corollary we cannot conclude that during future crisis episodes economies characterized by fragile banking sectors are more prone to crisis transmission.