DETERMINANTS OF SCHOOL ENROLMENT AND EDUCATION ATTAINMENT: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM KENYA1

This paper investigates the determinants of demand for schooling in Kenya. Probit and ordered probit methods are used to model enrolment and attainment respectively. The results show that child characteristics, parental education and other household characteristics, quality and cost of schooling are important determinants of demand for education services in Kenya. The results further show that girls would be more affected by policy changes than boys. The findings call for targeting in efforts to boost and sustain demand for schooling in Kenya. The study recommends immediate policy interventions focusing on improving quality of education and poverty alleviation.     

Engaging stakeholders in corporate accountability programmes: A cross‐sectoral analysis of UK and transnational experience

This paper explores the type of stakeholder engagement currently being undertaken by many organisations as part of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting (SEAAR) processes. Specifically, the paper seeks to determine the extent to which current corporate practice iteratively promotes stakeholder participation in collaboratively designing accountability programmes, or whether it merely is a new term for canvassing stakeholder opinions. Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation is used as a conceptual model for positioning contemporary methods of stakeholder dialogue. The findings from interviews with representatives from twenty‐nine UK and transnational organisations actively engaged in stakeholder dialogue are presented. This paper concludes that contemporary organisations seem to be seeking to engage with stakeholders in partnerships, yet their attempts still fall short of what Arnstein called Citizen Control, the level of achievement that non‐governmental organisations would like stakeholder engagement to attain.     

Accountants’ cognitive styles and ethical reasoning: A comparison across 15 years

Recent attention to accountants’ ethics in the news, in professional practice, and by academia leads to questions about the ethical and cognitive characterization of students selecting accounting careers. We employ the Myers/Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for assessing cognitive styles, and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) for assessing ethical reasoning to study differences between two groups of accounting graduates and new hires entering the accounting profession across a period of 15 years. We show that the dominant cognitive make-up of accountants has not changed significantly over the study period, which is consistent with prior research. Also, we hypothesize and provide evidence that this dominant style is associated with lower levels of ethical reasoning (as measured by the DIT) than other cognitive styles. The ethical reasoning scores are lower for the 2005 sample than for the 1990 sample. This result may be attributable to age, gender, grade point average, or political orientation; however, incomplete data in our sample does not allow us to make definitive conclusions regarding these control variables. We discuss the implications of these findings for curriculum development and professional practice.     

Chinese intellectual property rights? Know before you go

China's membership in the World Trade Organization further encourages foreign direct investment. Organizations establishing a multinational enterprise in China, and intending to utilize their intellectual property rights as a method of conducting their business enterprise, must be familiar with the current laws and developments regarding their protection and enforcement. This article focuses on Chinese intellectual property laws with examples of both infringements and enforcements. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Insights Regarding the Applicability of the Defining Issues Test to Advance Ethics Research with Accounting Students: A Meta-analytic Review

Numerous researchers have investigated accounting students’ levels of moral reasoning, ethical choice and judgment employing the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and using its P score as an indicator of moral reasoning. Not surprisingly, a number of DIT studies report conflicting results. Moreover, despite widespread use of the DIT, there is concern that it may not adequately measure all facets of ethical judgment (cf. Bailey et al., Behav Res Account 22(2):1–26, 2010). Thus, we endeavor to provide insight not only into the contradictory results but also about the applicability of the DIT for studying accounting students. To do so, we collect published and unpublished DIT studies employing accounting students as subjects and use meta-analysis to aggregate findings across these studies to quantify their results, examining commonly employed variables. We show significant relationships between P scores and some variables (length of professional experience, choice of major, political ideology, gender, GPA and education level) but not others (age). Further, our findings demonstrate that the DIT provides added insights when exploring questions of ethical choice, and ethics instruction, particularly when the instruction is embedded in an accounting course. Finally, we find that the level of DIT P scores reported in the studies relates to whether the study was published. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research.     

SME internationalization and performance: Growth vs. profitability

Lu and Beamish (2001) examined the effect of two internationalization strategies, exporting and foreign direct investment (FDI), on SME performance (ROA). We extend this research by examining the differential effects of these strategies on two other dimensions of SME performance: growth and ROS. We develop and test four sets of hypotheses using a sample of 164 Japanese SMEs. We find that exporting activity has a positive impact on growth, but negative impact on profitability. FDI activity has a positive relationship with growth, but a U curve relationship with profitability. Exporting activity has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between an SME’s FDI activity and firm growth, a negative moderating effect on the relationship between an SME’s FDI activity and firm profitability. An SME’s age when it starts to make FDIs has a negative moderating impact on the relationship between FDI and firm growth and profitability.