The Joint Effect of Ethical Idealism and Trait Skepticism on Auditors’ Fraud Detection

Journal of Business Ethics - Although regulators have identified ethical lapses as a key factor contributing to auditors’ failure to detect their clients’ fraudulent financial reporting...     

In Pursuit of Happiness: Disentangling Sustainable Consumption,Consumer Alienation,and Social Desirability

Journal of Consumer Policy - This study makes a novel attempt to disentangle the complex relationships between making sustainable purchasing choices and happiness, while also considering the key...     

A Machine Learning Analysis of the Recent Environmental and Resource Economics Literature

We use topic modeling to study research articles in environmental and resource economics journals in the period 2000–2019. Topic modeling based on machine learning allows us to identify and track latent topics in the literature over time and across journals, and further to study the role of different journals in different topics and the changing emphasis on topics in different journals. The most prevalent topics in environmental and resource economics research in this period are growth and sustainable development and theory and methodology. Topics on climate change and energy economics have emerged with the strongest upward trends. When we look at our results across journals, we see that journals have different topical profiles and that many topics mainly appear in one or a few selected journals. Further investigation reveal latent semantic structures across research themes that only the insider would be aware.

     

Why and when organizational culture fosters affective commitment among knowledge workers: the mediating role of perceived psychological contract fulfilment and moderating role of organizational tenure

Drawing on Denison and Mishra (1995)’s framework of organizational culture, this study examines why and when organizational culture is related to knowledge workers’ affective commitment. Data were collected from 640 employees working in three high-technology companies in China. The findings indicate that the relationship between organizational culture and affective commitment is mediated by perceived psychological contract fulfilment. In addition, organizational tenure moderates the relationship between two external dimensions (i.e. adaptability and mission) of organizational culture and perceived psychological contract fulfilment. This study extends the current theoretical framework of organizational culture by demonstrating the underlying mechanism and the boundary condition of the relationship between organizational culture and affective commitment. The findings also provide practical implications for international managers to design appropriate human resource management policies and practices in China.     

Pedagogical and technological replanning: a successful case study on integration and transversal skills for engineering freshmen

Replanning is often used to optimize results of an activity in an ever changing world. To address the challenge of preparing future engineers for success, a special course was created for all engineering freshmen of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, in Portugal. Presented as a case study, this special course underwent a careful replanning as a result of several years of experience in teaching practice alongside with a theoretical deepening in pedagogical and technological issues, under the aegis of the action-research methodology. Within the context of the case study course, the mentioned replanning was also based on a theoretical approach that clearly identifies teaching–learning-assessment methodologies that promote regulation from those that foster emancipation, using a specific instrument: a taxonomy of educational processes. The replanning was designed to globally boost results regarding the educational aims of the course such as furthering freshmen’s integration into work environment and preparing them for success by fostering transversal skills (needed for study and work). Technology is seen as a mean of education enrichment as well as a productivity tool. The introduced innovations include fun-but-educational activities, several types of assessment over time and specific technological tools which were critical for the educational impact/achievement of this course. Success is demonstrated by encouraging feedback from the stakeholders, high students’ classifications and a steady reduction in retention. It is advocated that large portions of the reasoning behind the replanning can be extrapolated to other courses.     

The Role of Ideas in Understanding Industrial Relations Policy Change in Liberal Market Economies

This paper analyzes the uneven processes underpinning industrial relations policy liberalization in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland. Drawing upon 140 elite interviews and building upon ideational comparative political theories, the paper highlights the role of ideas in the policy change process. It identifies how particular ideas can be used to construct policy problems, how these ideas can gain legitimacy through battles with competing ideas, and how policy legacies can influence whether ideas take root. The findings from the comparative case analysis expose a critical difference between “positive legacies” and “negative legacies” to account for different liberalization trajectories.     

Smart Meter-Angebote: Eine empirische Untersuchung von Kundenpräferenzen

The implementation of smart meters in German households by 2032 is a major step in the transition towards an intelligent and connected energy system. Despite of federal legislation providing a structured plan for the nationwide smart meter rollout including basic product requirements, actors within the energy market have the opportunity to take an active part in shaping the market through appealing product offers and hence to create competitive advantage. This study identifies relevant features of smart meters from literature und business practice, and measures customer’s preferences for these features. Results indicate predominantly positive customer evaluations of smart meter features, amongst which the availability of consumption data, the installation price and rental charges as well as time variable tariffs contribute most to overall utility of smart meters. Finally, findings suggest targeting customers by defining strategies to address privacy concerns, to educate about saving potentials as well as to create differentiated pricing schemes.     

Debt contract strictness and auditor specialization

The conflicts of interest among managers, shareholders and creditors resulting in agency costs, can be mitigated by restricting managers’ adverse behavior, through financial covenants to better align the various stakeholder interests. Thus, debt contract strictness represents an important aspect of agency costs between creditors, shareholders, and management that is not always captured by interest rates. The contract setting provides a unique opportunity to investigate how creditors may rely on auditors to alleviate information uncertainty stemming from reliance on management's financial reporting and thus alleviate the creditor's potential loss of invested capital. After controlling for borrower risks, loan characteristics, and audit factors, we show that auditor industry specialization is significantly associated with a reduction in the strictness of debt contracts, consistent with creditors viewing certain industry expert auditors as effective monitors against financial reporting manipulation aimed at the avoidance of debt covenant triggers that protect creditors against potential loss. Further, we find that the association between loan strictness and auditor specialization is attenuated by stronger corporate governance systems, external monitors, and prior lender relationships.     

Negotiating with Terrorists: The Costs of Compliance

It is often argued that negotiating with terrorists will encourage terrorist attacks. To date, corroborating empirical evidence is scarce. Using ITERATE data, we investigate the impact of conceding to terrorist demands on terror activity. We restrict attention to hostage events with clear‐cut demands from terrorists. Our sample period runs from 1978 to 2005 and comprises 1435 events in 125 countries. Estimating a flexible and dynamic Structured Additive Regression model, we find that the percentage of successfully negotiated events has a nonlinear effect on future terror intensity consistent with our simple theoretical model. More specifically, although moderate rates of negotiation increase the number of future terror events, higher negotiation rates tend to have the opposite effect. The estimated threshold is around 20%.     

Bayesian selection of technology assumptions for the transformation from supply-use to input–output tables

ABSTRACT

In the construction of input–output models from supply-use tables, technology assumptions disambiguate how an industry uses inputs in the production recipe of multiple outputs. This paper uses Bayes' theorem to select technology assumptions, taking into account empirical observations. The paper presents a formulation to explore hybrids between product and industry technology assumptions in product-by-product tables. We then present Markov chain Monte-Carlo techniques to implement the Bayesian method for selecting technology assumptions. We apply the method in a case study using Eurostat supply-use tables of 2004 and 2005, exhibiting a volume of secondary products of less than 13%, and 59 products and industries per country. The results show that the choice of technology is not important, given that there is no strong evidence in favour of any of them.