Towards an integrated model for the transference of environmental responsibility

This research explores how environmental responsibility transfers to others. Although environmental responsibility is one of the most debated topics in environmental management literature, a framework describing how a teacher's environmental responsibility shapes the student's environmental responsibility is still lacking. Adopting emotional contagion theory as a lens, the paper addresses this issue via the mediation of emotional contagion and the moderation of a teacher's environmental concern. Based on a survey of teachers and students (N = 283) conducted in Pakistan, our findings provide evidence that a teacher's environmental responsibility can better transfer to students via emotional contagion. Additionally, our data establish that the transference of environmental responsibility from teachers to students via emotional contagion is more effective when the teacher has a high level of environmental concern than when he or she has a low level of environmental concern. Finally, the authors discuss the implications for policy in detail.     

Parental expectations and school enrolment decisions: Evidence from rural Ghana

We use field data to investigate factors that influence parents' decisions to enrol children in schools in rural Ghana. The empirical results identified a host of socio‐economic and household‐level factors including remittances parents expect from investing in education, parents perception of a child's desirable professions, cost of schooling and discount rate as significant determinants of parental school enrolment decision. When gender of the child and remittances are taken into account, we show male parents are more likely to invest in education of boys than girls because they expect significantly higher returns from their investment in boys. Female parents do not show such gender preference. The proportion of children enrolled in school is positively related to average cost of schooling for male parents Gender of parent plays a significant role in school enrolment decision making.     

Economization of Society: Functional Differentiation and Economic Stagnation

The explanation of economization and marketization processes is typically approached in the mindset of structural superiority, primacy or hegemony of the economic subsystem over non-economic spheres of social life. However, economic primacy is an underexplored puzzle for social theory from the perspective of functional differentiation theory, which emphasizes equal autonomy of social subsystems. Schimank has paved the way for theorizing economic primacy and economization pressures coherent with functional differentiation. Economization in his theoretical solution is connected to the economy’s governance mechanism—the market which is seen as having a weak order-building capacity. The contribution of this article lies in suggesting an alternative conceptualization of the internal dynamics of the economy—the stagnation tendency for explaining economization pressures as a systematic outcome.     

Perks and the informativeness of stock prices in the Chinese market

While the literature shows that perks can affect firm values positively or negatively, we argue that firms with higher perks are more likely to be associated with a lower quality of financial reporting, which, in turn, can affect the informativeness of stock prices. Based on hand-collected data on perks from Chinese listed firms, we find that firms with lower perks are associated with higher informativeness of stock prices (or lower R-square). Moreover, the positive association between perks and R-square is shown to be weaker for firms with higher financial reporting quality through audit and earnings quality measures.     

Social Preferences,Sorting, and Competition*

In this paper, I investigate how an increase in competition for workers influences the impact of social preferences on labor‐market outcomes. By sorting themselves into firms with homogeneous work forces, workers can ensure that they suffer less from social comparisons. Competition promotes choice and thus facilitates sorting. However, competition also boosts rent differences in the labor market, because firms cannot curb internal inequity among its employees without losing workers to competitors. To reduce their exposure to social comparisons, workers might engage in inefficient sorting into unemployment. Consequently, social preferences can have strong effects (i.e., unemployment) in a competitive labor market, whereas they only have a slight impact on labor‐market outcomes in a monopsony.     

Separating real incentives and accountability

Accountability—the expectation on the side of the decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—has been found by psychologists to strongly influence decision-making processes. The awareness of this issue remains however limited amongst economists, who tend to focus on the motivational effects of financial incentives. Accountability and incentives may provide different motivations for decision makers, and disentangling their effects is thus important for understanding real-world situations in which both are present. Separating accountability and incentives, I find different effects. Accountability is found to reduce preference reversals between frames, for which incentives have no effect. Incentives on the other hand are found to reduce risk seeking for losses, where accountability has no effect. In a choice task between simple and compound events, accountability increases the preference for the normatively superior simple event, while incentives have a weaker effect going in the opposite direction.     

The Effects of Management Accounting Systems and Environmental Uncertainty on Small Business Managers' Performance

This study examines the interacting effects of management accounting systems (MAS) and perceived environmental uncertainty on small business managers' perceptions of their performance. Results obtained from using a multiple regression and partial derivative analyses of responses to questionnaires distributed to a sample of 42 managers/owners of light engineering manufacturing firms in Australia, confirmed the hypothesis that the effects of MAS on performance were dependent on environmental uncertainty. Under high levels of uncertainty, sophisticated MAS had a positive effect on performance but under low levels it had a negative effect.     

Earnings quality: Some evidence on the role of auditor tenure and auditors’ industry expertise

Prior studies suggest that auditors with short tenure are associated with lower earnings quality because of the lack of client-specific knowledge and/or low balling. In this study, we examine whether industry specialization of auditors and low balling affect the association between auditor tenure and earnings quality. We find that the association between shorter auditor tenure and lower earnings quality is weaker for firms audited by industry specialists compared to non-specialists. In addition, we do not find results consistent with the low balling explanation.