Paying not to sell

In this paper we show that, in the presence of buyer and seller power, a monopolist can enter into a costly contractual relationship with a low-quality supplier with the sole intention of improving its bargaining position relative to a high-quality supplier, without ever selling the good produced by that firm.     

The Role of Accountants in Decision-Making in Lebanese Firms

The issue of accountants＇ role in decision-making has been the center of attention of lots of studies in the last decade but never did it get the adequate coverage in Lebanon. This paper studies to what extent accountants are involved in the managerial decision-making in Lebanon. Two hundred experienced accountants from all over the country were randomly selected for a questionnaire survey. This survey provides evidence as to what factors contribute to the variance of influence accountants have in managerial decision-making. The results from the questionnaires varied, but we conclude that accountants＇ involvement in new product development （NPD）, the skills that accountants have, their role in the financial analysis of the firm, and how much the finn they work for encourages them to advice on business decisions affect the degree of contribution an accountant has to decision-making. The findings of this research could be used as a reference to help in understanding the role of accounting in Lebanon by various finns and organizations.     

Sovereign bond market dependencies and crisis transmission around the eurozone debt crisis: a dynamic copula approach

We examine the dependency between the European government bond markets around the recent sovereign debt crisis. A dynamic copula approach is used to model the time-varying dependence structure of those government bond markets, evaluate the nature and strength of their dependencies over time, and gauge the transmission of the crisis shocks. Our results can be summarized as follows: i) the eurozone sovereign bond markets under consideration have a significant and positive dependence with the Greek and the EMU benchmark sovereign bond markets; ii) the dynamic-BB7 copula function best describes the dependence structure between these sovereign bond markets and provides evidence of asymmetric tail dependence; iii) the conditional probability of crisis transmission from Greece to other eurozone countries is higher than the other way around; and iv) Greece is the most vulnerable country when the eurozone entered into the sovereign debt crisis.     

Validity of parent's self-reported responses to home safety questions

The aim of the study was to describe the validity of parent's self-reported responses to questions on home safety practices for children of 2–4 years. A cross-sectional validation study compared parent's self-administered responses to items in the Home Injury Prevention Survey with home observations undertaken by trained researchers. The relationship between the questionnaire and observation results was assessed using percentage agreement, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and intraclass correlation coefficients. Percentage agreements ranged from 44% to 100% with 40 of the total 45 items scoring higher than 70%. Sensitivities ranged from 0% to 100%, with 27 items scoring at least 70%. Specificities also ranged from 0% to 100%, with 33 items scoring at least 70%. As such, the study identified a series of self-administered home safety questions that have sensitivities, specificities and predictive values sufficiently high to allow the information to be useful in research and injury prevention practice.     

Syrian women accountants’ attitudes and experiences at work in the context of globalization

The purpose of this study is to explore how globalization is impacting on the experiences of Syrian women accountants working in the accounting and finance professions. The study uses postcolonial theory to interpret face-to-face in depth interviews with female accountants and in particular their experiences and attitudes regarding wearing or not wearing the hijab in Syria. Insights from the interviews reveal that Syrian women accountants have been able to use the practice of veiling in order to negotiate greater opportunities for access to work in a patriarchal context. Nonetheless, the increased influence in recent years of private/Western accounting and finance firms has mainly hindered women, especially veiled women’s ability to access and progress at work. The study suggests that the issue of female clothing for Muslim women is still overemphasized in the East and West. The paper argues for the need to go beyond the politics of the hijab and to focus on addressing broader socio-political, cultural and global conditions that are contributing to Syrian women’s marginalization in the accounting and finance professions, and beyond.     

Stakeholder engagement in internet financial reporting: The diffusion of XBRL in the UK

Internet financial reporting is now widespread with most medium and large companies in the developed world providing a wide variety of financial data online. However, much of this information mirrors the paper versions of financial reports, often with little attempt to enhance the decision usability of the data, providing a so called ‘first generation’ of online reporting (ICAEW, 2004). eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) has been designed to provide a ‘second generation’ of online reporting, specifically to enhance the usability of the data. Documents rendered in XBRL are digitally-enabled so that it is easier for stakeholders to extract information directly into spreadsheets, or any other XBRL-enabled analysis software, without the need to re-key data thus providing significant improvements in information flows and enhancing inter-company comparability.XBRL consortia have spent more than 15 years promulgating the use of this technology within the business and government communities. However, despite their efforts XBRL has not become widely diffused, there is little stakeholder engagement and very few organisations have voluntarily adopted XBRL in practice.The results of a questionnaire survey in the UK indicate that awareness of XBRL, and second generation reporting more generally, resides in key champions but there is little diffusion outside this narrow set of stakeholders. Regulatory engagement seems to be the only impetus for diffusion and better channels of communication within stakeholder networks, such as between regulators, preparers, users and the XBRL community are needed. This paper suggests that currently the supply-push for XBRL is failing to produce effective use of this technology in the UK. Greater regulatory commitment is now needed to create an impetus for XBRL such as creating tools and making publicly available, accessible, repositories of XBRL data. Unless this happens, diffusion will not occur, and the demand-pull which is now needed will vanish and XBRL will fade and die.     

Industry-level determinants of the linkage between credit and stock markets

This paper examines the relationship between US credit default swaps (CDS) and stock returns on an industry-wide basis across a number of investment horizons, with particular focus on the major determinants of such a relationship. Wavelet analysis is first applied to extract the CDS–stock wavelet correlation for each US industry. Then, Bayesian Model Averaging is employed to identify the key driving factors of the industry CDS–stock wavelet correlations at short- and long-term horizons. The empirical results indicate that the wavelet correlations between the industry CDS and stock returns are primarily negative over time and across time scales. Moreover, the CDS–stock correlation at longer horizons exhibits a much more stable pattern than its counterpart at shorter time frames. The results also demonstrate that the volatility of US Treasury and stock markets, as measured by the MOVE and VIX indices, respectively, the volatility of volatility, as captured by the VVIX index, and US economic policy uncertainty, as measured by the EPU index, are the most robust determinants of the correlation between CDS and stock returns at shorter and longer horizons for most US industries. In contrast, the Fama–French systematic equity factors exhibit a practically negligible explanatory power on the CDS–stock link.