Reference points for measuring social performance: Case study of a social business venture

We present a longitudinal qualitative case study to elaborate on how a social venture forms reference points for social performance. Although organizations increasingly use various social performance targets to direct their operations, the scholarly knowledge on social performance reference points remains limited. We make use of the prior accounting literature and draw on the idea of compromising accounts to discuss how provisional and performative metrics can have a significant role in how organizations develop new ways to evaluate their social performance. Given that the social performance reference point criteria are ambiguous and the corresponding referents malleable, performative accounts are helpful as they can intervene in the organizational life by making particular things visible, providing space for interpretations, and facilitating discussion, thus creating temporary settlements and enabling opportunities for productive compromises between different organizational groups and evaluative principles. The recursive feedback loops between reference point referents, criteria and accounting artefacts help the organization to make sense of its own social performance and interpret the associated performance feedback, and thereby provide ground for organizational decisions on further action. Moreover, we discuss how imperfect accounts can be useful for social businesses in their pursuit of developing their activities and achieving social impact.     

Optimal investment with vintage capital: Equilibrium distributions

The paper concerns the study of equilibrium points, or steady states, of economic systems arising in modeling optimal investment with vintage capital, namely, systems where all key variables (capitals, investments, prices) are indexed not only by time but also by age. Capital accumulation is hence described as a partial differential equation (briefly, PDE), and equilibrium points are in fact equilibrium distributions in the variable of ages. A general method is developed to compute and study equilibrium points of a wide range of infinite dimensional, infinite horizon, optimal control problems. We apply the method to optimal investment with vintage capital, for a variety of data, deriving existence and uniqueness of equilibrium distribution, as well as analytic formulas for optimal controls and trajectories in the long run. The examples suggest that the same method can be applied to other economic problems displaying heterogeneity. This shows how effective the theoretical machinery of optimal control in infinite dimension is in computing explicitly equilibrium distributions. To this extent, the results of this work constitute a first crucial step towards a thorough understanding of the behavior of optimal paths in the long run.     

Elicitation using multiple price list formats

We examine the properties of a popular method for eliciting choices and values from experimental subjects, the multiple price list format. The main advantage of this format is that it is relatively transparent to subjects and provides simple incentives for truthful revelation. The main disadvantages are that it only elicits interval responses, and could be susceptible to framing effects. We consider extensions to address and evaluate these concerns. We conclude that although there are framing effects, they can be controlled for with a design that allows for them. We also find that the elicitation of risk attitudes is sensitive to procedures, subject pools, and the format of the multiple price list table, but that the qualitative findings that participants are generally risk averse is robust. The elicitation of discount rates appear less sensitive to details of the experimental design. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at . JEL Classification C9, D81, D91 An erratum to this article is available at .     

论中国加入WTO后会计理论研究的视点选择

中国加入WTO后,必将对现行会计体系产生一定的影响。因此,现阶段我国会计理论研究的视点为:会计规范体系的完善与会计信息效度的提高,会计管理职能的强化与会计监督责任的履行,会计服务市场的开拓与同业竞争实力的提升,知识产权保护观念的增强与无形资产核算范围的扩展,资源环境保护意识的强化与社会责任会计信息的适量运用,网上交易方式的普遍推行与会计信息传递媒介的创新。     

Monitoring recessions: A Bayesian sequential quickest detection method

Monitoring business cycles faces two potentially conflicting objectives: accuracy and timeliness. To strike a balance between these dual objectives, we propose a Bayesian sequential quickest detection method to identify turning points in real time with a sequential stopping time as a solution. Using four monthly indexes of real economic activity in the United States, we evaluated the method’s real-time ability to date the past five recessions. The proposed method identified similar turning-point dates as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with no false alarms, but on average, it dated peaks four months faster and troughs 10 months faster relative to the NBER announcement. The timeliness of our method is also notable compared to the dynamic factor Markov-switching model: the average lead time was about five months when dating peaks and two months when dating troughs.     

Reconciling sustainability and discounting in Cost–Benefit Analysis: A methodological proposal

The incorporation of the intergenerational equity objective has rendered the traditional Cost–Benefit Analysis (CBA) approach obsolete for the evaluation of projects presenting an important number of environmental externalities and for those whose impacts extend throughout a long period of time.Based on the assumption that applying a discount rate rewards current consumption and, therefore, that it is only possible to introduce a certain intergenerational equity in a Cost–Benefit Analysis, in this work we propose an approach to discounting based on a different rationale for tangible and intangible effects. We designed two indicators of environmental profitability: a) the Intergenerational Transfer Amount (ITA), which quantifies in monetary units what the current generation is willing to pass on future generations when an environmental restoration project is carried out, and b) the Critical Environmental Rate (CER), measures the implicit environmental profitability.These concepts were tested through an empirical case study pertaining to the assessment of an Erosion Control Project in the southeast of Spain. The results yield traditional profitability indicators that are higher — and probably closer — to the real values set by the contemporary society. The information provided by the environmental profitability indicators proposed renders more transparency to the quantification of the levels of intergenerational equity applied, thereby facilitating the difficult reconciliation of the CBA technique with the objective of sustainability.     

Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions:(1) How should accounting prices be estimated?(2) How should we evaluate policy change in animperfect economy? (3) How can we check whetherintergenerational well-being will be sustainedalong a projected economic programme? We do notpresume that the economy is convex, nor do weassume that the government optimizes on behalfof its citizens. We show that the same set ofaccounting prices should be used both forpolicy evaluation and for assessing whether ornot intergenerational welfare along a giveneconomic path will be sustained. We also showthat a comprehensive measure of wealth,computed in terms of the accounting prices, canbe used as an index for problems (2) and (3)above. The remainder of the paper is concernedwith rules for estimating the accounting pricesof several specific environmental naturalresources, transacted in a few well knowneconomic institutions.     

Multiple Species Boreal Forests – What Faustmann Missed

Recent research in natural sciences shows that the dynamics in boreal forests are much more complex than what many models traditionally used in forestry economics reflect. This essay analyzes some challenges of accounting for such complexity. It shows that the optimal harvesting strategy for forest owners is history dependent and for some states of the forest, more than one strategy may be optimal.This paper confirms earlier literature on shallow lakes and coral reefs and shows that this kind of phenomena seem much more common than previously thought. They are valid for a wide range of ecosystems that cover large surfaces and they do not depend on the choice of some specific function to model the non-linearity. There are also indications that theses results could be obtained even for resources with concave growth if at least one species with non-linear growth affects their dynamics.     

随机折现因子方法与CAPM关于风险溢价的实证比较

本文根据随机折现因子方法的基本理论，结合广义矩阵法和蒙特卡罗模拟，对随机折现因子方法和传统的CAPM对风险溢价的计算进行实证比较研究。实证结果表明，对于中小样本，随机折现因子方法比传统的CAPM方法优越。估计量较为精确，误差小；对于大容量样本，这两种方法性能接近。另外，随机折现因子方法得到Jensen＇sα均值比CAPM方法得到Jensen＇sα均值小，而且标准偏差明显较小，也从另一角度说明了随机折现因子方法的优越性。     

西藏"⊥"型经济布局结构与重点区域开发

本文在系统阐释区域经济发展的理论与摸式和西藏区域经济布局变迁的基础上,全面研究了西藏"⊥"型经济布局结构的基本内容及各自的开发重点.作者认为21世纪初期西藏区域经济开发应按点-轴开发模式进行,重点区域是拉萨经济区、日喀则经济区、山南经济区和林芝经济区.