Issues concerning the employment and employability of disabled people in UK accounting firms: An analysis of the views of human resource managers as employment gatekeepers

In this paper we consider attitudes of human resource managers towards the employment and employability of disabled people in United Kingdom (UK) accounting firms. Only one study [Duff, A., Ferguson, R.J., in press. Disability and accounting firms: Evidence from the UK. Critical Perspectives on Accounting] has considered the employment of disabled people in accounting firms, despite a growing number of studies considering gender, race and social class in accounting employment. This dearth of evidence is unexpected given the passing of disability rights legislation in the UK in 1995 and the United States of America in 1990. Our investigation utilizes nine semi-structured interviews with human resource managers (or their equivalent) in large and medium-sized UK accounting firms. Three participants are from the Big Four firms, which dominate the market for accounting and auditing services. Views were elicited regarding: (i) drivers of disability awareness, (ii) the role of partners, (iii) how firms view disability, (iv) impairments firms view as a problem, and (v) job applications. Participants’ responses indicate an awareness of existing legislation governing disability issues, in particular, the UK's Disability Discrimination Act, 1995. However, there is evidence that accounting firms restrict their understanding of disability to legal definitions. The study identifies specific impairments which firms see as impediments to employment and critically assesses firms’ perceptions of the employability of disabled people.     

Accounting fundamentals and CEO bonus compensation

Research indicates that there is a positive association between accounting earnings and chief executive officer (CEO) cash compensation; however, evidence also suggests that this positive association ceases to exist when earnings performance is poor or declining. This latter result has led some critics of corporate compensation policies to conclude that CEOs are not penalized for poor or declining firm performance. The purpose of this study is to further illuminate the pay-performance debate by expanding the traditional executive bonus compensation model to include a set of accounting fundamentals that prior research indicates are related to both current and future firm performance. Our results indicate that there is a highly significant relationship between accounting fundamentals and the level of and change in CEO bonus compensation. Moreover, we find a highly significant relationship between accounting fundamentals and both bonus omissions and bonus reductions. When earnings are negative or declining, we find that the above relationships remain intact. In contrast, when earnings are negative or declining, we find that the relationship between aggregate earnings and bonus compensation is weak or insignificant in most of our analyses. Taken together, our results suggest that the apparently weak relationship between accounting earnings and CEO bonus compensation (particularly when earnings are negative or declining) is partly due to the fact that the bonus compensation model excludes accounting fundamentals which are strongly associated with bonus compensation. Thus, we conclude that (i) bonus compensation is more closely tied to firm performance than critics sometimes claim and (ii) bonus compensation awarded to CEOs when earnings performance is poor is at least partially explained by the presence of favorable accounting fundamentals.     

Employment Quota System and Labour Market Outcomes of Individuals with Disabilities: Empirical Evidence from South Korea

To date, only a few studies have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of disability employment quota systems using structural changes in policies. This study exploits the structural changes in South Korea's disability employment quota system that took place in 2004 and 2006 to expand the current disability policy evaluation literature. We separate the effect of these changes in the quota system into their effect on the probability of labour force participation and their effect on the probability of employment (after controlling for selection into the labour market). We also study the extent to which the changes – which included increasing the number of employers covered by the quota system, the number of jobs available to individuals with disabilities and the financial incentives for employing individuals with disabilities – have affected job satisfaction among individuals with disabilities. Our results suggest that the changes in the quota system may have increased labour force participation but have had a limited positive impact on the probability of employment among people with disabilities in South Korea. Further, compulsory hiring and expanded opportunities have not substantially affected the level of job satisfaction observed among employees with disabilities relative to their non‐disabled counterparts.     

Labor market responses to rising health insurance costs: evidence on hours worked.

Increases in the cost of providing health insurance must have some effect on labor markets, either in lower wages, changes in the composition of employment, or both. Despite a presumption that most of this effect will be in the form of lower wages, we document a significant effect on work hours as well. Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we show that rising health insurance costs during the 1980s increased the hours worked by those with health insurance by up to 3%. We argue that this occurs because health insurance is a fixed cost, and as it becomes more expensive to provide, firms face an incentive to substitute hours per worker for the number of workers employed.     

Disability and accounting firms: Evidence from the UK

An accumulation of interpretative studies in a range of international contexts has considered gender, race and social class in accounting employment. However, no work has considered accounting firms’ attitudes towards employing disabled people. This omission is surprising given the passing of successive disability rights legislation in the United States since 1918 and the United Kingdom (UK) since 1944 and consequent changes in public expectations regarding equal employment opportunities for disabled people. This paper examines the UK accounting profession's response to changes in disability legislation. Using a survey administered to UK firms and an analysis of the Big Four firms’ 2003 UK annual reviews, we report that firms’ have a minimal understanding of disability, that disability is not a significant component of firms’ personnel policies, that firms lag behind other organizations in their attitudes to disability, and images of disability are wholly absent from firms’ annual reviews. We discuss these findings in the context of prior accounting research which considers gender, race and social class, which is used to develop a research agenda.     

Disability insurance and optimal income taxation

This paper studies the design of disability insurance scheme when agents differ in their privately known productivity. We extend the Diamond and Mirrlees (1978) two period model to allow for agents differing ex-ante in their productivity and characterize the optimal nonlinear tax transfer that maximizes a utilitarian welfare function when per-period earnings and age are observable while individuals’ productivity and health status are not observable. We show that the induced tax/benefit scheme should exhibit a marginal income tax that decreases with age for some agents. A marginal subsidy on the young high productive income may be desirable. While the disability scheme always involves the old low productive agents to be indifferent between working and claiming disability benefits, this result is not always true for the old high productive agents. JEL Classification H55 · H23 · E62     

Disability Insurance: Theoretical Trade-Offs and Empirical Evidence*

Disability insurance provides protection against health shocks that limit the ability to work. In most countries, these programmes are large and growing, both in expenditure and in number of recipients. We discuss the traditional trade-off between insurance and incentives in providing this insurance, with a focus on the US and UK experiences. There is substantial evidence on the extent of the labour supply incentive costs of disability insurance, but there has been a lack of evidence on the insurance value until very recently. Further, evidence on errors in the disability insurance process suggests false rejections of genuine claimants is a substantial problem, and these are more serious than false acceptances of healthy applicants. We provide a life-cycle framework for understanding the trade-offs and to evaluate the welfare implications of policy reforms. We argue that reforms should be focused on reducing false rejections and supporting labour market attachment. The difficulty in considering reform is that the design of disability insurance has many aspects that interact and impact on outcomes.     

Attention! Distracted institutional investors and stock price crash

Using the extreme returns of firms in unrelated industries of institutional shareholders' portfolios as exogenous variations in institutional investor distraction (Kempf et al. 2017), we find a positive and significant relation between institutional shareholder distraction and stock price crash risk. The effect is associated with weakened monitoring, and it becomes stronger when alternative corporate governance is weaker and when managers' incentives to hoard bad information are stronger. Managers reduce firms' accounting conservatism when institutional investors become distracted, which is evidence of an increased motivation to hoard bad news. Overall, our findings shed additional light on the important monitoring role of institutional investors in corporate governance.     

Where firms choose to disclose voluntary environmental information

Corporate environmental performance is of increasing importance to investors, public policy makers and the general public. Firms disclose environmental information (mostly) voluntarily in their annual reports and on their websites. These disclosures are important, because they provide environmental performance information and influence capital markets. We compare environmental disclosure in annual reports and on websites with a long-term (bad) and a short-term (crisis) environmental performance measure. We find evidence to support our hypotheses that different levels of environmental disclosure are made in annual reports and on websites under different conditions. More specifically, firms disclose more environmental information on their websites when faced with an environmental crisis and more in their annual reports when they have a bad environmental reputation.     

Frequent cross-border acquirers from emerging countries and cultural distance: Does the cultural difference of the initial deal matter?

This paper analyzes the relationship between national cultural differences and the performances of repeated cross-border acquirers from emerging countries, using a sample of 1079 deals conducted by 337 acquirers for the sample period of 1985–June 2008. Empirical results indicate that cross-border acquisitions on average are associated with positive wealth effects; however, for firms starting with deals with high cultural differences, abnormal returns become near zero for subsequent deals. The evidence points to the relevance of the culture factor. Moreover, the results can be consistent with either the hubris behavior (Roll, 1986) or a learning effect (Aktas et al., 2011). Conditional on successful first deals, declining abnormal return pattern is more pronounced, compared to unconditional results. Regression analyses that control for other factors point to the same conclusion that the declining abnormal return pattern is significant only for firms with high initial cultural differences. The results remain qualitatively the same after using an alternative cultural measure and accounting for country median and information asymmetry. In addition, evidence suggests that information asymmetry is greater for initial deals with higher cultural differences. The practical implication of our results is that it is generally better for firms to start international acquisitions in countries with low or medium cultural differences.     

信息管理与信息系统专业大学生求职择业困惑透视

信息管理与信息系统专业大学生在求职择业中,由于学校、社会和个体等原因,部分大学生表现出种种不良心态,陷入就业误区;引导大学生树立正确的求职择业观,调试就业心理,克服和避免不良心态的干扰,主动适应社会发展需要,帮助大学生择好业、就好业是高校和社会共同关注的重点.     

An Analysis of the Effect of Tax Policy on Health Insurance Purchases by Risk Group

There is an extensive body of literature dealing with the welfare loss associated with generous levels of health insurance as a function of the tax subsidy. The theoretical discussion in this study considers the effect of the tax subsidy on pooling within plans, and suggests the hypotheses that the tax subsidy will have a disproportionately positive effect on the likelihood that a high‐risk worker will be eligible for and participate in employment‐based coverage, while the effect of the tax subsidy on plan generosity will be greatest for low‐risk employees. If coverage of high‐risk individuals enhances social welfare, this result may offset, at least in part, the welfare loss associated with generous plans. Data from the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey are used to test these hypotheses. The results provide evidence that the subsidy works to expand risk pools in the employment‐based health insurance market.     

Regional Grants: Are They Worth It?*

Regional grants have recently come under scrutiny and are controversial. Some estimates put the employment effect of these grants at no more than 6,000 jobs in the first half of the 1990s, against expenditure of £500 million. Other aspects of the grants are questioned, such as their ability to attract foreign direct investment and their effect on productivity. This paper reviews these issues, focusing on the recent evidence for the Regional Selective Assistance scheme. It describes the nature and difficulties involved in policy evaluation, and finds that differences over the employment effect of the grants result from possible biases induced by the evaluation methodology and from differences in the job measure used. Overall, the paper argues that the regional grants are cost‐effective in employment terms, but that expenditure is small relative to the scale of the problem, so that an expansion of the grants may be desirable.     

子女外出务工对农村中老年人健康的影响 ——基于中国健康与养老追踪调查数据的实证分析

本文基于2011年中国健康与养老追踪调查数据,研究子女外出务工对农村中老年人健康的影响。使用自评健康状况测量生理健康,使用抑郁指数测量心理健康,Probit估计结果显示,子女外出务工促进了农村中老年人生理健康和心理健康水平。此外,选取“村庄外出务工人口比例”和“家庭子女中男性比例”作为子女外出务工的工具变量,采用两阶段最小二乘法进行了内生性检验,结果显示,子女外出务工对农村中老年人的生理健康和心理健康仍呈显著的正向影响。通过采用替换子女外出务工和健康测量指标的方式,本文进一步验证了上述结果的稳健性。在全面实施“健康中国”和“乡村振兴”国家战略背景下,一方面应加大对农村地区基础教育的投入,另一方面应重视职业技能培训,从长期和短期提升农村劳动力的人力资本,使其能够“走出去”且高质量就业,为提高农村中老年人健康水平发挥积极作用。     

Stock price crash risk and internal control weakness: presence vs. disclosure effect

This study examines the stock price crash risk for a sample of firms that disclosed internal control weaknesses (ICW) under Section 404 of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX). We find that in the year prior to the initial disclosures, ICW firms are more crash‐prone than firms with effective internal controls. This positive relation is more pronounced when weakness problems are associated with a firm's financial reporting process. More importantly, we find that stock price crash risk reduces significantly after the disclosures of ICWs, despite the disclosure itself signalling bad news. The above results hold after controlling for various firm‐specific determinants of crash risk and ICWs. Using an ICW disclosure as a natural experiment, our study attempts to isolate the presence effect of undisclosed ICWs from the initial disclosure effect of internal control weakness on stock price crash risk. In so doing, we provide more direct evidence on the causal relation between the quality of financial reporting and stock price crash risk.     

“好”的不确定性、“坏”的不确定性与股票市场定价——基于中国股市高频数据分析

不确定性并不是都是“坏”的,“好”的不确定性也同样存在。本文采用Barndorff-Nielsen et al.(2010)提出的已实现半方差作为股票市场“好”的不确定性和“坏”的不确定性的代理指标,并在此基础上构建了相对符号变差(RSV),分析RSV对中国股市定价的影响。基于2007-2017年中国A股5分钟高频数据的实证研究发现:(1)与理论解释相一致,RSV与股票收益之间呈现负相关关系。无论是基于单变量分组、双变量分组还是公司层面的截面回归,这种影响在经济上和统计上都显著。(2)RSV是独立于已实现偏度的一个重要定价因子,且RSV对股票的定价能力强于已实现偏度的定价能力。(3)RSV对中国股市的影响是状态依存的,相对于经济景气程度高的状态,在经济景气程度低的状态下RSV定价影响更大。(4)基于RSV构建的投资组合的表现明显优于市场超额收益率组合、SMB组合和HML组合的表现。     

The dynamics of the Monday effect in international stock indices

This examination of the temporal dynamics of the international Monday effect is based on 50 countries. Observed between-country differences are characterised by an economic factor based on four indices. The prior day effect captures the tendency for price changes to follow those on the prior day. A bad (good) day occurs when the price change on the prior day is negative (positive). A panel regression with panel corrected standard errors, is used to characterise the way that the Monday effect and the cognate prior day effect systematically vary between countries over the period 1994 to 2006. At the start of the data in 1994, there is a considerable prior day effect which is larger for poor countries. This between-country difference declines over time and has essentially disappeared by 2006. The bad non-Monday effect and the bad-Monday effect also decline over time. Further analysis with six leading economies provides evidence that the prior day influence on Mondays and non-Mondays dates back to at least 1973.     

Effect of rollover risk on default risk: Evidence from bank financing

We study the effect of rollover risk on the risk of default using a comprehensive database of U.S. industrial firms during 1986–2013. Dependence on bank financing is the key driver of the impact of rollover risk on default risk. Default risk and rollover risk present a significant positive relation in firms dependent on bank financing. In contrast, rollover risk is uncorrelated with default probability in the case of firms that do not rely on bank financing. Our measure of rollover risk is the amount of long-term debt maturing in one year, weighted by total assets. In the case of a firm that depends on bank financing, an increase of one standard deviation in this measure leads to a significant increase of 3.2% in its default probability within one year. Other drivers affecting the interaction between rollover risk and default risk are whether a firm suffers from declining profitability and has poor credit. Additionally, rollover risk's impact on default probability is stronger during periods when credit market conditions are tighter.     

Women accountants: Is the grass greener outside the profession?

Studies of professional accountancy firms have indicated a complex process of internal socialisation which shapes the professional and organisational identities of the chartered accountants working within them. These processes have acted as a mechanism for excluding women, hindering their progress and facilitating their exit. Previous evidence suggests that women leave professional accountancy firms in order to accommodate more flexibility, experience less pressure, achieve consistency of hours and hence attain a better work/life balance.In this paper we seek to examine whether the gendered work practices of professional accountancy firms influence female choice to seek alternative employment outside the professional accountancy firm environment. Specifically the paper seeks to answer two research questions (1) why and when do women leave professional accountancy firms? (2) is the working environment outside professional accountancy firms less gendered?Data was collected by means of a postal questionnaire distributed in 2005 to women who had qualified in the years 1990–1995 (n = 1022). Responses were received from 370 women, of whom 100 were employed with professional accountancy firms and 270 employed within industry. In depth interviews were also conducted with 7 partners in professional accountancy firms and 6 women who had left the professional accountancy environment to pursue employment elsewhere.Whilst there was evidence that professional accountancy firms continue to reflect gendered working norms practices, rather than compound the dominant view, this study suggests that the primary reason women leave professional accountancy firms is to seek more interesting work as opposed to obtaining more flexibility in their working lives. In addition, the experiences of the women, the working patterns, and rates of progression were similar irrespective of employment type.     

Health,disability and work: patterns for the working age population

We examine the role of health as a determinant of labour force participation, paying particular attention to the link between the two provided by disability insurance schemes. We first review the evidence on associations between health and labour force participation. Enrolment in disability insurance is not determined by health alone, and we highlight the main other causes that the literature has identified. In an application to The Netherlands, we follow the structure of the literature review and show that the trends in health and disability insurance enrolment look rather positive. In particular, the 1990 reforms of disability insurance might have been more effective than previously realised because part of their success was hidden by demographic change: The large number of baby boomers kept the absolute inflow high as they aged, despite large reductions in relative rates.