The impact of the antecedents and consequences of job burnout on junior accountants' turnover intentions: a structural equation modelling approach

This paper examines the impact of the antecedents and consequences of job burnout on junior accountants' turnover intentions. A questionnaire was completed by 368 junior accountants working in public accounting firms. Our results suggest that role ambiguity, role conflict and job‐related tension are important antecedents for job burnout. Role ambiguity and role conflict initially influence employees' perceived levels of job‐related tension, and job‐related tension is associated to job burnout, which, in turn, decreases employees' levels of job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Dissatisfied and uncommitted employees are more likely to seek alternative employment.     

Why Do Firms Use Incentives That Have No Incentive Effects?

This paper illustrates why firms might choose to implement stock option plans or other pay instruments that reward “luck.” I consider a model where adjusting compensation contracts is costly and where employees' outside opportunities are correlated with their firms' performance. The model may help to explain the use and recent rise of broad‐based stock option plans, as well as other financial instruments, even when these pay plans have no effect on employees' on‐the‐job behavior. The model suggests that agency theory's often‐overlooked participation constraint may be an important determinant of some common compensation schemes, particularly for employees below the highest executive ranks.     

How to detect illegal corporate insider trading? A data mining approach for detecting suspicious insider transactions

Only in the U.S. Stock Exchanges, the daily average trading volume is about 7 billion shares. This vast amount of trading shows the necessity of understanding the hidden insights in the data sets. In this study, a data mining technique, clustering based outlier analysis is applied to detect suspicious insider transactions. 1,244,815 transactions of 61,780 insiders are analysed, which are acquired from Thomson Financial, covering a period of January 2010–April 2017. In order to detect outliers, similar transactions are grouped into the same clusters by using a two‐step clustering based outlier detection technique, which is an integration of k‐means and hierarchical clustering. Then, it is shown that outlying transactions earn higher abnormal returns than non‐outlying transactions by using event study methodology.     

国家审计人员心理契约、工作满意度与知识共享行为

在知识经济的时代,知识成为组织提升核心竞争力的主要因素。本文基于文献研究提出了国家审计人员心理契约与知识共享行为的关系以及影响这种关系的工作满意度的假设。根据315份问卷的实证研究发现,心理契约与审计人员知识共享行为显著正相关;心理契约与审计人员工作满意度显著正相关;工作满意度与审计人员知识共享行为显著正相关;工作满意度在心理契约与审计人员知识共享行为关系中起部分中介作用。研究结论对于国家审计机关识别审计人员的心理需求,提高工作满意度,促进知识共享有重要的理论意义与实践价值。     

NOT REPORTING A PROFIT: CONSTRUCTING A NON‐PROFIT ORGANISATION

Public sector reformers advocate contracting‐out as a means of improving cost‐effectiveness. In the health sector, market‐based contracts with for‐profit organisations can reduce equity of access and divert public funds to private gain. Such issues have prompted policy makers to seek alternative contracting strategies. This paper examines a primary health care policy whereby government contracts with private non‐profit organisations to increase efficiency and meet World Health Organisation ideals. The study found that the policy's implementation has not achieved these aims when for‐profit providers masquerade as non‐profit organisations. The implication is that governments may find it more effective to manage for structural diversity than mandate homogenisation.     

Costly contracting in a long‐term relationship

We examine a model of contracting where parties interact repeatedly and can contract at any point in time, but writing formal contracts is costly. A contract can describe the external environment and the parties' behavior in a more or less detailed way, and the cost of writing a contract is proportional to the amount of detail. We consider both formal (externally enforced) and informal (self‐enforcing) contracts. The presence of writing costs has important implications both for the optimal structure of formal contracts, particularly the tradeoff between contingent and spot contracting, and for the interaction between formal and informal contracting. Our model sheds light on these implications and generates a rich set of predictions about the determinants of the optimal mode of contracting.     

Supermarket branch banks and traditional banks: An evaluation of differences in employees' attitudes regarding product offerings,job satisfaction and turnover

Traditionally, banking was an activity conducted primarily in an environment in which employees were housed in a central location. In this environment, the bank culture was relatively stable and well-known to customers and employees alike. Further, both the public and the market knew the bank's financial service offerings. The advent of the supermarket branch bank has created challenges for both employees and managers. Many employees are no longer under the direct supervision of bank management. The culture of the branch bank may be vague, and with this change in culture and in supervision, problems with consistency and quality of banking services may exist. Additionally, banks may experience challenges in terms of job satisfaction, turnover and perceptions of product offerings at the supermarket branch bank and at the traditional brick-and-mortar bank. This research evaluates these environmental changes in terms of their impact on the employees' perceptions of customer attitudes regarding branch and brick-and-mortar bank offerings. This research also assesses the employees' perceptions of job satisfaction and turnover at branch versus traditional banks.     

Strategic ex ante contracts: rent extraction and opportunity costs

This article cosiders the possibility that a seller can contract with one uninformed buyer prior to an auction involving two potential buyers. The seller's optimal strategic ex ante contract more accurately reflects joint opportunity costs of the seller and the contracted buyer, and therefore extracts more rent from the entrant. Moreover, this ex ante contract mitigates the seller's ex post rent seeking vis‐à‐vis the contracted buyer. Accordingly, it may create more social welfare than the absence of ex ante contracts, depending upon the contracted buyer's financial constraint and the distributions of trade surplus. Implementation of the optimal strategic ex ante contract and policy implications are discussed.     

Optimal job design in the presence of implicit contracts

We characterize the optimal job design in a multitasking environment when the firms use implicit contracts (i.e., bonus payments). Two natural forms of job design are compared: (i) individual assignment, where each agent is assigned to a particular job and (ii) team assignment, where a group of agents share responsibility for a job and are jointly accountable for its outcome. Team assignment mitigates the multitasking problem but may weaken the implicit contracts. The optimal job design follows a cutoff rule where only the firms with high reputation concerns opt for team assignment. However, the cutoff rule need not hold if the firm can combine implicit incentives with explicit pay‐per‐performance contracts.     

Pareto‐archived evolutionary wavelet network for financial constrained portfolio optimization

The multi‐objective portfolio optimization problem is too complex to find direct solutions by traditional methods when constraints reflecting investor's preferences and/or market frictions are included in the mathematical model and hence heuristic approaches are sought for their solution. In this paper we propose the solution of a multi‐criterion (bi‐objective) portfolio optimization problem of minimizing risk and maximizing expected return of the portfolio which includes basic, bounding, cardinality, class and short sales constraints using a Pareto‐archived evolutionary wavelet network (PEWN) solution strategy. Initially, the empirical covariance matrix is denoised by employing a wavelet shrinkage denoising technique. Second, the cardinality constraint is eliminated by the application of k‐means cluster analysis. Finally, a PEWN heuristic strategy with weight standardization procedures is employed to obtain Pareto‐optimal solutions satisfying all the constraints. The closeness and diversity of Pareto‐optimal solutions obtained using PEWN is evaluated using different measures and the results are compared with existing only solution strategies (evolution‐based wavelet Hopfield neural network and evolution‐based Hopfield neural network) to prove its dominance. Eventually, data envelopment analysis is also used to test the efficiency of the non‐dominated solutions obtained using PEWN. Experimental results are demonstrated on the Bombay Stock Exchange, India (BSE200 index: period July 2001–July 2006), and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Japan (Nikkei225 index: period March 2002–March 2007), data sets. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What do employees know? Quality perception and ‘over-satisfaction’ in firms going public

Should IPO investors pay attention to employees' views on firm quality and work satisfaction (e.g., work-life-balance)? We track employees' opinions (Glassdoor) in private firms that subsequently go public. Employees' pre-IPO views are informative: positive reviews of firm/manager quality predict stronger post-IPO stock performance, while dispersion in opinions correlates with post-IPO return volatility. A striking finding is that employees' satisfaction in excess of that predicted by firm quality opinions (over-satisfaction) is negatively related to post-IPO performance. Finally, positive initial-day stock returns enhance employees' views regarding firm quality, suggesting that IPO underpricing may secure a boost in employees' morale.     

Contract Type and the Cost of Provision: Evidence from Maintenance Service Contracts*

More than half a billion dollars are spent each year on the maintenance of Australia's urban water and sewerage networks. Expenditure is governed through a mix of in‐house and outsourced maintenance service contracts. We re‐examine issues relating to the relationship between the cost of maintenance service provision and the type of contract used. We take advantage of the fact that water retailers in Melbourne use a mix of contract types – including fixed‐price (FP) and cost‐plus (C+) contracts – for the provision of water and sewerage network maintenance services. Our results suggest that the C+ contract results in substantial savings.     

Attitudes of new appointees to accounting and finance departments in the higher education sector

Holland [Holland, K., 1991. Recruitment by accounting departments in the higher education sector: an analysis of recent employees. British Accounting Review 23, 49–66] and Weetman [Weetman, P., 1993. Recruitment by accounting departments in the higher education sector: a comment on the Scottish experience. The British Accounting Review 25, 287–300] reported studies of appointees to accounting and finance (A&F) departments in the UK and Scotland, respectively. This investigation uses a questionnaire survey, and an analysis of the British Accounting Review Research Register to examine five research questions: (i) the characteristics of recent appointees to UK A&F departments across three time periods, 1998—1999 (N=46), 2000–2001 (N=40), and 2002–2003 (N=55); (ii) subsequent job changes of the populations of appointees in 1998–1999 and 2000–2001; (iii) respondents' motivations for becoming A&F lecturers; (iv) their sources of current occupational discontent; and (v) their proposals for making A&F lecturing posts more attractive. Herzberg's [Herzberg, F., 1968. One more time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review (reprinted 2003)] motivation–hygiene dual-factor theory is used to conceptualise job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In turn, issues relating to occupational discontent are described by Rousseau's [Rousseau, D., 1990. New hire perceptions of their own and their employer's obligations: a study of psychological contracts. Journal of Organisational Behaviour 16, 389–400] psychological contract.The findings identify differences in the characteristics of the appointees in both pre-1992 and post-1992 universities. Overall, staff joined with an expectation of flexible hours of working and a desire to carry out research. The most important source of job discontent was the widening salary gap between academe and industry and the profession. Improved salary levels, more time for scholarly activity and better promotion prospects were seen as the most important factors in making the job more attractive. The implications of our findings for new appointees and institutions are discussed, along with suggestions for future research.     

Using clustering ensemble to identify banking business models

The business models of banks are often seen as the result of a variety of simultaneously determined managerial choices, such as those regarding the types of activities, funding sources, level of diversification, and size. Moreover, owing to the fuzziness of data and the possibility that some banks may combine features of different business models, the use of hard clustering methods has often led to poorly identified business models. In this paper we propose a framework to deal with these challenges based on an ensemble of three unsupervised clustering methods to identify banking business models: fuzzy c‐means (which allows us to handle fuzzy clustering), self‐organizing maps (which yield intuitive visual representations of the clusters), and partitioning around medoids (which circumvents the presence of data outliers). We set up our analysis in the context of the European banking sector, which has seen its regulators increasingly focused on examining the business models of supervised entities in the aftermath of the twin financial crises. In our empirical application, we find evidence of four distinct banking business models and further distinguish between banks with a clearly defined business model (core banks) and others (non‐core banks), as well as banks with a stable business model over time (persistent banks) and others (non‐persistent banks). Our proposed framework performs well under several robustness checks related with the sample, clustering methods, and variables used.     

Controlling opportunism in vertical contracting when production precedes sales

In a make‐to‐stock vertical contracting setting with private contracts, when retailers do not observe each other's stocks before choosing their prices, an opportunism problem always exist in contract equilibria but public market‐wide Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) can restore monopoly power. However other widely used tools which do not fall under antitrust scrutiny and require only private bilateral contracts, such as buyback contracts, also allow the producer to fully exercise his monopoly power. We conclude that a more lenient policy toward RPM is unlikely to affect the producer's ability to control opportunism.     

Hedging with Two Futures Contracts: Simplicity Pays

We propose to use two futures contracts in hedging an agricultural commodity commitment to solve either the standard delta hedge or the roll‐over issue. Most current literature on dual‐hedge strategies is based on a structured model to reduce roll‐over risk and is somehow difficult to apply for agricultural futures contracts. Instead, we propose to apply a regression based model and a naive rules of thumb for dual‐hedges which are applicable for agricultural commodities. The naive dual strategy stems from the fact that in a large sample of agricultural commodities, De Ville, Dhaene and Sercu (2008) find that GARCH‐based hedges do not perform as well as OLS‐based ones and that we can avoid estimation error with such a simple rule. Our semi‐naive hedge ratios are driven from two conditions: omitting exposure to spot price and minimising the variance of the unexpected basis effects on the portfolio values. We find that, generally, (i) rebalancing helps; (ii) the two‐contract hedging rules do better than the one‐contract counterparts, even for standard delta hedges without rolling‐over; (iii) simplicity pays: the naive rules are the best one–for corn and wheat within the two‐contract group, the semi‐naive rule systematically beats the others and GARCH performs worse than OLS for either one‐contract or two‐contract hedges and for soybeans the traditional naive rule performs nearly as well as OLS. These conclusions are based on the tests on unconditional variance ( Diebold and Mariano, 1995 ) and those on conditional risk ( Giacomini and White, 2006 ).     

Specification and negotiation in incomplete contracts

We investigate contractors' bargaining power and holdup on buyers in procurement auctions of incomplete contracts held by California Department of Transportation. Using a model where contractors bid competitively in response to a buyer's choice of initial contract design, we infer the contractors' costs and bargaining power from the bids and transfers negotiated after the auction. We find that the contract winners have substantial bargaining power in post‐auction negotiation. The average holdup on the buyer is about 20% of project costs. Counterfactual cost‐plus contracts would reduce the buyer's surplus in 72% of the projects, with an average reduction over $382,000.     

Management of frontline financial sales personnel

The employee turnover rate within the financial services industry is one of the highest among all industries. Studies demonstrate that a salesperson’s organizational commitment and propensity to leave are impacted by job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. This study examines the relationships among emotional exhaustion, organizational commitment, propensity to leave and the facets of job satisfaction. Findings support that: (i) financial services salespeople’s propensity to leave is influenced by emotional exhaustion, (ii) emotional exhaustion is mediated by multi-faceted job satisfaction in predicting organizational commitment and (iii) the facets of job satisfaction are, in part, mediated by organizational commitment in predicting propensity to leave.     

Information Asymmetry and Dual Distribution in Franchise Networks

We examine whether a dual distribution system that uses both franchisor‐operated and franchisee‐operated outlets reduces a franchisor's information disadvantage when contracting with franchisee retailers. Using detailed qualitative and quantitative managerial data, we find persuasive evidence of the strategic use of performance information obtained from franchisor‐operated outlets to reduce information asymmetry and enhance contracting efficiency for franchisee‐operated outlets. We test whether the proximity of franchisor‐operated retail outlets to franchisee‐operated retail outlets reduces underpricing of quasi‐franchise contracts. Our results accord with the proposition that information asymmetry reduces contracting efficiency and are consistent with our prediction that a manufacturer can reduce intrinsic information asymmetry by maintaining franchisor‐operated outlets that are geographically proximate to the franchisee‐operated outlets, and that this improves the franchisor's pricing of franchising contracts. We conclude that dual distribution reduces the franchisor's information asymmetry and increases their contract pricing efficiency.     

Pricing Double-Trigger Reinsurance Contracts: Financial Versus Actuarial Approach

This article discusses various approaches to pricing double‐trigger reinsurance contracts—a new type of contract that has emerged in the area of ‘‘alternative risk transfer.’’ The potential coverage from this type of contract depends on both underwriting and financial risk. We determine the reinsurer's reservation price if it wants to retain the firm's same safety level after signing the contract, in which case the contract typically must be backed by large amounts of equity capital (if equity capital is the risk management measure to be taken). We contrast the financial insurance pricing models with an actuarial pricing model that has as its objective no lessening of the reinsurance company's expected profits and no worsening of its safety level. We show that actuarial pricing can lead the reinsurer into a trap that results in the failure to close reinsurance contracts that would have a positive net present value because typical actuarial pricing dictates the type of risk management measure that must be taken, namely, the insertion of additional capital. Additionally, this type of pricing structure forces the reinsurance buyer to provide this safety capital as a debtholder. Finally, we discuss conditions leading to a market for double‐trigger reinsurance contracts.