How can IMF policy eliminate country moral hazard and account for externalities?

Costly crisis prevention has positive external effects, which leads to free-riding of governments on each other's efforts. “Ordinary” IMF loans aggravate existing externalities, reinforcing the under-investment problem. We consider the reform proposals of the “Meltzer commission” in both loan and insurance models and show how the IMF can eliminate country moral. The efficiency-ensuring loan policy accounts for given externalities and involves effort-contingent discounts on interests or the extension of credit volume. Similar results hold for the insurance framework. Ex ante participation requires that smaller countries be “subsidized” by large ones, or that IMF policy consider distributional aspects in addition to efficiency.     

Rethinking the profession-state dynamic: The case of the Victorian charter attempt, 1885–1906

Historical analyses of specific professionalization projects and of the profession-state axis have been suggested as possible remedies for the “unexciting routine” into which the sociology of the professions has recently slipped. Accordingly, this essay analyses an attempt by Victorian accountants to attain a Royal Charter from 1904 to 1906 and its antecedent world dating from 1885 to 1903. It tracks the shifting constraints upon, and opportunities available to key players in state agencies and accounting associations. It thereby accounts for the shifts in the aims and strategies of those, the intended and unintended consequences of their actions, and the ultimate outcome of the charter attempt. In doing so it questions the assumption of a tightly defined concept of occupational “monopoly” or “closure” associated with a stable set of strategic imperatives. It also questions the tight coupling of action, interest, and outcome implied by “crude” Marxian analyses, and supports the contention that “professions” are the dynamic outcome of the mutual interaction of “state” and “profession”.     

Examining the differences between United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (U.S. GAAP) and International Accounting Standards (IAS): implications for the harmonization of accounting standards

Current trends indicate continued movement towards the harmonization of accounting standards, but not without difficulty and concern. At times, the political and financial market pressure, push the movement in opposite directions. The paper discusses the conceptual framework used in establishing Global Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) (International Accounting Standards, IAS) and U.S. GAAP. Numerous transactional examples are illustrated under both Global GAAP and U.S. GAAP treatment. Several country specific references are presented demonstrating the difficulty in achieving harmonization. Implications for harmonization of accounting standards include arguments “for” and “against” Global GAAP.     

Accounting and the examination: A genealogy of disciplinary power

Historical elaboration of Foucault's concept of “power-knowledge” can explain both the late-medieval developments in accounting technology and why the near-universal adoption of a discourse of accountancy is delayed until the nineteenth century. It is the disciplinary techniques of elite medieval educational institutions—the new universities and their examinations—that generate new power-knowledge relations. These techniques embody forms of textual rewriting (including the new “alphanumeric” system) from which the accounting advances are produced and “control” is formalised. “Double-entry” is an aspect of these rewritings, linked also to the new writing and rewritings of money, especially the bill of exchange. By the eighteenth century accounting technologies are feeding back in a general way into educational practice (e.g. in the deployment of “book-keeping” on pupils) and this culminates in the introduction of the written examination and the mathematical mark. A new regime of “objective” evaluation of total populations, made up of individually “calculable” subjects, is thereby engendered and then extended — apparently first in the U.S. railroads — into modern comprehensive management and financial accounting systems (systems of “accountability” embodying Foucault's “reciprocal hierarchical observation” and “normalising judgement”), while written examinations become used to legitimate the newly autonomous profession of accountancy.     

The accounting of interpretations and the interpretation of accounts: The communicative function of “the language of business”

The objectivistic philosophical assumptions which underlie contemporary research in accountancy, as well as economics and elsewhere, are challenged and an interpretive alternative is proposed. A “hermeneutical” view of decision-making is examined, first with regard to science in general, and then concerning the human sciences in particular, and finally with regard to economics. Human decisions are not seen as objective, mechanical or behavioristic but as meaningful utterances of minds, as part of a bidirectional communicative process. That is, scientific decisions, like everyday decisions, are mutually interpretive processes of communication in language. Although it is true that much of mainstream neoclassical economics is incompatible with this interpretive approach, the “Austrian” school can be seen as an interpretive version of neoclassicism. This school of economics indicates a way to understand the communicative function the accounting “language” itself serves in the economic process. The professional judgments made by both accounting researchers and practicing accountants, then, are treated as “matters of interpretation,” but as not, thereby, arbitrary.     

Price clustering in foreign exchange spot markets

This paper documents the existence of price clustering in the foreign exchange spot market for the German mark, the Japanese yen, the United Kingdom pound, the French franc, the Italian lira, and the Swedish krona. The U.S. dollar exchange rate indicative quotes for these currencies tend to exhibit clustering around right-most digits that end in either a “zero” or a “five.” The tendency for exchange rates to cluster has increased with increases in trading volume and volatility. Moreover, the tendency for exchange rates to cluster differs across currencies.     

Constructing, persuading and silencing: the rhetoric of accounting standards

Members of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and its staff are continuously engaged in a variety of efforts to persuade individuals that the work of this entity is valuable, appropriate, useful and correct. In this paper, I focus upon the persuasive efforts that are employed in “official” accounting standards. These documents do more than simply detail new technical accounting requirements. The texts have been shaped to express a particular point of view about the significance of events and activities that occurred during the standard-setting process and contain numerous efforts to persuade readers to accept this perspective. In particular, I argue that the FASB employs rhetorical strategies in its accounting standards that construct (and attempt to persuade us) that a specific standard is “good”, that silence alternatives and possible criticisms of the standard and that construct the FASB as a “good” standard-setter. These strategies help to construct standards as technical products and thereby also work to maintain the myth of accounting objectivity.     

Learning and the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank

This paper examines the welfare implications of alternative inflation targeting proposals for the monetary policy of the European Central Bank. We assume that policy makers have to “learn” the laws of motion of inflation in an economy characterized by “stickiness” in domestic price setting behavior and subjected to recurring shocks to productivity, exports and foreign price. We find that a switch from an “asymmetric” inflation targeting strategy to an “symmetric” makes little difference in welfare payoffs, but it comes at a cost of much higher interest-rate variability. We also find that there are practically no welfare gains from switching from an inflation-targeting strategy based on the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) to a strategy based on the domestic price component of the HICP.     

The social sciences: who needs ‘em?

It is generally forgotten that the institutionalization of disciplines in the social sciences occurred less than 100 years ago. At that time, academics were able to convince the larger community that they could contribute mightily to the amelioration of problems in society. But times have changed. Faced with processes of “globalization,” new technologies, and new pedagogic demands, institutions of higher education now scramble for scarce funds in what is a zero-sum game of survival. But along with this is an attending loss of confidence in the avowed goals and promises of the social sciences, a condition greatly exacerbated by “the culture wars” on campuses. Like it not, too many share the opinion of the Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, James F. Carlin, who asserted that “at least 50% of the non-hard sciences research on American campuses is a lot of foolishness”. Indeed, the future looks bleak unless faculties in the social sciences reassert for themselves an older ideal: the idea that social science has genuine emancipatory potential. But of course that also leaves us with the question, who will pay us to do this work?     

When courts are overgrown with grass: the role of courts in the 21st Century

What will be the social role of courts over the future? This essay explores this question by examining the “five dimensions” of judiciary—the judiciary as a branch of government, subsystem of the legal system, as a forum for resolving dispute, as public agency, and an institution of a changing society. It considers the duty of courts to safeguard the interests of future generations; the place of courts during “the end of authority”; the increasing use of artificial intelligence in formal adjudication, and concludes with a time when “the courts of justice are overgrown with grass”.     

Offering a globally-linked international accounting course in real time: a sharing of experiences and lessons learned

This article reports the experiences from offering an online international accounting course that involved students from Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA participating in real time via both audio and video links. In addition to interacting among themselves, students also interacted with accounting practitioners and standard setters from these countries. The latter attended class either in person or “virtually” via audio and video links. The paper also discusses the major benefits from the course, as identified by student feedback and direct faculty observations. A number of challenges in offering a course of this type also are identified. These insights can assist accounting educators interested in implementing a similar international accounting course at their institutions. They also have implications for applying distance-learning approaches in courses with a domestic focus.     

Psychology, meaning and the challenges of longevity

Humankind has begun to reap one of the most valued harvests of its scientific and technological pursuits: a significant increase in human longevity. We now live longer than ever before, due in large part to advances in medicine and health care that provide those who have the opportunity to afford them a lifespan that for many approaches or exceeds the 100-year mark. It is now within the realm of possibility that people will live lives of 125 years or more within the next century. However, our ability to increase physical longevity may have outstripped our ability to deal individually and socially with these new lives, these new existences that go well beyond what has traditionally been considered a “working life”. How well-prepared are we psychologically to cope with the meaning of a life that extends to as much as 150 years or more? In this new “age of longevity”, what are the challenges for psychology as a resource for humanity in its quest to give definition to the experience of being alive, as well as for managing the affairs of everyday life? Traditional developmental theories in psychology tend to articulate early stages of life in detail, but are generally mute on the matter of later life. Cognitive psychology has been inclined to view longevity as leading to a deterioration of mental faculties due to “aging”. This paper examines the psychological implications of increased lifespans from an optimistic perspective by reviewing current developments in research on cognition, emotion and aging. The review identifies trends in psychology that, if emphasized and strengthened, may lead to improved theoretical frameworks that cast longevity in a positive light, and that identify how people can find meaning and fulfillment throughout their whole lifespan.

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life for which the first was made.” Robert Browning “Rabbi Ben Ezra”

I first encountered Browning’s works as an undergraduate, and being a pre-engineering student at the time my tendencies toward poetry were stunted to say the best. Few of the great works of literature my teachers compelled me to read at that stage of my life and development made enough of an impact to last beyond the length of the course requiring their reading. Much has changed since then and my interests in literature and what literature has to say that is of value for our lives has deepened. But Browning’s enthusiastic call to join him in aging has always been a fascination. Indeed, what could be more of a contradiction to modern attitudes about becoming elderly than to claim “the best is yet to be”? What can be more of a challenge to how we approach the relationship between being young and being old than to claim that the last of life is “for which the first was meant”? What can the possible rewards of the golden years be that transcend the glorious enthusiasms, unfettered optimisms, and just pure physical conveniences of being young? Or, was Browning simply trying to sucker us all into a fait accompli, the hopeful outcome of which is the envy of the very youth that the aged often envy so much?There is little enough envy of the aged today. I approach these years with great caution, recognizing that how I look upon those who are two decades older than myself will, in turn, condition me to see myself in those years much in the way that I see them now. “Aging” is not something anyone really wants to do. We want to, at best, “grow older”, a perspective that carries with it a more positive spin: growing wiser, growing up, or simply “growing” with all of its new-age connotations of personal enlightenment and becoming. I am not “aging”, I am “becoming at one”.The language we have adopted to talk about the time-course of life, and particularly about the years in the latter third of that course, does much to frame both how we live those years and how we anticipate them in our youth. Our expectations are ones of decline, physical debilitation and mental infirmity. We “retire”, as in withdrawal into seclusion, away from the mainstream of life and into the backwater eddy of inaction. On the shelf.Much of this view has been reinforced by how humanity has approached examining this aspect of its own time course through science. We study aging with an eye to how its effects influence the abilities of those so afflicted to perform or operate compared to those who still have a grasp on their full faculties. And, of course, we find that as people grow older, they do not approach life in the same way as do younger people.Part of our view on life comes from the very way in which science is funded: those interested in the last of life often receive their support from the National Institute on Aging, not the National Institute on The Last of Life for Which the First Was Made. Research agendas often focus on identifying sources of infirmity and potential prostheses, either physical or social, that can ease the lives of the elderly on their way toward achieving the goal of successful aging. All too often, success in aging means imposing relatively few demands on social resources or on the lives of younger people, such as family members. In our “ageist” society, elderliness is not generally equated with status and stature. Less and less, the young “listen” to the old out of deep interest in their lives and their experiences. Wisdom is the providence of the freshly matured and recently educated.The shortcomings of life in the advancing years are many and well-documented in the research literature. Memory spans decrease, information retrieval becomes less reliable, and new information is less readily assimilated. As people become older, they appear to rely more and more on automatic processing of information, quick associations and the like, rather than deliberative and conscious reasoning [1]. For the older mind, intuition is at least moderately preferred over analysis. For example, younger people tend to interpret stories analytically, focusing on details, while older people tend to focus less on a story’s details and more on its “gist” and its underlying significance to things that are important to them [2], and tend to do better at grasping and dealing with information in terms of its holistic meaning [3 and 4].The effects of these differences in information processing between young and old can be seen in practical matters of everyday life, such as decision making and judgment. Johnson [5], for example, found that older adults use simplifying decision strategies more often than younger adults. These strategies, such as noncompensatory rules that consider only the positive or the negative aspects of a decision option but not both, relieve one of the psychological burden of making complex and effortful tradeoffs, at the possible expense of efficiency and accuracy. Chasseigne et al. [6] found that as people age, they become less consistent in their use of information in making judgments and predictions; even reducing the overall information load and demands on memory does little to improve the reliability of their judgments. ¹     

Adopting commercial software in the accounting classroom: A focus on learning

Concerns about the current state of accounting education are well documented. A common anxiety is that students are not prepared to deal with the complex issues and unstructured problems that they will encounter throughout their professional lives. Recent studies conclude that an educational objective for accounting is to teach students how to learn. This paper discusses adopting commercial-use software as an approach to accomplish this objective. The paper also provides an example for an accounting information systems class. Because “learning to learn” involves teaching students learning strategies, accounting educators need to find new ways to help students acquire these strategies. This paper will be useful for instructors seeking ways to assist students in developing strategies for learning that will better prepare them for careers in a complex and dynamic environment.     

On the consequences of state dependent preferences for the pricing of financial assets

This paper introduces state dependent utility into the standard Mehra and Prescott [J. Monet. Econ. 15 (1985) 145] economy by allowing the representative agent's coefficient of relative risk aversion to vary with the underlying economy's growth rate. Existence of equilibrium is proved and its asymptotic properties analyzed. This generalization leads to level dependent marginal rates of substitution, a property that sharply distinguishes this model from the standard construct. For very low coefficients of relative risk aversion, the equilibrium risk free and risky security returns are demonstrated to have volatilities and an associated equity premium that substantially exceed what is found in the data. This provides a contrasting perspective on the classic “equity premium puzzle.”     

The external organizational environment and its impact on management information systems

It is argued in this paper that organizations are “living purposeful” or “adaptively rational” systems whose survival depends on their ability to interact successfully, on a continual basis, with the surrounding environment. Three states of the external organizational environment — controllable, partially controllable and uncontrollable — are identified, and the information characteristics of each state are discussed. The approaches that organizations can adopt to collect information on the environment are also discussed; these approaches use externally-based data sources and modeling and/or analytic techniques. On these bases, we consider effective strategies and methodologies which organizations can adopt for processing, evaluating and communicating information about the external environment to satisfy decision-making requirements.     

World on fire: two scenarios of the destruction of human civilization and possible extinction of the human race

This paper examines the foundation for two scenarios of the future depicting how human civilization might destroy itself and possibly bring about the extinction of the human race in the process. The scenarios are based upon the two human-generated “fires” deeply ingrained within industrial civilization: (1) the nuclear “fire” of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and their automated “launch on warning” alert systems and (2) the slow burning “fire” of global warming and runaway climate change. This paper also examines obstacles that are currently preventing the necessary first steps towards solving these problems.     

Galton's Error and the under-representation of systematic risk

Science progresses by improving its measurement apparatus. This holds true in finance too. The new methodology of “complete identification”, using simple algebraic geometry, throws new light on Galton's Error in finance and economics and the resulting misinformation of investors. Mutual funds conventionally advertise their relative systematic market risk, or “betas”, to potential investors based on incomplete measurement by unidirectional bivariate projections: they commit Galton's Error by under-representing their systematic risk. Consequently, far too many mutual funds are marketed as “defensive” and too few as “aggressive”. Using the new methodology it is found that, out of a total of 3217 mutual funds, 2047 funds (63.7%) claimed to be defensive based on the current industry standard methodology, but only 608 (18.9%) actually are. This under-representation of systematic risk leads to inefficiencies in the capital allocation process, since biased betas lead to mispricing of mutual funds. Complete bivariate projections produce a correct representation of the epistemic uncertainty inherent in the bivariate measurement of relative market risk and provide a new CAPM taxonomy. Our conclusions have also serious consequences for the proper “bench-marking” and recent regulatory proposals for the mutual funds industry. Extension of the new methodology to multivariate systematic risk measurement by Asset Pricing Theory (APT) is suggested.     

British central government and “the mercantile system of double entry” bookkeeping: a study of ideological conflict

The study examines the contest between rival interests following the Treasury's decision to explore the potential of “the mercantile system of double entry” bookkeeping as the basis for recording and reporting the financial affairs of British central government. At the heart of the ensuing dispute was an ideological conflict between individuals representing the competing interests of the aristocracy and those of the new capitalist classes. The battleground was whether the mercantile system of double entry should be designed to reflect the “old society” priorities of stewardship, patronage and personal accountability or “new society” pressure for a business framework judged capable of achieving “cheap and efficient government”.