US Families 2025: In search of future families

Parenting defines and cultivates gender roles for men and women, from both biological and cultural angles. From scanning the latest trends, issues, and social pulses on parenting, families and the gender roles encapsulated, it is evident that changes are taking place: dual-income families, a health insurance crisis, family-work conflicts, bioengineering, same-sex marriage, and increasing health concerns — just some of the issues — are changing in the US, while families and gender roles are being shaped and reshaped in the process. In this article, four alternative future scenarios generate implications that challenge mainstream assumptions about the future of parenting and reveal possibilities for future male and female roles. Four scenarios (Mr. & Mrs. Right Now, Marriage Marketplace, The New Waltons for the 21st Century, and Desperate Housewives) emerged from an informal workshop held at the University of Houston, Clear Lake (UHCL) February 19, 2005.     

Eleonora Masini on the empowerment of women

Eleonora Barbieri Masini's lifetime contributions as visionary sociologist and pioneering futurist are well known. Less well known, perhaps, are her roles as vital catalyst in organizing comparative research on the role and status of women and as activist leader in efforts to end the exploitation and subordination of women and to create a future world of equality, freedom, and social justice. In this article, examples of Masini's work on—and for—the empowerment of women are given.     

Disclosure of outsourcing in the annual report: Causes and market returns effects

Firms increasingly are utilizing outsourcing to enhance or maintain their competitiveness. Prior research shows that capital markets value a firm's decision to outsource. This study uses a sample of firms announcing outsourcing arrangements in a press release to examine which factors are associated with the subsequent decision to voluntarily provide or withhold information about outsourcing in their annual report. The paper also examines whether annual report disclosure is a reliable signal of future market performance. We find that underperforming firms, larger firms, and firms experiencing negative outsourcing announcement market returns and negative long-term market returns are more likely to disclose outsourcing in their annual reports. There is also evidence that firms' disclosure of outsourcing in the annual report signals an improvement in market performance that is credible to the capital markets. We contend that the disclosure and subsequent firm performance issues we investigate apply to any type of outsourcing arrangement, and therefore our results are relevant to future information systems research on this subject. Our findings also suggest that regulatory standards could reduce private information search costs for investors by providing a common disclosure methodology for outsourcing activities.     

The search for meaning in a changing work context

The nature of work is currently undergoing a complete transformation. In response to economic pressures organizations are reshaping themselves into totally new forms. Information technology is underpinning this transformation by providing the backbone for new organizational structures and new ways of working. The implications of this transformation are far reaching, particularly as the entire concept of work changes. The boundaries which have traditionally existed between organizations, individuals, family, home life and community will disappear as work increasingly becomes situation-independent and centred in the home. Our current understanding of the meaning of work will become increasingly obsolete and therefore will force individuals to search for new meanings of work in their lives. As a result work will take on an entirely different meaning. This article explores the problems of the meaning of work in a context of change. We look forward to a future in which the nature of work as we know it now will have changed beyond recognition. The question we address is this: what will work mean to us in the future?     

Future roles of business in society: the expanding boundaries of corporate responsibility and a compelling case for partnership

The roles and responsibilities of business in society, in particular global business, are being defined more broadly by an expanding range of stakeholders. This paper aims to review these changes and their implications in order to understand better the likely future expectations of business in society and the way in which leading companies are setting new standards of responsible business practice. It begins by tracing trends within corporate social responsibility debates, and then draws on empirical research and observed stakeholder demands of business, to argue that the boundaries of corporate responsibility are advancing both internally and externally.Internally, these boundaries are changing in terms of the increased responsibility of corporations towards their direct and indirect internal stakeholders. This is shown through innovations in business practice to achieve enhanced social justice in the workplace, improved governance, and more accurate disclosure of non-financial risk. This paper provides a context for this discussion by examining emerging international law, guidelines and voluntary initiatives, regulatory frameworks, and risk review procedures that increasingly seek to redefine corporate responsibility by establishing new norms of best practice and behaviour. These boundaries are also expanding externally, as society increasingly expects global business to work with others to provide solutions to humanitarian crises and endemic problems facing the world. This paper explores how some companies are doing this by applying core competencies in ways that integrate social development and business goals. It suggests, in turn, that the challenges of these expanding boundaries of responsibilities are best addressed through strategic partnerships.This paper concludes that there are new multi-stakeholder convened global governance frameworks evolving that are encouraging businesses of the future to re-invent themselves as a ‘force for positive good’ in society. This involves going beyond the paradigm of simply ‘doing no harm’, and way beyond previous expectations of business as being only about shareholder value. This prediction is supported by examples drawn from the practice of global companies that are already innovating to fulfil this wider role.     

时间压力、责任与审计判断绩效:一项实验研究

近年来,我国注册会计师面临的时间压力和责任日益增加,而时间压力和责任都是影响审计判断绩效的重要环境因素。本文采用实验研究方法,以我国注册会计师为被试,研究了时间压力和责任对我国注册会计师审计判断绩效的影响。研究发现,时间压力显著降低了注册会计师的审计判断效果,但同时提高了判断加工速度,责任能显著提高审计判断效果但对判断效率和判断加工速度没有显著影响。在高责任的情况下,审计判断效果不受时间压力的影响,高责任抑制了高时问压力带来的审计判断效果下降。     

Balancing Retirement Security With the Needs of Frail Parents

Abstract

Caring for frail elderly parents can interfere with work responsibilities. People who provide care to their parents may need to take time off from work or retire altogether. However, reductions in labor supply at midlife can have serious implications for retirement wealth and, as a result, on economic well-being in later life. This paper examines how family support for the elderly can affect retirement savings by examining the relationship between labor supply, time help to parents, and financial assistance to parents. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study on a nationally representative sample of women ages 53–63, we found that women who helped their parents with personal care assistance worked significantly fewer hours than did those who did not help their parents, whereas those who provided financial assistance worked significantly more hours. Although few persons at midlife presently spend substantial amounts of time helping their elderly parents in any given year, for those who do, the costs can be high. Pressures on families are likely to mount in the near future as falling mortality and fertility rates continue to increase the proportion of the population that is very old and as women continue to play more important roles in the labor market.     

Is there a gender gap in CEO compensation?

The gender pay gap generates significant political and social debate. This study contributes to this discussion by examining if a gender pay gap exists at the highest level of corporate management, the CEOs. While previous studies have documented a gender pay gap for most levels of executives the findings with respect to CEOs are conflicting. In this paper we focus only on CEO's as it is the most homogenous of executive roles and does not require us to assume that executives with similar titles undertake identical roles. Our evidence is based on 291 US firm-years for the period of 1998–2010. We do not find any association between CEO pay and gender using both the total sample and a sample matched using propensity scores to control for firm characteristics. These insignificant results hold for total pay, salary and bonuses, and for different matching procedures and econometric specifications. Our results therefore indicate that women who rise through the “glass ceiling” to the level of CEO are remunerated at similar levels to their male counterparts.     

Development of PPPs IN Victoria

Governments around Australia and internationally have come to recognise that both public and private sectors have roles to play in building modern public infrastructure. Governments are increasingly turning to mechanisms known as public-private partnerships (PPPs) or the private finance initiative (PFI).₁ The nature of PPPs and the reasons governments use them have evolved over the past 20 years and are continuing to do so. This article describes the evolution of PPPs in Victoria since the late 1980s, the accounting treatment of PPPs and future developments.     

An empirical investigation of analytical procedures using mixture distributions

Analytical procedures are evaluations of account and transaction flow information made by a study of plausible relationships between both accounting and non‐accounting data. This study investigates the performance of Tweedie distributions (which have Gaussian distributions as members) in improving fit of zero‐inflated, non‐negative, kurtotic and multimodal analytical review data. The study found that account valuations are more informative than marginal data in analytical review, that mixture Poisson–Gamma distributions offer better fit than Gaussian distributions, even under assumptions of central limit theorem convergence, and that mixture Poisson–Gamma distributions provide better predictions of future account and transaction volumes and values. Model performance improvement with price versus returns data in this empirical study was substantial: from less than one‐quarter of variance, to almost two‐thirds. Tweedie generalized linear model risk assessments were found to be a magnitude smaller than traditional risk assessments, lending support to market inefficiency and increased risk from idiosyncratic factors. An example with several differing distributions shows that use of mixture distributions instead of point estimation can reduce sample size while retaining the power of the audit tests. The results of this study are increasingly important as accounting datasets are growing exponentially larger over time, requiring well‐defined roles for models, algorithms, data and narrative which can only be achieved with statistical protocols and algorithmic languages.     

The new road to the top

By comparing the top executives of 1980's Fortune 100 companies with the top brass of firms in the 2001 list, the authors have quantified a transformation that until now has been largely anecdotal. A dramatic shift in executive careers, and in executives themselves, has occurred over the past two decades. Today's Fortune 100 executives are younger, more of them are female, and fewer were educated at elite institutions. They're also making their way to the top more quickly. They're taking fewer jobs along the way, and they increasingly move from one company to the next as their careers unfold. In their wide-ranging analysis,the authors offer a number of insights. For one thing, it has become clear that there are huge advantages to working in a growing firm. For another, the firms that have been big for a long time still provide the most extensive training and development. They also offer relatively long promotion ladders--hence the common wisdom that these "academy companies" are great to have been from. While women were disproportionately scarce among the most senior ranks of executives in 2001, those who arrived got there faster and at a younger age than their male colleagues. Perhaps the career hurdles that women face had blocked all but the most highly qualified female managers, who then proceeded to rise quickly. In the future, a record of good P&L performance may become even more critical to getting hired and advancing in the largest companies. As a result, we may see a reversal of the usual flow of talent, which has been from the academy companies to smaller firms. It may be increasingly common for executives to develop records of performance in small companies, or even as entrepreneurs, and then seek positions in large corporations.     

Forward interest rate premium and asymmetric adjustment: Evidence from 16 countries

This paper examines the ability of the forward premium to provide an unbiased estimate of the future spot rate allowing for potential asymmetries. Extant evidence suggests that forward rates provide a biased predictor of future spot rates. Examining the forward premium for 16 countries, only for 2 countries does the linear expectations hypothesis holds. For the remaining countries, results generally support the view that the larger the forward premium the better a predictor for future spot rates it is, however, this result is not unique across all countries. Furthermore, although the asymmetric model improves data fit over the linear model, only in four cases does the model support an unbiased predictor interpretation. Further research is therefore required to understand the nature of this relationship, not least given the importance of correctly priced forward and long rates in terms of expected returns to future investments and the conduct of monetary policy.     

The effectiveness of chief financial officer board membership in improving corporate investment efficiency

The key roles of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in firm operating performance, corporate strategic choices, and corporate governance have been increasingly emphasized in recent decades. In this study, we empirically investigate the relation between CFO board membership and corporate investment efficiency to determine whether CFO presence on the board reduces firms’ propensity to over- or underinvest. We find that CFO board membership is significantly associated with a decreased level of corporate over- and underinvestment. Further, the positive effects of CFO board membership on corporate investment efficiency are greater for firms with greater information asymmetries. Last but not least, we find that the improved investment efficiency experienced by firms with CFOs on their boards has a positive effect on the firms’ future performance. Overall, we find that CFO board membership is associated with improved investment efficiency and firms’ future profitability. By documenting the real business impact of CFO board membership on investment efficiency and firms’ future performance, we add bricks to the literature on board composition and how it influences firms’ strategic choices and performance. Our findings suggest that having CFOs on boards could benefit firms’ investment practices, which directly relate to corporate strategic performance.

     

Future labor income growth and the cross-section of equity returns

This paper examines the equilibrium relation between future labor income growth and expected asset returns; it proposes revisions in the expectation of future labor income growth as a macroeconomic state variable and suggests a three-factor model, including a factor related to this variable, along with the consumption growth factor and the market factor. The proposed future labor income growth factor is positively associated with the Fama-French factors and subsumes their explanatory power in explaining the cross-section of stock returns. These results provide a possible economic explanation for the roles of the Fama-French factors: they are compensation for higher exposure to the risk related to changes in the value of human capital. This paper also compares the performance of the proposed three-factor model with other competing models and finds that the proposed model specification better captures cross-sectional variation in average returns than any of the competing asset pricing models considered.     

Women can change the future

This article examines the role of Asian women—particularly the Asian village woman who holds a key to revitalizing the economic system. A change in the method of cloth production to a system of women producing cloth in thousands of villages and city slums with spinning-wheels would provide the basis of social revolution and economic change. Other future scenarios for Asian women are outlined and the rudiments of an Asian feminist perspective are presented.     

What Do Investment Banks Truly Bring to the Table?

This paper investigates the role of intermediaries in the initial public offering (IPO) process. In the U.S. market, investment banks have traditionally been involved in a firm‐commitment or best‐efforts underwriting capacity. However, in the Australian IPO market, investment banks are increasingly being named in association with new issues in diverse roles such as issue managers, sponsoring brokers and corporate advisers. Using a sample of 468 IPOs over the 1996 to mid‐2006 period, we examine the influence of investment banks across these different engagements. In support of the signalling and information production roles of intermediaries, we find that issuers choosing high intermediary involvement are typically older, retain more capital, seek to raise larger amounts of capital and are without independent expert certification. We find mixed support for the certification hypothesis when testing for the effect of intermediary reputation on IPO issuer wealth loss. Further, the impact of intermediary involvement on underpricing is not significantly different for the different levels of intermediary involvement once issue characteristics have been accounted for. This is puzzling since these different roles by definition do not provide the same level of issue quality assurance.     

Is that a future we want?: An ecofeminist exploration of images of the future in contemporary film

Contemporary film images of the future are usually made within the hegemonic world of the Hollywood¹ film industry. This paper will argue that these films, with their global reach, are contributing to the dominant single view of the future. A view that limits the future to a Western high-tech, white, heterosexual, patriarchal, militaristic, dark blandness where a small number of the rich and powerful men are in control; it is a view that misses out on the lushness of human and biological diversity and the joyful messiness of plurality and truly democratic systems of shared power. Using Causal Layered Analysis as a methodological framework, and ecofeminism to ask questions, this paper explores images of the future in a small number of contemporary films, with specific attention to images of the ecological future in depictions of landscape, food, and animals as well as women's roles in society as an indicator of social justice and equality.Ecofeminism provides a theoretical base from which to identify areas of domination of women, human Others, non-human Others, and the Earth. Ecofeminism combined with Futures Studies provides direction on alternative ways to envision futures—futures that celebrate and protect local human and biological diversity as well as a recognition of common values based on requirements for peace, shelter, food, water, basic material well-being, and cultural expression.     

Services in the new industrial economy

‘Manufacturing matters’,¹ but ‘So do services’. The future of industrialization is the future of both these increasingly intertwined and interdependent activities. Rather than a post-industrial society, we are seeing a new mode of industrialization encompassing and integrating manufacturing and services. This article considers the prospects for services in the new industrial economy,² focusing on innovation in services. Services have frequently been considered to be relatively poor in economic performance. However, regarding services as laggards is decreasingly useful when considering contemporary services, many of which are the major users, carriers and promoters of many classes of innovative hardware. New services (such as software and telematics) are performing vital roles in the diffusion of new technologies, techniques and organizational styles. This article outlines some trends in the service economy, examines the special nature of services, considers how services are changing their products and processes, and assesses emerging strategies for organization and trade in services.     

Environmental,Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure: A literature review

Voluntary nonfinancial Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure is a rapidly growing and increasingly important topic that has attracted great attention from both academic researchers and capital market participants in recent years. The objective of this survey study is to provide a comprehensive review of the ESG disclosure literature in accounting research with suggestions for the future. Specifically, we organize the literature into four categories: motivations for and consequences associated with ESG information, in addition to disclosure- and user-level characteristics with the potential to affect the observed outcome of information disclosure. We also discuss the key role of nonfinancial rating agencies as a new type of ESG information intermediary in capital markets and suggest opportunities for future research.     

Historical and Projected Mortality for Mexico,Canada, and the United States

Abstract

This paper presents historical death rates for Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. by sex and broad age group. The time period for this historical analysis begins with 1900 (1930 for Mexico). These data provide a quite consistent basis from which experts can develop and contrast their expectations for future mortality trends. Official mortality projections developed by government agencies of each of the three countries provide a starting point for this discussion.

During this century, death rates declined fairly rapidly in all three countries. However, the rate of mortality improvement has varied considerably across time periods: distinct periods of rapid and slow improvement are evident in the data, but are not consistent across the countries and have not yet been explained.

The historical rates of improvement in mortality have also varied greatly by age and sex: younger age groups have shown the most rapid proportional improvement in mortality in all three countries, and mortality improvement during this century has generally been greater for females than for males. However, the data provide evidence that this difference in the rates of mortality improvement between men and women has recently slowed, and even reversed, in the U.S. and Canada. Historical experience and projections are provided in graphs, in which death rates are plotted on a logarithmic scale. This approach allows easy detection of the extent to which rates of improvement have been changing (death rates with constant rates of improvement would be plotted as straight lines).

The official projections supplied for comparison provide strikingly similar outlooks for future potential mortality improvement. In each case, the relatively average rapid rate of mortality improvement experienced so far this century is assumed to slow in the future. In addition, rates of improvement are projected to be much more similar for all three countries across age groups and between the sexes.