True and Fair — An Imaginary View

The recent collapses of major Australian corporations and the human and economic consequences have emphasised the need for a new approach to auditing in Australia to fix the culture of complacency. The challenge is to continue to persuade directors, auditors and ASIC to better understand what the law requires, and to pressure government to create the conditions to ensure that ASIC undertakes appropriate enforcement.     

Without `Reinventing the Wheel': Business Accounting Applied to the Public Sector

This article considers why a business accounting model was applied in an early adoption of public-sector accrual accounting. The history of that change shows that large private-sector consulting firms were active in the promotion and implementation of a commercial model of public-sector accrual accounting. It is argued here that the consulting firms' actions are best understood using concepts of mimetic isomorphism and the interplay between self-interest and perceived public interest. They formed an epistemic community in which self-interest was present but with a zealous belief that private-sector accounting was an inherently righteous objective for the public sector.     

Information styles of marketing and R&D personnel during technological product innovation projects

Abstract The research question in the present article can be phrased in the following way: what are the elements which influence the perception of the utility of information received from another function? A field study research has been conducted in 40 Belgian companies. In each company, we have studied two on-going innovation projects (one planning project, one development project). Crossfunctional communication behaviours at the R&D/marketing interface have been measured by means of mailed structured questionnaires. Three-hundred and eighty-six questionnaires have been returned. The data analyses show that there are four underlying information dimensions, i.e. the perceived relevance, the perceived comprehensibility, the perceived novelty and the perceived credibility of information. We also discuss some contingency variables (function of the message receiver, stage in the innovation process) that might moderate the impact of these dimensions. It will be shown that the interaction between source and receiver has a significant impact on the perceived credibility, the perceived comprehensibility and the perceived novelty of the received information.     

International trade in a differentiated good: Trade elasticities in the world rice market

In many previous rice trade models, the commodity has been regarded as a homogeneous product. However, homogeneity is not an appropriate assumption, given the various types of rice that are traded and consumed. Parameters estimated from these models, therefore, do not reflect the real world market for rice and, hence, may mislead decision makers who use the results for policy evaluation purposes. This study uses an Armington approach to model the world rice trade as a differential good market and to derive trade elasticity parameters.     

The approximation capabilities of the minflex-Laurents,translog, and generalized Leontief forms

This paper compares the approximation capabilities of the minflex-Laurents translog and minflex generalized Leontief cost functions with their translog and generalized Leontief counterparts in Monte Carlo experiments. The minflex Laurent specifications generally provided closer approximations to underlying technical and economic parameters. Imposition of nonlinear restrictions on some of the parameters of the minflex Laurent models yielded measurable improvement in estimated elasticities of substitutions, returns to scale, and rates of technical change.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through E. Appelbaum.     

A Permanent Change in the Route to Owner Occupation?

This paper attempts to explain why home ownership rates among young adults fell in the early 1990s when various indicators suggested it had become more affordable. As a potential explanation, we focus on the relatively slower growth in their incomes and argue that this could signal a fundamental change in behaviour, a change in route adopted into owner occupation, induced by structural economic change. In examining the implications for housing tenure, we use a conditional fixed effects multinomial logit model to exploit the information on the tenure choice and the timing of transitions in the British Household Panel Survey. Our results reveal that relatively slower income growth contributed significantly to this decline and that ignoring the intertemporal correlation in micro‐panels generates inconsistent results.     

Risk preferences in multi-period consumption models, the equity premium puzzle, and habit formation utility

The relationship between the relative risk aversion measure for the utility function for consumption and that for the value function for wealth is a derived relationship whose properties depend on how consumption and wealth are defined and measured. This fact together with information concerning estimates for these two relative risk aversion measures is used to give another perspective on the equity premium puzzle, and to explain why it is that the habit formation utility function is effective in eliminating that puzzle. A time separable utility function that can serve as an alternative to the assumption of habit formation is also presented.     

R&D–Marketing Integration Mechanisms, Communication Flows, and Innovation Success

Rudy Moenaert, William Souder, Arnoud De Meyer, and Dirk Deschoolmeester report the results of their study of forty technologically innovative Belgian companies to examine the interaction between marketing and R&D. They studied one commercially successful and one commercially unsuccessful technological product innovation project in each participating company and collected data from one marketing and one R&D respondent per project. Communication flows between marketing and R&D are increased under conditions involving formalization of projects, decentralization, positive interfunctional climate, and role flexibility.     

Generalised estimates of diffusion rates for the oxygen blown steel process: An international comparison

The purpose of this study is to build on the results recently obtained by Poznanski (1990). First, the estimation technique is generalised by removing both the symmetric restrictions and the effects of autocorrelated errors that are present in simple logistic functions. Secondly, attention is drawn to the existence and consequences of multicollinearity when non linear techniques are applied to a general exponential. Thirdly, an attempt is made to quantify the importance of market structure and time lags in adoption as determinants of diffusion speed. Finally, a comparison between these generalised results and Poznanski's is made.The study concludes that, by generalising the estimation technique, some significant changes take place. Changes occur in the ordering and magnitude of diffusion speeds, especially amongst the developing and centrally planned economies. Changes also occur in the nature of the diffusion process, and in the importance attributed to market structure and diffusion lags in determining the rate of diffusion. It is also shown that, for some countries, multicollinearity imposes constraints on the type of generality that can be obtained.