The Impact of Ethics Education on Reporting Behavior

We examine the impact of an ethics education program on reporting behavior using two groups of students: fourth year Masters of Accounting students who just completed a newly instituted ethics education program, and fifth year students in the same program who did not receive the ethics program. In an experiment providing both the opportunity and motivation to misreport for more money, we design two social condition treatments – anonymity and public disclosure – to examine whether or to what extent ethical values are internalized by students. We find that when participants are anonymous, misreporting rates are nearly the same regardless of ethics program participation. However, when their reporting behavior is made public to the cohort, participants who completed the ethics program misreported at significantly lower rates than those who did not receive the ethics program. The results suggest that ethics education does not necessarily result in internalized ethical values, but it can impact ethical behavior.     

Adult equivalence scales and food expenditures: an application to Mexican beef and pork purchases

In the analysis of food expenditures, the use of a simple count of household members as an estimate of household size implicitly assumes each household member has the same marginal impact. In this analysis of Mexican food expenditures, endogenously determined adult equivalence scales are estimated in such a way that these marginal impacts are allowed to vary by household member age and gender. The results of a series of hypothesis tests indicate a rejection of the implied null hypothesis of equal marginal expenditure impacts associated with the use of the traditional count based household size variable. This study also rejects the null hypothesis of the equality of adult equivalent scales across the commodities included in this analysis.     

Chinese International Students. An Avant‐Garde of Independent Travellers?

Though most long‐haul Chinese travellers participate in group‐based tours, many young Chinese are now travelling overseas to acquire educational qualifications. These ‘study tourists’ travel independently around their place of study, often accompanied by friends and relatives whom they are hosting. Understanding the characteristics of such independent behaviours may offer insights into China's future outbound travel market. This study of 1400 Chinese studying in Australia highlights distinctions between independent student travellers and youth travellers more generally such as backpackers. The findings challenge established typologies of independent youth travellers and raise prospective implications for marketers. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward an understanding of market resilience: market liquidity and heterogeneity in the investor decision cycle

During liquidity shocks such as occur when margin calls force the liquidation of leveraged positions, there is a widening disparity between the reaction speed of the liquidity demanders and the liquidity providers. Those who are forced to sell typically must take action within the span of a day, while those who are providing liquidity do not face similar urgency. Indeed, the flurry of activity and increased volatility of prices during the liquidity shocks might actually reduce the speed with which many liquidity providers come to the market. To analyze these dynamics, we build upon previous agent-based models of financial markets, and specifically the Preis et. al (Europhys Lett 75(3):510–516, 2006) model, to develop an order-book model with heterogeneity in trader decision cycles. The model demonstrates an adherence to important stylized facts such as a leptokurtic distribution of returns, decay of autocorrelations over moderate to long time lags, and clustering volatility. Consistent with empirical analysis of recent market events, we demonstrate the impact of heterogeneous decision cycles on market resilience and the stochastic properties of market prices.