Nationality and differences in auditor risk assessment: A research note with experimental evidence

This study examines whether auditors from different countries come to different conclusions when they perform analytical procedures to assess the risk of misstatement in accounts. During a laboratory experiment, auditors who worked for the same firm in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States performed analytical procedures on identical case materials. Although auditors from all three countries came to similar conclusions about the overall risk of misstatement, they attributed risk differently across the individual financial statement accounts they evaluated.     

Public Professional Accountability: A Conditional Approach

In the past decades, profession(al)s have increasingly been called to account. Several authors have reported that this increased public professional accountability, in the form of showing that professional conduct meets predefined standards or rules, has had severe negative consequences for professionals, their clients and society, and call for ‘intelligent’ forms of accountability; forms of accountability that may inform a wider public about professional conduct but do not harm it. In this paper, we propose a form of ‘intelligent’ public professional accountability. Taking Freidson’s (Professionalism. The third logic, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001) notion of institutional ethics as a point of departure, we develop a form of accountability that seeks to account for the conditions required for professional conduct. The paper first discusses the current ‘dilemma of professional accountability,’ describes ‘ideal-type professional conduct’ and goes into the conditions it requires. Next, it shows what accounting for these conditions entails and that this form of accountability fits the criteria for intelligent accountability, as set by O’Neill (in: Morris and Vines (eds.) Capital failure: rebuilding trust in financial services, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014).     

The economic burden of common adverse events associated with metastatic colorectal cancer treatment in the United States

Aims: Adverse events (AEs) associated with treatments for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) may compromise the course of treatment, impact quality-of-life, and increase healthcare resource utilization. This study assessed the direct healthcare costs of common AEs among mCRC patients in the US.

Methods: Adult mCRC patients treated with chemotherapy or targeted therapies were identified from administrative claims databases (2009–2014). Up to the first three mCRC treatment episodes per patient were considered and categorized as with or without the AE system/organ category during the episode. Total healthcare costs (2014 USD) were measured by treatment episode and reported on a monthly basis. Treatment episodes with the AE category were matched by treatment type and line of treatment to those without the AE category. Adjusted total cost differences were estimated by comparing costs during treatment episodes with vs without the AE category using multivariate regression models; p-values were estimated with bootstrap.

Results: A total of 4158 patients with ≥1 mCRC treatment episode were included (mean age?=?59 years; 58% male; 60% with liver and 14% with lung metastases; 2,261 [54%] with a second and 1,115 [27%] with a third episode). On average, two treatment episodes were observed per patient with an average length of 166 days per episode. Adjusted monthly total cost difference by AE category included hematologic ($1,480), respiratory ($1,253), endocrine/metabolic ($1,213), central nervous system (CNS; $1,136), and cardiovascular ($1,036; all p?Limitations: Claims do not include information on the cause of AEs, and potentially less severe AEs may not have been reported by the physician when billing the medical service. This study aimed to assess the association between costs and AEs and not the causation of AEs by treatment.

Conclusions: The most costly AEs among mCRC patients were hematologic, followed by respiratory, endocrine/metabolic, CNS, and cardiovascular.     

Bank incentives, contract design and bank runs

We study the Diamond-Dybvig [Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity, J. Polit. Econ. 91 (1983) 401-419] model as developed in Green and Lin [Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation, J. Econ. Theory 109 (2003) 1-23] and Peck and Shell [Equilibrium bank runs, J. Polit. Econ. 111 (2003) 103-123]. We dispense with the notion of a bank as a coalition of depositors. Instead, our bank is a self-interested agent with a technological advantage in record-keeping. We examine the implications of the resulting agency problem for the design of bank contracts and the possibility of bank-run equilibria. For a special case, we discover that the agency problem may or may not simplify the qualitative structure of bank liabilities. We also find that the uniqueness result in Green and Lin [Implementing efficient allocations in a model of financial intermediation, J. Econ. Theory 109 (2003) 1-23] is robust to our form of agency, but that the non-uniqueness result in Peck and Shell [Equilibrium bank runs, J. Polit. Econ. 111 (2003) 103-123] is not.     

Salespersons as Internal Knowledge Brokers and New Products Selling: Discovering the Link to Genetic Makeup

Managers increasingly realize the importance of involving the sales force in new product development. However, despite recent progress, research on the specific role of the sales force in product innovation‐related activities remains scarce. In particular, the importance of a salespersons' internal knowledge brokering has been neglected. This study develops and empirically validates the concept of internal knowledge brokering behavior and its effect on selling new products and developing new business, and explores whether a salesperson's internal brokering qualities are determined by biological traits. The findings reveal that salespeople with the DRD2 A1 gene variant engage at significant lower levels of internal knowledge‐brokering behavior than salespeople without this gene variant, and as a result are less likely to engage effectively in new product selling. The DRD4 gene variant had no effect on internal knowledge brokering. Management and future research implications are discussed.     

Personal income tax mimicry: evidence from international panel data

This paper investigates personal income tax (PIT) mimicry at the international level. It is the first to empirically investigate the extent to which PIT mimicry varies along the tax schedule and the first to include nations which are not part of the OECD. We use data on international personal income tax schedules from the world tax indicators to estimate marginal and average tax rates at various multiples of per capita gross domestic product (GDP). These tax rates are then used to estimate the extent to which countries respond to their neighbors’ PIT policy. We find evidence of PIT mimicry using a balanced panel of 53 countries over 24 years. This finding is strongest for tax rates at lower multiples of per capita GDP and survives several robustness checks.     

MULTIPLE OWNERSHIP,COLLUSION AND UNUSUAL RESULT PATTERNS IN SOCCER

Expanding on the literature on antitrust, multiple ownership, and collusion in sports, this paper finds a very unusual result pattern between two clubs competing in the Croatian soccer league—Lokomotiva and Dinamo Zagreb. Their close sporting and business relationship has raised many questions about the possible collusion between them, potentially affecting the integrity of the competition. We analyze all matchups in the competition's 25‐year history to single out those characterized by biggest under‐ and overperformances by competing clubs. Our findings provide some support to the allegations of a possible collusion between the clubs as Lokomotiva's underperformance against Dinamo is so far in the tail of normal distribution that it has a lower occurrence probability than a random person being hit by lightning. (JEL Z29, K21, L83).     

Understanding Top Management and Organizational Change Through Demographic and Processual Analysis*

abstract Top management theory has been strongly influenced by demographic studies of top management teams (TMTs), but not by research into organizational adaptation to conditions of extreme institutional turbulence. This article analyses the transformation of a post‐socialist enterprise through a combination of demographic and processual methods to develop an enriched account of the micro‐processes through which top management constructed organizational change. Adding layers of narrative data and processual explanation directly addresses the well rehearsed problems in demographic TMT studies. From the findings, we propose a set of theoretical arguments that conceptualizes top management in terms of management regimes, to which TMTs are politically tied and through which they seek to realize their values and strategies in organizational outcomes.