Women and Land Deals in Africa and Asia: Weighing the Implications and Changing the Game

Large-scale land deals have attracted much attention from media and policymakers, and several international initiatives are attempting to regulate and address the impacts of such deals. Little attention has been paid to the gendered implications of such deals in the literature, and most regulatory initiatives do not address gender adequately. To fill this gap, this contribution identifies implications of land deals for women and recommends measures to mitigate negative impacts. It reviews evidence from four case studies commissioned for the International Land Coalition (ILC) Global Study of Commercial Pressures on Land conducted in 2010. The evidence is analyzed within a framework that posits women's vulnerability to land deals as due to four dimensions of underlying discrimination. This study analyzes three of these dimensions in depth, arguing that women are likely to be affected differently by land deals and disproportionately more likely to be negatively affected than men.     

The million dollar donor journey: Stages of development for high‐net‐worth women donors

Most charitable giving research focuses on individual donors at a specific point in time and uses quantitative surveys with limited data about donors' experiences. This study uses reflective interviews to examine the life trajectories of a cohort of women donors who have made gifts of $1 million or more to causes that benefit women and girls. By drawing from developmental psychology, we illustrate the iterative process of learning about giving—shaped by life experiences—that comprise the journey to becoming a million‐dollar donor. We find that, in their journeys toward making their million‐dollar commitment, women donors followed a shared trajectory with distinct stages and prompts for progression. Our findings provide guidance for fundraising professionals to recognize the stages of a potential donor's readiness to give and to facilitate progression in the journey, thus increasing the potential for more large‐scale gift commitments in the future and deepening the donor–fundraiser relationship.     

Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games

Research on ultimatum and dictator games has found that because of "fairness" first movers in such games offer more than noncooperative game theory predicts. We find that if the right to be the first mover is "earned" by scoring high on a general knowledge quiz, then first movers behave in a more self-regarding manner. We also conducted dictator double blind experiments, in which the experimenter could not identify the decision maker. The results yielded by far our largest observed incidence of self-regarding offers, suggesting that offers are due to strategic and expectation considerations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, C91.     

Fee pressure and audit quality

This study investigates the association of audit fee pressure with an inverse measure of audit quality, misstatements in audited data, during the recent recession. Fee pressure in a year is measured as the difference between benchmark “normal” audit fees and actual audit fees. We find fee pressure is positively and significantly associated with accounting misstatements in 2008, the center of the recession. Our results suggest that auditors made fee concessions to some clients in 2008, and that fee pressure was associated with reduced audit quality in that year.     

Impact of stakeholder characteristics on voluntary dissemination of interim information and communication of its level of assurance

Equity of access to information for listed entities is a key principle in an efficient and effective market. Direct mailing is a mechanism for achieving this. This study examines equity of access by identifying the half‐yearly financial information, if any, voluntarily mailed out by Australian listed entities and associated stakeholder characteristics. We find that certain stakeholder characteristics (presence of audit committee and shareholder dispersion) are associated with voluntary mail‐out of half‐yearly financial information, along with certain control variables (size of entity, industry and audit opinion). This study further identifies that there are very few instances of the higher level of assurance (audit) being chosen, and where half‐year information is disseminated there are very few instances of the level of assurance on this information being communicated to shareholders.     

Getting By with a Little Help from Your Family: Toward a Policy-Relevant Model of the Household

Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the ways in which households in developed Western economies gain their livelihoods, with marked elements of a return to old ways of working. There has been a shift from reliance upon one family wage to the need for family employment as well as growing reliance on self-employment and small business. These changes mean that childcare for working parents, and the promotion of new small enterprise, are key areas of policy concern. Drawing on original English empirical research around both these themes, this article shows the ways in which UK households draw on redistribution between the generations as a v - v generally decommodified v - v contribution to livelihoods and "getting by." We argue that these results confound widely utilized models of how people behave, and take particular issue with how economists and policy-makers model the household and its boundaries as the institutional context for individual decisions.     

The influence of poll results on public opinion: Examining the personal consequences of the poll topic

A laboratory experiment examined the effect of reporting poll results on opinions regarding a legislative proposal affecting higher education. The results indicated that exposure to poll results was more likely to change opinions when the proposal had few personal consequences, and when the majority position in the polls was counter to the opinions held by most subjects. Under these conditions, a ‘bandwagon effect’ resulted wherein subjects tended to switch to the majority position reported in the polls. However, when the personal consequences of the proposal were substantial, and/or the majority position was consistent with the views of most subjects, poll results had little or no impact on opinions. These results suggest that, in certain circumstances, reported poll results are viewed as an acceptable basis for opinions on government policies, and that governments can use poll results strategically to sway the opinions of voters - especially voters who are relatively unaffected by the policy.