Predicting the budgetary funding need of education in the three-year budget for 2008–2010

The paper presents a technique developed by the authors, which makes it possible to determine the necessary amount of financing for education at all the budget system levels for 2008-2010, based on the Russian average value of financing, taking into account the budget expenditures index for two variants of student population, i.e. the actual number of on-budget students and the number of students required to meet the economy’s need for trained workers. The technique was developed and the calculations were made on the basis of Russian long-term forecasts and the Russian three-year federal budget for 2008–2010.     

Issues Facing Small Accounting Practices in Regional North Queensland: An Exploratory Study

Small accounting practices (SAP), most of which are sole principals, are an important part of the accounting profession and the Australian economy. This exploratory study identifies issues and challenges experienced by small accounting principals in Far North Queensland, Australia. The findings generally correspond with previous research, ranking staffing and keeping up to date through professional development as key areas of concern, and also highlighting the expectation gap between SAP principals and their clients. Stress emerged as a major concern for principals, and new areas of possible conflict of interests were uncovered. A number of potential areas for future research, including comparative studies in city and suburban areas, have been identified.     

Financial Development and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from Six MENA Countries

This paper examines the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth for six Middle Eastern and North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia), within a quadvariate vector autoregressive framework. We employ four different measures of financial development and apply the augmented vector autoregression vector (VAR) methodology of Toda and Yamamoto to test for Granger causality. Our empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that finance leads to growth in five out of the six countries. Only in Israel could weak support be found for causality running from economic growth to financial development but no causality in the other direction. These findings suggest the need to accelerate the financial reforms that have been launched since the mid 1980s and to improve the efficiency of these countries’ financial systems to stimulate saving/investment and, consequently, long‐term economic growth.     

Social Capital and the Terms of Trade for Farmland

Social capital is a person or group's sympathy for or sense of obligation to another person or group. This article introduces social capital into a neoclassical model of farmland exchange and shows how relationships alter the terms of trade. Empirical evidence from a survey of farmers shows that the type of relationship farmland sellers have with farmland buyers has a statistically significant and economically important effect on the minimum-sell price for farmland. Compared to the minimum-sell price when selling to a total stranger in an arm's-length transaction, farmland sellers discount prices to friendly neighbors and relatives and require a premium from unfriendly neighbors and influential people in the community.     

Punishment in environmental protection

The fundamental character of a punishment is the subject of this paper. Based on the assumed function of a punishment (deterrent), a punishment has to be perceived and experienced to be an adverse result by the punished and the public. The first factor in particular means that the courts have to have flexibility to sentence a person to such a punishment that is experienced as such. The legal question becomes how this customization of a punishment is acceptable from an equality standpoint. In the field of environmental protection, the administrative process poses serious problems. There may be administrative proceedings that result in substantial economic losses for individuals and groups alike. Jürgen S. Poesche was born in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada), lived in Europe and North America and graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology, University of Helsinki, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration and Tampere University of Technology. Areas of interest include chemical and mechanical pulping, environmental protection (EIA, environmental ethics, environmental law), and capital investment decision-making. He has published in, e.g., Wochenblatt für Papierfabrikation, Finnish Journal of Business Economics, Ympäristojuridiikka (Environmental Law), and in the publication series of the Helsinki University of Technology and the Tampere University of Technology. Presently, he is working for a major Canadian forest products company.     

The law of one price: a test based on prices for selected inputs in New Zealand agriculture

The law of one price (LOOP) is an essential foundation of both the pure theory of trade and monetary theory. Strictly speaking, the law relates to prices of individual commodities. However, empirical tests of LOOP have often relied on aggregated data. In this paper, a model is derived and estimated using price data for 15 selected inputs in New Zealand agriculture. The results offer no support for the LOOP in the short run, and the results for the long run are mixed. It may be inappropriate, therefore, to assume that the LOOP holds generally in modelling exercises, particularly when models are used for policy purposes.     

Evidence on the motivation for management forecasts of corporate earnings

A multivariate model of the process by which managers decide to release public forecasts of their firms' earnings is developed, based on factors that are hypothesized to affect the demand for and the willingness to supply such forecasts. We test the model on data from a comprehensive sample of earnings forecasts, and find support for our hypotheses about the likely joint influence of those factors. Larger firm size, greater leverage, higher and more stable earnings rates and less rapid growth rates are found to be associated with an increased propensity for management to provide earnings forecasts for their firms.     

Competitive decision making: Two and a half frames

We argue that the study of competitive decision making has been heavily influenced by the frames of reference that are adopted by researchers. The dominant economic frame and the emergent behavioral frame describe largely separate phenomena and have little overlap. Drawing from examples of learning in games and markets, we show how each of these frames falls short of capturing some interesting elements in competitive decisions. We then describe how a coevolutionary perspective may be emerging as an integrative paradigm for the study of competitive decisions.This paper was prepared for the conference, Understanding Competitive Decision Making. Comments by the participants of that conference and Paul Shoemaker are gratefully acknowledged, as are discussions with Colin Camerer, Eldar Shafir, and Sharoni Shafir.