Measuring Nonprofit Incubator Performance: Toward an Adapted Balanced Scorecard Approach

The number of business incubators in the world has risen dramatically, with many regions promoting nonprofit incubators. Yet declines in public funding have brought to the fore a key question about how well they perform. Both policymakers and incubator managers therefore stand to benefit from reliable tools to monitor performance. In this paper, we present a scale to measure incubator performance based on the research literature on incubator performance and management control. We used the balanced scorecard as a basis for thought about how best to develop a model of nonprofit incubator performance. Data collected from 121 incubator managers show that performance can be assessed along four constructs: local development performance, incubatee satisfaction, incubation processes, and learning. This tool comprises a broad range of performance indicators and, perhaps more importantly, may help incubator managers to better run their organizations and regional policymakers to better evaluate their entrepreneurship policies.     

基于自然和社会要素影响的清江流域生态系统服务研究

清江流域生态系统作为湖北西南山区重要的生态屏障,对山地城镇的发展具有重要意义。为反映清江流域生态系统服务价值的空间异质性,运用加权求和法、层次分析法和区位熵法分析并归因。结果表明:(1)清江流域生态风险源分布在人口密集的中下游流域,受洪涝、干旱、塌荒等地质灾害影响较大,应降低灾害风险对生态系统造成的影响;(2)研究区生态环境与经济分布不协调,其中恩施市等经济发展水平与植被覆盖率较高,巴东县等经济发展水平与植被覆盖率最低;(3)研究区总生态系统服务价值为3.96×106万元,流域内生态系统服务价值分布与土地面积表现为不协调。研究结果为政府决策者在实施可持续发展战略提供科学合理的依据。     

Output volatility,composition of trade,and transmission of economic shocks across countries

In this paper we investigate how supply and demand shocks in one country affect output volatility in other countries. While the evidence for cross‐country transmission of demand shocks is mixed, we find that volatile supply in one country leads to larger imports and output volatility in other countries. As a result, the effect of trade openness on output volatility is highly heterogeneous across countries and depends on the composition of their trade. Those countries whose imports originate in economies with volatile supply experience a greater impact of trade on output volatility.     

Islamic financing and bank risks: The case of Malaysia

We examine whether Islamic financing can explain three important bank risks in a country with a dual banking system: credit risk, interest‐rate risk, and liquidity risk. Using Malaysian data, we find that commercial banks with Islamic financing have significantly lower credit and liquidity risks but significantly higher interest‐rate risk than banks without Islamic financing. There is also evidence that bank size is significantly related to credit risk; the proportion of loan sales to total liabilities and bank size are significant determinants of interest‐rate risk; and off‐balance‐sheet financing, the extent of securitization, loan volatility, bank capital, and bank size are statistically significantly related to liquidity risk. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

E-Alliance: A Negotiation Infrastructure for Virtual Alliances

In this paper we provide an overview of E-Alliance, a software infrastructure we are developing to support negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organisational alliances. Our baseline is to offer a collaboration framework which fully preserves the autonomy of organisations grouped in an alliance, while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. We propose to support negotiation between the partners within such alliances by combining different technologies, such as software engineering techniques, middleware-level coordination facilities and multiagent systems support. We present our approach in the context of a sample scenario of an alliance where partners are printshops capable of (out/in) sourcing print jobs among them to better accomplish their customers' requests.     

Can Benefits in Recreational Parks in Malaysia Be Transferred? A Choice Experiment (CE) Technique

This paper analyses benefit transfer in the case of recreational parks using the choice experiment (CE) technique. The CE was employed because it allows different changes in recreational park attributes to be taken into account. The analyses were performed in terms of transferability of valuation function and willingness to pay (WTP) values. The results for the valuation function suggest that the estimated coefficients between the two sites are not transferable. However, the estimated WTP values can be transferred. The results suggest the suitability of using the CE approach in analysing benefit transfer if the objective is to transfer the WTP values rather than the valuation function. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Standard Setting for the Financial Reporting of Religious Business Organisations: the Case of Islamic Banks

Islamic banks have to abide by Islamic principles in all their business transactions. Accounting practices also have to be in conformity with this cardinal rule. Currently almost every Islamic bank sets its own accounting policy through a process which involves in-house religious advisers and the financial auditor of the bank. However, Islamic banks have recently agreed to establish a standard setting body to regulate their financial accounting and reporting. This paper argues that one of the predominant factors which seems to have influenced this decision and the institutional arrangements through which accounting standards will be promulgated is Islamic banks' fear of possible future intervention by their regulatory agencies.     

The Impact of the UK Price Codes on Accounting Functions in Organisations: A Power Perspective

The literature on pricing has hardly used the concepts of organisation theory to emphasise the internal factors that seem to influence the mechanics of pricing decisions. It is this missing theme to which this article attempts to draw attention by arguing that pricing decisions are influenced by organisational subunits ‘power which is not necessarily constant over time. This was made possible by examining the impact of the Price Commission, which operated in the UK between 1973 and 1979, on companies’ pricing decision making processes.     

Managing Perceptions of Technical Competence: How Well Do Auditors Know How Others View Them?*

We investigate factors that influence an auditor's accuracy in knowing how subordinates, peers, and superiors view his or her own technical competence (metaperception). Extant literature on reputation management in auditing contexts depicts preparers of audit workpapers as strategic agents (subordinates) who stylize workpapers and engage in behaviors that enhance their reputations with reviewers (superiors). These superiors, in turn, are represented as strategically engaging in coping behaviors in response to such stylization attempts. One of the necessary conditions for auditors to enhance their reputations on a sustainable basis is accurate metaperception. We report the results of an experiment that investigates determinants of auditors' metaperception accuracy. Our participants comprise teams of audit partners, managers, and seniors who work together in the field. Each auditor performs two tasks of varying complexity and then predicts whether other team members can accurately perform the task and how other team members assess his or her performance on the tasks. Results show that accuracy in knowing what others think of one's technical proficiency (metaperception) is generally high, particularly when the predictor auditors are partners and managers; however, metaperception accuracy is asymmetric and varies depending on the predictor auditor, the target auditor being predicted, and task complexity. Implications are discussed.     

Viewpoint: An extended class of instrumental variables for the estimation of causal effects

Abstract We examine how structural systems can yield observed variables instrumental in identifying and estimating causal effects. We provide an exhaustive characterization of potentially identifying conditional exogeneity relationships and demonstrate how structural relations determine exogeneity and exclusion restrictions that yield moment conditions supporting identification. This provides a comprehensive framework for constructing instruments and covariates. We introduce notions of conditioning and conditional extended instrumental variables (XIVs). These permit identification but need not be traditional instruments, as they may be endogenous. We distinguish between observed XIVs and proxies for unobserved XIVs. A main message is the importance of sufficiently specifying causal relations governing the unobservables.