Accounting for Animal Welfare: Addressing Epistemic Vices During Live Sheep Export Voyages

Journal of Business Ethics - In this research, we develop a reporting framework based on an ethical account of the Australian live sheep export (LSE) industry’s current operations. We...     

The reluctant regulator: The Rural Utilities Service and American broadband policy

Drawing on the increasing body of literature on policy stakeholders and the ever-growing acknowledgement that communication policy is crafted by more than just parliamentarians and formal communication regulators this paper examines the role that another set of regulators plays in communication policy: agriculture regulators. Based on a study of the United States Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), this paper explores alternative agents of communication policy. More specifically, through document analysis we examine the way in which the Rural Utilities Service has shaped rural broadband policy in the United States over the last three decades. The implications for this research are wide, as it brings another policy actor into the policy making melee, and pushes communication policy scholars to consider the role that non-traditional communication regulators play in the communication policy making process.     

Exploring corporate governance research in accounting journals through latent semantic and topic analyses

The literature on corporate governance (CG) has been expanding at an unprecedented rate since major corporate scandals surfaced, such as Enron, WorldCom, and HealthSouth. Corresponding with accounting's important role in CG, accounting scholars increasingly have investigated CG in recent years, so the body of literature is growing. Although previous attempts have been made to summarize extant literature on CG via reviews, none of these attempts has utilized recent developments in text analyses and natural language processing. This study uses latent semantic and topic analyses to address this research gap by analysing abstracts from 1,399 articles in all accounting journals that the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) has rated A and A*. The ABDC journal list is widely recognized as a journal‐quality indicator across many universities worldwide. The analyses revealed 10 distinct research topics on CG in the ABDC's top accounting journals. The results presented include the five most representative articles for each topic, as distinguished by topic scores. This study carries important practice and policy implications, as it reveals major research streams and exhibits how researchers respond to various CG problems.     

Housing “Beta”: Common Risk Factor in Returns of Stocks

This study proposes the housing “beta” and tests whether the housing “beta” is a significant determinant for stock returns in a multifactor framework. We hypothesize that the housing market is a systematic risk factor given the impact of the housing market on the overall economy and economic growth of most countries, as well as the effect of homes in the overall wealth of individual investors. The housing market directly affect GDP growth through residential fixed investment and housing services. In addition, the housing market indirectly impacts economic activities via consumption. Our results show that the housing “beta” is positive and significant in explaining stock returns after controlling several other factors from the prior literature. This relationship is stronger, as expected, during the financial crisis period. We conducted several robustness checks using a different study period and housing market indices and obtain results which are consistent with our main findings.

     

How fast can China grow? The Middle Kingdom's prospects to 2030

Given its size and importance for global commodity markets, the question of how fast China can grow over the medium term is an important one. Using a Cobb–Douglas production function, we decompose the growth of trend GDP into those of the capital stock, labour, human capital and total factor productivity (TFP) and then forecast trend output growth out to 2030 using a bottom‐up approach based on forecasts that we build for each one of these factors. Our paper distinguishes itself from existing work in that we construct a forecast of Chinese TFP growth based on the aggregation of forecasts of its key determinants. In addition, our analysis is based on a carefully constructed estimate of the Chinese productive capital stock and a measure of human capital (based on Chinese wage survey data) that better reflects the returns to education in China. Our results suggest that Chinese GDP growth will slow from around 7% currently to approximately 5% by 2030, consistent with a gradual rebalancing of the Chinese economy characterized by a decline in the investment rate. Moreover, our findings underscore the growing importance of TFP growth as a driver of Chinese growth.     

The Economics of the Criminal Behavior of Young Adults

A bstract This study uses a combination of individual-level and county-level data to estimate an economic model of crime for young adults similar to that used by Becker (1968) and Trumbull (1989). In order to estimate a model of crime in which both individual-level and county-level data are used, it is necessary to take account of the bias introduced by using aggregate-level data in conjunction with individual-level data. In order to eliminate this bias, a technique derived by Moulton (1990) is employed. Results from a logit regression model indicate that race, sex. and peer pressure have statistically significant effects on the probability that a young adult will commit a crime. Results also suggest that police presence, as measured by county-level per capita police expenditures, does not deter young adults from committing crimes.     

Does the Starting Point Matter? The Literature‐Driven and the Phenomenon‐Driven Approaches of Using Corporate Archival Data in Academic Research

Despite recent and perhaps myopic criticisms of archival data with regard to supporting causal theoretical claims, it would be folly to disregard the exploratory and grounded theory development potential that these substantial, rich, and timely archives hold. The question then becomes one of how academics might tap into such archives. This paper considers this issue from a pragmatic perspective, drawing on the experiences of various academics with extensive experience in constructing data‐access relationships with industry. With the support of scholars who published their work using corporate archival data in leading academic journals, we suggest a phenomenon‐driven approach paralleled with the traditional literature‐driven approach in academic studies. This paper highlights best practices, pitfalls, and future opportunities, with the aim of serving as a guide for intrepid scholars interested in capitalizing on contemporary big data initiatives supported at many firms.     

Phases of the Canadian business cycle

In this paper we contrast a number of univariate models of Canadian GDP. Our preferred models are used to provide a business cycle chronology for Canada, which is compared with some existing, more judgmentally determined chronologies. We find that a simple, 'two quarters of negative growth' rule for determining recession dates is the most similar to our chronology. We also find that the most recent recession in Canada was unique in both its length and the slow speed of recovery. JEL Classification: C22, C51, C52, E32
Phases du cycle d'affaires au Canada. Dans ce mémoire, les auteurs contrastent un certain nombre de modèles du PIB canadien. Les modèles préférés sont utilisés pour définir une chronologie des cycles économiques du Canada qu'on peut comparer avec d'autres chronologies existantes basées davantage sur le jugement. On découvre que la règle "deux trimestres de croissance négative" est celle qui se rapproche le plus de la chronologie proposée quand il s'agit de définir les dates de récession. On découvre aussi que la récente récession canadienne a été unique tant par sa durée que par la lenteur avec laquelle la reprise subséquente s'est amorcée.     

Intervention, Corruption and Capture: The Nexus between Enterprises and the State

We study the nexus between enterprises and the state in transition countries, using new enterprise survey data. We examine the quality of governance, state intervention in enterprise decision-making, state benefits to firms, and corruption payments. The quality of governance varies both across countries and across different dimensions of governance within countries. Economic reform improves governance in countries with a low degree of 'state capture' by vested interests, but not in high-capture countries. Despite reform, state intervention in firm decisions continues, but it varies substantially across firms. At the micro level (within a country), there is clear substitution between the degree of state intervention, state benefits to firms, and corruption payments, which is consistent with a bargaining model of politicians and firms. But at the macro level (across countries) these elements are complementary, suggesting that politicians, perhaps under pressure from captor firms, have some control over the scope of regulation and intervention.