Does congruence between espoused and enacted organizational values predict affective commitment in Australian organizations?

This article explores the motives of individuals to accept international assignments. It uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to further our understanding of how important a variety of items are in the decision to work abroad. Employing a mutual dependency perspective it contrasts individual motives and organizational perspectives. Organizations significantly underestimate the importance of career, work/life balance and development considerations and overestimate the financial imperative and some family motives. The analysis showed that for individuals some of these factors significantly relate to outcome variables in terms of the perceived career capital accrued from assignments. The study presents a more nuanced picture of influence factors on the decision to go and advocates the use of context-sensitive, multiple perspectives. Practical implications for multinational organizations are discussed.     

Asset pricing dynamics

This paper is concerned with the issue of dynamics in financial data and asset pricing models such as the CAPM. A literature review in this area is undertaken and highlights the need for a modern time series econometric approach in asset pricing. Such an approach is discussed and deals with problems related to structural breaks and microstructures, dynamics in the mean and variance process, and non-stationary regressions and cointegration. An empirical application using UK stock market data demonstrates the merit of the proposed methodology in correcting market model regressions.     

Organizing a precarious black box: An actor‐network account of the Atlantic Schools of Business, 1980–2006

There is a growing use of actor‐network theory (ANT) throughout management and organization studies. While earlier ANT research used ethnography to “follow the actors” in the production of organization/knowledge, more recent studies use archival sources to examine developments over time. We extend the latter approach using qualitative social network analysis (SNA) and apply this to a case study of the Atlantic Schools of Business (ASB). Our contribution is two‐fold: first, through an examination of actors in the ASB networking processes over 26 years, we demonstrate how the seemingly stable surface of an organization can hide the precariousness of organizing; second, we reveal the potential fusion of ANT with SNA as a method for dealing with large qualitative datasets over long periods of time. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Financial profiles and the disclosure of expenditures for socially responsible purposes

Recently the relationship between “socially responsible” activities and the financial performance of corporations has received attention in the business literature. Most studies have focused on the market reaction of shareholders to the disclosure of both monetary and nonmonetary corporate contributions relating to pollution control, employee welfare, affirmative action, and other activities deemed to be in the public interest. Results of this research have been mixed, with some authors finding favorable market response to socially responsible actions, and others finding no difference between the market performance of more and less responsible firms. The purpose of this paper is to examine financial performance and socially responsible activities from a different perspective. Specifically, it examines the relationship between the disclosure of monetary expenditures for various social initiatives and composite financial accounting profiles of disclosing and nondisclosing firms. Using two-group discriminant analysis, the authors conclude that management tends to disclose monetary expenditures for these generally nonproductive purposes at times when the financial statements of the firm otherwise look favorable to shareholders. Such disclosure in a sample of Fortune 500 firms in 1976 and 1977 was clearly not unrelated to financial performance, and neither did it appear to occur in order to explain relatively poor financial statements.     

International Evidence on the Predictability of Stock Returns

This article examines the predictability of stock returns using international stock market data from eighteen countries. The study finds that the ability of dividend yields to predict stock returns increases as the return horizon lengthens from one month to forty-eight months. These results add to earlier ones, based on U.S. data only, showing that predictability grows with the return horizon. The study also explores why the observed pattern of predictability arises and provides evidence supporting the reasons suggested by Fama and French.     

Statistical analysis of inequality with decompositions: the Canadian experience

This study carries out a decomposition of Theil-entropy measures into a between-group component, based on factors such as education, age, gender, and marital status, and a component representing inequality within each group. We apply a bootstrapping technique to measures of inequality to enable statistical inference. Trends in household income inequality in Canada are investigated using data from 1991 to 1997 drawn from Survey of Consumer Finance. We find an evident trend toward increasing inequality of household incomes between the years 1991–1997, during which the economy was recovering from a steep recession. Although most of the increase in measured inequality is attributed to the `within-group' component, we find the change in `between-group' inequality to be significant for education, age, and marital status. First version received: May 2001/Final version received: September 2001     

The Influence of Financial Factors on Corporate Investment

Abstract
Recent theoretical developments have shown that cash flows and the structure of a firm's balance sheet may have an important influence on investment. Establishing a link between cash flows, leverage and investment provides insights into the way that monetary policy and cyclical factors more generally influence the corporate sector. If cash flows are an important determinant of investment then changes in monetary policy (by changing interest rates) will influence investment through a cash flow effect as well as through altering the rate at which the returns to investment are discounted. If this is the case, the higher leverage of the corporate sector implies, other things being equal, that monetary policy may have a larger impact on investment than in the past .
In this article we use panel-data analysis to examine the impact of financial factors on investment decisions of firms in the Australian corporate sector. We find strong support for the influence of financial factors on investment decisions. Leverage, internally generated cash flows, and the stock of cash and liquid financial assets are all important influences on investment behaviour, particularly for smaller firms, highly leveraged firms, and firms with high retention ratios .     

Editorial

This paper reports the results of 16 market experiments designed to produce measures of the effects of nonresidential land uses on the prices of nearby dwellings. Each experiment consists of a sample of home sales in a homogeneous neighborhood located near a single nonresidential land use, e.g., industry, commercial, high-density dwellings, and highways. The data consist of price, physical characteristics of the dwelling, distance from the nonresidential use, and the date of sale for each transaction. Hedonic price indices are estimated and the significance of the distance effects assessed. No systematic relationship between nonresidential land use per se and housing prices is found.