Holism versus Reductionism in Modern Social Science Research

Quality &; Quantity - Since an early stage in most of thetechnical sciences, and during the last fewdecades in many of the social sciences,reductionistic research has become a mainstream typeof...     

Transfer of training: the role of feedback in supportive social networks

The transfer of training to the workplace often fails to occur. The authors argue that feedback generated within the work environment about the application of newly learned skills in the workplace helps to close the gap between the current performance and the desired goal of full application of what is learned during training. This study takes a social network perspective and explores the role of feedback generated within the social network in fostering motivation‐to‐transfer and the transfer of training. The results show that the number of people providing feedback and the helpfulness of this feedback are positively related to the motivation for and actual transfer of training. The frequency of feedback appears to be negatively related. This study underlines the importance of feedback in turning the workplace into a learning environment fostering the transfer of training. It also suggests the value of adopting a social network perspective.     

Perceptions and outlook on intercropping coffee with banana as an opportunity for smallholder coffee farmers in Uganda

Coffee and banana are important cash and food crops in Uganda and the surrounding East African highland region. Production is dominated by smallholders that have limited arable land and often coffee and banana are intercropped. No significant research and development efforts have been undertaken over the last few decades on this coffee/banana intercropping system. Because recent studies suggest that this system could be a practice with high benefits to the farmers, we decided to study the perceptions of stakeholders along the coffee value chain starting with farmers. Perception analysis based on open-ended interviews following interview guides revealed that a major limitation for the sustainability of this system was poor soil fertility conditions. Perceptions on the benefits of intercropping differed little among coffee actors; that is, banana intercropping provides additional food and income from smallholders’ limited land and helps farmers reduce risks related to drought, pest/disease attacks and coffee price volatility. However, farmers’ desire to minimize risks does not match the objective of stakeholders higher up the coffee value chain to maximize coffee production. Furthermore, research by public institutes, both national and international, is primarily organized for single crops and not systems. We conclude that the institutional setting of the coffee sector hampers the promotion of intercropping, despite the benefits for the farmer.     

Post-Enron Implicit Audit Reporting Standards: Sifting through the Evidence

Summary The accounting scandals and the demise of Andersen have increased auditors’ ex ante business risk. As a result, stock markets revised downward the value of the external audit (Callen and Morel (2002); Chaney and Philipich (2002); Krishnamurthy et al. (2002); Asthana et al. (2003)). One commonsensical reaction on behalf of auditors should have been to apply the existing rules more carefully and, thus, issue more non-clean opinions on the financial statements they have audited. This is exactly what we see. Closer scrutiny reveals that the higher incidence of non-clean audit opinions is not due to the (substantial) changes in the audit client list or their balance sheets. This study mirrors earlier results where auditors relaxed their standards following a drop in business risk (Geiger and Raghunandan, (2001), (2002); Francis and Krishnan, (2002)).Authors are listed just by alphabetical order. We gratefully acknowledge useful comments from participants at the 2004 American Accounting Association Midyear Auditing Section conference, and outstanding suggestions from an anonymous referee for De Economist. Any remaining errors are ours.     

Hedging with Two Futures Contracts: Simplicity Pays

We propose to use two futures contracts in hedging an agricultural commodity commitment to solve either the standard delta hedge or the roll‐over issue. Most current literature on dual‐hedge strategies is based on a structured model to reduce roll‐over risk and is somehow difficult to apply for agricultural futures contracts. Instead, we propose to apply a regression based model and a naive rules of thumb for dual‐hedges which are applicable for agricultural commodities. The naive dual strategy stems from the fact that in a large sample of agricultural commodities, De Ville, Dhaene and Sercu (2008) find that GARCH‐based hedges do not perform as well as OLS‐based ones and that we can avoid estimation error with such a simple rule. Our semi‐naive hedge ratios are driven from two conditions: omitting exposure to spot price and minimising the variance of the unexpected basis effects on the portfolio values. We find that, generally, (i) rebalancing helps; (ii) the two‐contract hedging rules do better than the one‐contract counterparts, even for standard delta hedges without rolling‐over; (iii) simplicity pays: the naive rules are the best one–for corn and wheat within the two‐contract group, the semi‐naive rule systematically beats the others and GARCH performs worse than OLS for either one‐contract or two‐contract hedges and for soybeans the traditional naive rule performs nearly as well as OLS. These conclusions are based on the tests on unconditional variance ( Diebold and Mariano, 1995 ) and those on conditional risk ( Giacomini and White, 2006 ).     

Country versus sector factors in equity returns: The roles of non-unit exposures

In this paper we disentangle, analytically and empirically, the roles of the unit-exposure restriction in Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994). We show that if the purpose is to construct factors, the unit-exposure variance-analysis model can be viewed as just an algorithm that does not really assume a return-generating process; and in practice the effect of relaxing the restriction is immaterial. The restriction is more important if one wants to estimate whether, for a typical stock, the country factor generates more variance than the sector factor: exposure estimation becomes more important (i) the further the average exposures are from unity; or (ii) the higher the dispersion of the exposures. With respect to (i), the more important the corrections for sector (or geographical) structure in country (or sector) factors are, the more the average exposure falls below unity. Thus, the average exposure provides an alternative indicator of the importance of country versus sector effects. We empirically find that the average sector exposure is low (0.3) compared to the average country exposure (0.9). With respect to (ii) we correct the dispersion of exposures for estimation error in the exposures. We find that in our sample these estimation error corrections are more important for sector factors than for country factors, and that country factors are generating far more variance, in a typical stock's return, than do sector factors.     

Modelling the joint access mode and railway station choice

This study models the choices of Dutch railway users. We find a steeper negative distance effect on the utility of departure stations accessed by the non-motorized modes of walking and bicycle as compared to the motorized modes of car and public transport. Availability of parking places and bicycle standing areas have a positive effect on the choice of departure railway stations accessed by car and bicycle, respectively. Public transport frequency has a positive whereas travel time has a negative effect on the choice of departure stations accessed by public transport. The derived rail service quality index (RSQI), which provides a measure of rail accessibility to all other stations, has a significant and positive effect on the choice of departure stations accessed by all modes. The outcome of this paper can be used to develop a comprehensive railway accessibility indicator for neighbourhoods, for hedonic pricing studies.