RCTs: not the answer to the nursing shortage

An economic analysis was made of the proposal to create registered care technologists (RCTs) as an alternative to nurse market disequilibrium. RCTs may be a short-term solution to some, but more effective options may make use of existing resources.     

How the Client Effect Moderates Price Competition

Why is unregulated competition supposed to drive price down to ruinous levels in some high fixed-cost-low marginal-cost industries (e.g., railroads) but not in others (e.g., hotels)? We argue that price competition is moderated in high fixed-cost-low marginal-cost industries when the value one consumer realizes from the service is affected by the characterics of other consumers. We develop a simple model of this client effect using the example of the demand for hotels and then generalize the implications of our model to other industries.     

The Integrity Factor-Critical to Accounting Education

Integrity must be the organizing principle for accounting education and accounting practice. Without integrity, ethical frameworks can be misused as manipulative devices to support particular interests. The accounting profession has frequently addressed integrity. The professional interpretation, however, has been a narrow rules-oriented approach focusing on identifying fraudulent financial reporting and on traditional views on the nature and scope of the audit report. This paper links integrity to corporate responsibility and to the individual moral responsibility to take the moral point of view.     

An Application of the Boostrap Method to the Simultaneous Equations Model of the Demand and Supply of Audit Services*

This paper extends the application of the bootstrap method in accounting research to a simultaneous equations model of the demand and supply of audit services with mixed qualitative and continuous dependent variables. A moderately sized sample of 118 quality control reviews (Copley, Doucet, and Gaver 1994) is used to demonstrate the bootstrap method and compare results to estimates of standard errors obtained from Amemiya's 1978 asymptotic generalized least squares (GLS) procedure. We find that the GLS t-statistics are inflated by as much as 55 percent and the corresponding p-values are likewise overstated when compared to the bootstrap results. The problem is more acute with the qualitative dependent variable for audit quality, which is often the key variable of interest.