The impact of unstructured case studies on surface learners: a study of second-year accounting students

The empirical study described here uses the R-SPQ-2F questionnaire [Biggs, J., Kember, D., & Leung, D. Y. (2001). The revised two-factor study process questionnaire: R-SPQ-2F. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(1), 133–149] to test deep and surface approaches to learning in a university intermediate-level accounting class that uses business cases in group presentations. Statistical testing of results for learning style before and after group presentations indicates an increase in surface learning over time, with no detectable change in deep learning style. The type of business case used has no effect, in this setting. Course grades, however, are significantly less for students who did not participate in the group presentation activity at all. The results support the claim that students focus on what is required; they may adopt a strategic approach to learning. In a similar way, accounting academics and workload models may be reacting to incentives that discourage reflective and formative feedback. If deeper approaches to learning are desirable, assessments need to reward this behaviour.     

Persistent Unemployment and Policy Uncertainty: Numerical Evidence from a New Approach

In the recovery from the United States’ 2009 recession, unemployment has proven resistant to both aggressive fiscal policy and expansionary monetary policy. A possible explanation is the policy cost uncertainty hypothesis. This holds that managers of private firms have been rationally avoiding hiring workers in the years after 2010 because of the risk of higher future costs imposed by government policies. However, such a hypothesis cannot be directly tested in standard models of firm behavior. Thus, to formally test the policy cost uncertainty hypothesis, we use a novel “value functional” or “recursive” model of firm behavior, in which managers maximize the value of the business rather than its profits. Using this approach, we demonstrate that policy cost uncertainty affects the hiring decisions of firms, that the response to policy uncertainty is higher in some industries than others, and that the scale of the firm also affects its sensitivity to policy risk. This approach has potentially broad application within business economics, particularly in evaluating investment and hiring decisions; real options; and other aspects of uncertainty, fixed costs, and managerial flexibility.     

Donning Coase‐coloured glasses: a property rights view of natural resource economics*

Economic analysis of natural resource and environmental issues inappropriately places too much emphasis on Pigouvian externalities and too little on Coasean property rights and transaction costs. The crucial questions are who has what property rights and what are the transaction costs associated with these property rights. Asserting an externality implicitly assumes a set of property rights and hence a distribution of the social costs, but it is precisely a lack of property rights that allows decision makers to ignore social costs. By viewing natural resource and environmental problems through a Coasean lens, we better focus our attention on how property rights evolve, how they influence transaction costs, and how those transaction costs affect the potential for bargaining to minimise social costs.     

Who gains from Australian generic wine promotion and R&D?

The present paper estimates the distributions of aggregate returns from different types of research and promotion investments by the Australian grape and wine industry among grapegrowers, winemakers, domestic and foreign consumers, and the tax office. The results show that most of the gains from cost-reducing R&D in grape and wine production go to producers and that producers get a far larger share of the benefit from export promotion than that from domestic promotion. Foreign consumers of Australian wine also enjoy a significant share of the benefits from Australian R&D. Sensitivity analysis shows that the key results hold for a wide range of parameter values.     

Defining quality of nursing work life

As the largest single employee component of hospitals, nurses are critical to the functioning of the organization, and improving employee productivity continues to be a common theme in the health care literature. However, any increased productivity will be transitory if achieved at the expense of the quality of nurses' work life (QNWL), since improvement in the QNWL is prerequisite to improved productivity. The conceptual components of the concept of QNWL that differentiate QNWL from the concept job satisfaction are explored.     

Measuring the Restrictiveness of Trade Policy

This article provides an introduction to the trade restrictivenessindex (TRI), which equals the uniform tariff that is welfareequivalent to a given pattern of trade protection. Unlike standardmeasures of trade restrictiveness, the TRI has a solid theoreticalbasis, can incorporate both tariffs and quantitative restrictions,and can be adapted to construct the trade policy equivalentof domestic distortions. The article compares a number of applicationsand describes procedures for operationalizing the TRI on a personalcomputer. The authors conclude that the TRI has considerablepotential in empirical work.     

The selling and seasoning of investment company offerings

This article investigates the initial and subsequent pricing of Closed-End Investment Company (CEIC) shares offered to the public from 1986 through 1987. Unlike other equities, these showed no abnormal price appreciation at the offering; however, the new CEICs experience significant price declines in the 20 weeks following the offering. The evaporation of the initial premium begins approximately four weeks after the offering date, a lag that coincides with the period of time during which underwriters may cease supporting share prices in the secondary market.The authors thank John D. Jackson, Sam Peltzman, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.