REACTIONS TO REGULATION OF ACCOUNTING FOR GOODWILL

Regulations designed to achieve “uniformity in practice” in Australian firms' reporting of goodwill were first adopted in 1985 with the introduction of AAS18. Because of the requirement to amortise purchased goodwill, a number of firms either did not comply or took evasive actions to mitigate the effects of the standard. This paper documents and explains the pre-regulation cross-sectional variation in accounting practices. Reactions to the set of regulations introduced between 1985 and 1989 are then described and explained through a longitudinal study of accounting policy choice. We develop hypotheses which explain why the goodwill accounting rules reversed relations between the accounting methods adopted by firms and both the earnings effect of compliance and the market value of the firm's goodwill. The results are confirmatory.     

Timestyles: Role factor influences on the convergence and divergence of couples' complementary and substitute activity patterns

Using a role theory framework, this research focuses on convergence and divergence in complementary and substitute activities for husbands and wives. Hypotheses on the effects of children and wife's employment were assessed for a national sample of married men reporting on their and their wives' activities for a typical weekday and Saturday. Role factors are shown to have a significant impact on timestyles and the specific activities emerging as substitutes and complements.     

Capitalizing on capabilities

By making the most of organizational capabilities--employees' collective skills and fields of expertise--you can dramatically improve your company's market value. Although there is no magic list of proficiencies that every organization needs in order to succeed, the authors identify 11 intangible assets that well-managed companies tend to have: talent, speed, shared mind-set and coherent brand identity, accountability, collaboration, learning, leadership, customer connectivity, strategic unity, innovation, and efficiency. Such companies typically excel in only three of these capabilities while maintaining industry parity in the other areas. Organizations that fall below the norm in any of the 11 are likely candidates for dysfunction and competitive disadvantage. So you can determine how your company fares in these categories (or others, if the generic list doesn't suit your needs), the authors explain how to conduct a "capabilities audit," describing in particular the experiences and findings of two companies that recently performed such audits. In addition to highlighting which intangible assets are most important given the organization's history and strategy, this exercise will gauge how well your company delivers on its capabilities and will guide you in developing an action plan for improvement. A capabilities audit can work for an entire organization, a business unit, or a region--indeed, for any part of a company that has a strategy to generate financial or customer-related results. It enables executives to assess overall company strengths and weaknesses, senior leaders to define strategy, midlevel managers to execute strategy, and frontline leaders to achieve tactical results. In short, it helps turn intangible assets into concrete strengths.     

SUBJECTIVE DISTRIBUTIONS AS ECONOMETRIC RESPONSE DATA

Analysis of actual observations of response processes is a routine procedure in applied econometrics but methods of dealing with purely subjective probability distributions as response 'data' have seemingly not hitherto been worked out. The models and methods developed here go some way to filling this void. They are illustrated by using information from a cross-sectional study of sixty Nepalese small-scale farmers. Means and variances of subjective probability distributions for rice paddy yields under different technologies are related to controlled inputs, such as fertiliser levels, and to relevant socio-economic aspects of farmers themselves, such as technological knowledge and farm size.     

Procrastination, Obedince, and Public Policy: The Irrelevance of Salience

A bstract . Modern economics assumes that individuals are rational maximizers, who, in the presence of costly information , sometimes make mistakes. Recently, George Akerlof has challenged this presumption. He proposes that people sometimes fail to maximize their long-run utility , due to the phenomenon of "salience." This refers to the alleged systematic distortion in individual perception where events closer to a person (in time and in space) seem bigger and more important than they really are. The salience phenomenon is claimed to interfere with the process of rational maximization , rendering some individual choices, in effect, irrational. This paper subjects Akerlof's suggestion to critical scrutiny. It is argued that the examples Akerlof offers of the effect of salience are not the anomalies he claims but instead represent behaviors which can be readily explained within the framework of the standard economic model. All of his major examples are considered in this light and it is suggested that the work of Israel Kirzner holds more promise for improving the analytical power of the standard economic model than does the idea of salience.     

Policy and Management Work within International Agricultural Research

The diversity of players in the field of agricultural (and, more generally, rural) policy and management research is sketched in a global overview of relevant research resources, and the small but important part played by the CGIAR Centres in this is explored, particularly where it has maximum value in terms of international public goods, and for strategic links to other parts of the CGIAR portfolio. The patchy and often slender (and perhaps diminishing in specific cases) capacity of national agricultural policy research and analysis units in the less-developed world to deliver the needed research products is examined.     

Asymmetric information,dividends, and external financing

We analyze a signaling game where firms' dividend announcements convey private information but the possible need to externally finance the dividend creates an incentive conflict between inside and outside investors. Consequently, the attempt to address an adverse selection problem creates (or exacerbates) moral hazard. The interaction of these two imperfect information problems results in equilibria that may be separating or pooling. Additionally, the equilibrium may be only partially separating, i.e., firms are incompletely identified.