Intercultural Discourse Ethics: Testing Trompenaars' and Hampden-Turner's Conclusions about Americans and the French

Are culture driven ethical conflicts apparent in the discourse of the protagonists? A multi-year, multi-cultural study of managers by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner resulted in two conclusions relevant to business ethics. The first is that intercultural business conflicts can often be traced to a finite set of cultural differences. The second is that enough similarities exist between cultures to provide the grounds for conflict resolution. The research reported here gives credence to their study when applied to an ethical conflict viewed from French and American perspectives.     

Depositary Receipts, Country Funds, and the Peso Crash: The Intraday Evidence

We study the intraday impact of exchange rate news on emerging market American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and closed-end country funds during the 1994 Mexican peso crisis. Peso exchange-rate changes affect prices and trading volumes of Latin American equities, and some closed-end fund behavior is consistent with "noise trader" theories of small investors. However, there is no evidence that peso depreciation triggers a significant sell-off of non-Mexican securities or that other non-Mexican trading patterns change at times of high peso news flow. Thus, the "Tequila Effect" is largely confined to price changes.     

Consumer Bankruptcy in the United States: A Study of Alleged Abuse and of Local Legal Culture

This paper describes certain central aspects of the operation of the consumer bankruptcy system in the United States. It combines government data with the investigators' empirical data from two large studies done over a decade to explore two types of questions. The first area of investigation relates specifically to bankruptcy policy. The object is to identify the categories of persons principally served by the consumer bankruptcy system and to determine if suggestions of widespread abuse of that system by debtors are well-founded. The paper reports that the system is used primarily by the middle-class. It also reports that there is no evidence of widespread abuse. The second area of investigation is explanation of differences in the operation of the system in different regions of the country, differences that have persisted over twenty years despite major changes in legal rules and economic conditions. The paper argues that these differences are not explicable in terms of formal legal rules or a simple economic model and that a better explanation of the data is that the differences are the product of a "local legal culture" in each region.     

The proposed elimination of full cost accounting in the extractive petroleum industry: An empirical assessment of the market consequences

On July 15, 1977, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued an Exposure Draft of Statement 19 in which a proposal was set forth to establish the uniform usage of successful efforts accounting and to eliminate full cost accounting in the extractive petroleum industry. This study addresses the question of whether the proposed elimination of full cost accounting had an adverse effect on the security returns of full cost versus successful efforts firms. The evidence presented in this study suggests that the proposal to eliminate full cost accounting was associated with a significant negative difference in risk-adjusted rates between full cost firms and successful efforts firms whose financial reports remained unaffected by the proposed change. This observed difference was found to be sustained over an eight month period including confirming events and disclosures associated with the initial proposal. We do not attribute this difference to market inefficiencies but, rather, to the anticipated consequences which this mandated accounting change is likely to have on managerial behavior and to increased costs that will have to be borne by the affected companies.