Climate Change Scenario Analysis for Public Market Investors

Academic studies suggest that market participants are demanding higher risk premiums for carbon‐intensive assets, but that natural disasters have yet to be efficiently priced into the market. And as a consequence, asset owners and investors are less than fully informed about the evidence of climate change uncovered by the scientific community. The author assesses the exposure to climate risk of Rockefeller Capital's ‘Ocean Strategy,” an actively managed global equity portfolio, by using three publicaly available climate change scenario analysis tools: (1) Paris Agreement Capital Transition Assessment (PACTA); The Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), and (3) Carbon Tracker's 2 Degrees of Separation.     

Mass incarceration and consumer financial harm: Critique of rent-seeking by the carceral state

Mass incarceration is an approach to managing public safety that emphasizes detention over other means. It is also neoliberalism's quintessential political and economic project because it mobilizes a prison industrial complex to generate revenue. We highlight rent-seeking, the pursuit of extra-budgetary revenues by carceral agencies, because it inflicts financial harm on incarcerated consumers and their supporters. Carceral agencies leverage government's authority to set the conditions of detention. However, when they also leverage government's market-making authority to seek rents from incarcerated persons we characterize that as a government failure. To understand it, we depart from a focus on corruption by specific actors to highlight features of institutions that enable unethical behavior. We join activists and elected officials who call for an end to mass incarceration, but we also highlight more immediate reforms that can help restrain rent-seeking and enable greater public scrutiny of the carceral state.     

Can a workplace have an attitude problem? Workplace effects on employee attitudes and organizational performance

Using the employee opinion survey responses from several thousand employees working in 193 branches of a major U.S. bank, we consider whether there is a distinctive workplace component to employee attitudes despite the common set of corporate human resource management practices that cover all the branches. Several different empirical tests consistently point to the existence of a systematic branch-specific component to employee attitudes. “Branch effects” can also explain why a significant positive cross-sectional correlation between branch-level employee attitudes and branch sales performance is not observed in longitudinal fixed-effects sales models. The results of our empirical tests concerning the determinants of employee attitudes and the determinants of branch sales are consistent with an interpretation that workplace-specific factors lead to better outcomes for both employees and the bank, and that these factors are more likely to be some aspect of the branches' internal operations rather than some characteristic of the external market of the branch.     

Positioning of emotional intelligence skills within the overall skillset of practice-based accountants: employer and graduate requirements

This paper presents evidence of employer and graduate attitudes on the skill set requirements for professional accountants, and whether university accounting programs develop these skills, and in particular emotional intelligence (EI) skills. We use priority indices and strategic mapping to evaluate the positioning of 31 skills. This analysis suggests that university accounting programs could consider increasing the emphasis placed on particular EI and non-emotional intelligence (non-EI) skills while other skills could be de-emphasised. While non-EI skills were ranked higher than EI skills, some non-EI skills are considered well developed in graduates and others are viewed as important but not well developed. While employers expect correspondence between the skills seen as important in the workplace and their expected development in university, there was also reverse correspondence in that employers do not expect universities to develop skills considered less important in the workplace.     

An investigation of ethical position and budgeting systems: Egyptian managers in US and Egyptian firms

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possible impact of ethical position and national culture on budgetary systems. In particular, the present study examines the budgeting behaviors of Egyptian managers who work for Egyptian firms and Egyptian managers who work for US firms in Egypt. Based on a survey that was administered to 395 participants, our results suggest higher (lower) levels of budgetary participation for Egyptian managers working in US (Egyptian) firms, higher (lower) levels of incentive for Egyptian managers to create slack in US (Egyptian) firms, and more (less) frequent slack-creation behavior among Egyptian managers employed by US (Egyptian) firms. Significant differences were found in the ethical orientations of Egyptian individuals employed by US firms compared with those employed by Egyptian companies. Our results also suggest that ethical orientation helps mitigate slack-creation behavior.     

Research Note: Identifying the Invisible Colleges of the British Journal of Industrial Relations: A Bibliometric and Social Network Approach

The academic field of industrial relations has gone through much change in the last 20 years. On account of the rapid decline in union membership in the USA and the UK, industrial relations, which historically has focused on the employment relationship, has been searching for a new intellectual base. By conducting a bibliometric analysis of the journal British Journal of Industrial Relations (BJIR), we uncover the intellectual bases for that publication outlet for two time periods, 1986–1995 and 1996–2005. From the late 1980s to the mid‐1990s, BJIR's articles relied on the economics literature, while in the later period, it moved to the human resource and management journals, authors and articles. The possible explanations and implications of these findings are discussed.     

Cobranding arrangements and partner selection: a conceptual framework and managerial guidelines

Cobranding, the strategy of marketing brands in combination, has received increasing attention from academics and practitioners alike. This study examines two cobranding decisions facing a firm: the cobranding structure and the selection of a partner. Propositions rooted in the theories of attribution and categorization posit (a) how the levels of cobranding integration, exclusivity, and duration influence brand evaluation and consideration and (b) how consistency with the partner brand in hedonic attributes, complementarity in functional attributes, and brand breadth moderate the effect of partnership structure. Higher integration or longer duration likely has a greater impact on evaluation and consideration; an exclusive arrangement has a greater effect on evaluation but lowers consideration. For managers, these propositions are directly applicable; the outcomes of brand evaluation and consideration map onto the strategic goals of brand development and market development, respectively.