Gentlewomanly capitalism? Spinsters,widows, and wealth holding in England and Wales,c. 1800–1860

This article examines the demographic and geographical importance of wealthy middle-class women. It argues that in certain towns and cities, notably London, such women were of sufficient importance to merit attention in their own right. Drawing upon a sample of wills, it describes the types of wealth owned by these women. By examining women's investment in government securities, it argues that women's wealth was of crucial importance to the British state. Its findings challenge conventional understandings of the relationships between gender ideology, wealth holding, and economic development.     

An analysis of the global position of U.S. manufacturing

This article provides an overview of the changing export and import flows of U.S. manufactured goods in the global economy, offers some thoughts on the repercussions of these changes, and outlines possible outcomes. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Earnings management and abnormal returns: Evidence from the 1970–1972 Price Control Regulations

We examine the association between abnormal returns and earnings management in the context of price control regulations to test the construct validity of the earnings management model. Abnormal returns are used as a market–based measure, and discretionary accruals are employed to measure earnings management. Our results support the hypotheses that (1) price control regulations affect firms' security prices negatively, (2) firms make income–decreasing discretionary accruals to increase the likelihood of price increase approval, and (3) firms that are affected most negatively by the regulations manage earnings more aggressively. We conclude that the earnings management model we use in this study is capable of predicting opportunistic discretionary accruals.     

Testing Rival Theories of Budgetary Decision–making in the US States

This article tests three common budgetary decision–making theories in the US states. Pooled time series cross–section analysis is used from 1960 to 1996 to test the garbage can theory and incrementalism, and from 1989 to 1996 to test various theories of rational budgeting. The results demonstrate that there was some support for all three theories in terms of their impact on reducing state budget outputs. Rational budgeting reduces expenditures in aggregate, incrementalism has relatively low explanatory power below the aggregates, and garbage can budgeting is more prevalent in functional areas than for government as a whole. These findings imply that the future research agenda on budgetary decision–making theories should focus more on a system–wide approach, which takes into account many of the characteristics of all three rival models of decision–making, rather than exclusively focusing on each one singly.     

Density estimation in the uniform deconvolution model

We consider the problem of estimating a probability density function based on data that are corrupted by noise from a uniform distribution. The (nonparametric) maximum likelihood estimator for the corresponding distribution function is well defined. For the density function this is not the case. We study two nonparametric estimators for this density. The first is a type of kernel density estimate based on the empirical distribution function of the observable data. The second is a kernel density estimate based on the MLE of the distribution function of the unobservable (uncorrupted) data.     

Why Press Coverage of a Client Influences the Audit Opinion

In this study I use an experiment to examine why auditors are more likely to issue going–concern opinions when the client has been the subject of negative press coverage prior to the date of the audit opinion. I find no evidence that negative press coverage increases auditors' perceptions of legal liability, as was suggested in the prior literature. I do find, however, that negative press coverage increases auditors' perception of a client's bankruptcy probability and this, in turn, leads auditors to modify the audit opinion. Because the press coverage presented in this study provides no new information, the results suggest that auditors react too strongly to redundant information. This over–reaction can result in inefficient allocation of audit resources and can have deleterious affects on clients. Accordingly, policy makers, auditors and their clients might be interested in how auditors' reliance on redundant information can be reduced.     

数据管理:电子商务数据的存储问题

许多情况说明，用于组织中数据存储的消费已经成爆炸状态。产生这种情况的主要因素是电子邮件和电子商务对数据的质量和数量的要求提高了，并且这种数据大部分是分散的、非结构性的，这就增加了对组织中数据管理的要求。本文是在澳大利亚进行的一次调查的基础上做出的，该调查是关于组织中如何处理数据增长和由于数据增长所带来的问题。调查的结果显示人们对该问题表现出高度的关注，同时显示出一种乐观的趋势，即技术将对未来出现的各种各样的问题提供解决方案。     

Getting the Most Out of a Mandatory Subordinated Debt Requirement

Recent advances in asset pricing—the reduced-form approach to pricing risky debt and derivatives—are used to quantitatively evaluate several proposals for mandatory bank issue of subordinated debt. We find that credit spreads on both fixed- and floating-rate subordinated debt provide relatively clean signals of bank risk and are not unduly influenced by nonrisk factors. Fixed-rate debt with a put is unacceptable, but making the putable debt floating resolves most problems. Our approach also helps to clarify several different notions of “bank risk.”