‘Passionate and professional’: reconciling logics in public service accounting

In order to deliver public value, the UK government sought to build relationships and connect ‘the public’ with public servants (including back-office workers), but with what effect? Drawing on interviews with public service accountants, the authors found that how these accountants conceptualized ‘the public’—as society or people—shaped whether public value was considered as a monetary or moral concept. Accountants who regarded the public as people spoke of an improper level of involvement and struggled to maintain their professionalism.     

The Value of Online Seller Reputation: Evidence from a Price Comparison Site

This paper examines the value of seller reputation for e‐retailers trading via a price comparison site (PCS). E‐markets are widely held to accommodate sellers of differing service quality, including some who behave opportunistically. The paper uses a sample of offers on up to 295 digital cameras traded on a leading PCS, over a 134‐day period to estimate reputation's price impact. User‐generated reputation measures have a significant impact in the expected direction. However, their magnitude is small compared with variables capturing economy‐wide reputation. The strength of the reputation signal increased non‐monotonically with the number of reviews on which it was based. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sampling Minority Business Owners and Their Families: The Understudied Entrepreneurial Experience*

We here review and critique prior research on minority entrepreneurship, paying particular attention to the contributions and limitations of deployed sampling techniques and research methodologies. As based on this review, we then introduce the 2003 and 2005 National Minority Business Owner Surveys—a comprehensive and primary data collection effort that used varied methodologies to secure in‐depth information about random national samples of African American, Korean American, and Mexican American populations as well as a comparison sample of nonminority business owners. We present the initial business ownership profiles developed with these recent data, in part, as a benchmark of the U.S. entrepreneurial experience, and compare the profiles with those presented in prior research. These profiles document similarities and differences across the four groups and provide an empirical foundation for understanding the origin of those similarities and differences. No longer can we ignore the in‐depth study of minority businesses and their owning families nor can we simply assume that all businesses are the same, regardless of minority status or ethnicity.     

Smooth and Sticky Adjustment: A Comparative Analysis of the US and UK

This paper adopts the methodology of the microeconometric labor literature to analyze a common assertion from trade economists that reallocation within sectors is less costly than between sectors. Findings are compared across two countries (the UK and US) which have experienced very different recent aggregate unemployment experiences. Workers previously employed in "declining" sectors are more mobile than those employed in 'expanding' sectors in both countries, and individuals are more likely to switch sector the longer they are unemployed. A plausible explanation for this is that individuals initially attempt to find jobs that complement their general and specific skills in order to accrue the associated rewards, and move sector only as this prospect diminishes. This would seem to accord with the 'smooth adjustment hypothesis' which proposes that intraindustry adjustments are less costly than interindustry ones.     

Estimating stochastic volatility: the rough side to equity returns

Decisions in Economics and Finance - This paper evaluates the forecasting performance of a Brownian semi-stationary (BSS) process in modelling the volatility of 21 equity indices. We implement a...     

'Somewhere Over the Rainbow': The Post-Soviet Transition,the Market and the Mythical Process of Convergence

At the core of thinking about the post-communist transition has been the goal of convergence with the advanced West. This article accepts the legitimacy of this goal but argues that the prospects for its achievement are not good. Neo-classical theorists have misled and continue to mislead policy makers about the ease with which the goal can be achieved and the necessary conditions. The global pattern of growth and development suggests that 'convergence' is not a general characteristic of the world economy. A realistic appraisal of the potential in the transition bloc has therefore to address both regional problems and the overall pattern of global inequality.     

Measuring efficiency with a linear economic model

This paper modifies and interprets Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) using a linear economic model. This approach is similar to the cone input/output and assurance region approaches to DEA, but it is implemented so that the multipliers are measured in the same units across all linear optimization problems. This approach allows one to interpret alternatives as profit maximizing organizations and the DEA multipliers as prices that are comparable across the alternatives. This is a useful extension of the assurance region concept, but more important, is that our approach enhances communication with decision-makers. The improved communication is illustrated by applying the model to the siting of a long-term health care facility. This application is interesting because the multiplier bounds make practical sense, and because the problem has dimensions that sometimes lead to interpretation problems with the traditional DEA model. For example, the site characteristics do not result from coordinated decisions, some sites exhibit zero values for some variables, and the problem has many variables compared with the number of potential sites. Problems with these dimensions have, at times, been deemed unsuitable for DEA, but they are handled without problem by the linear economic model.