Learning Business Ethics in Schools

Business ethics is a contemporary issue among business professionals. To enhance business ethics in the long run, educating future business professionals in colleges （i.e., college students） is one of the starting points. This paper aims to investigate students＇ perceptions on business ethics, such as their perceived importance of business ethics, knowledge of and interest in business ethics, their preferred method of introducing business ethics, and the perceived usefulness of learning business ethics in lessons. Focus groups will be used to collect feedback on these issues from students with different gender and seniority in colleges. This study will give insights into the students＇ perceptions on business ethics and suggest ways/methodology to increase the awareness of business ethics in colleges. Business professionals and educators can make reference to the findings to develop relevant materials on business ethics to their employees and students.     

New public management and organisational commitment in the public sector: testing a mediation model

This paper focuses on the attitudes of learning professionals towards New Public Management (NPM). In a survey of the UK further education sector (n = 433), NPM beliefs were found to be positively associated with both affective and normative organisational commitment. However, as expected, NPM beliefs were not found to be related to continuance organisational commitment. The results also show that although perceived organisational support mediates the relationship between NPM beliefs and affective organisational comment, it is only a partial mediator of the relationship between NPM beliefs and normative organisational commitment. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings, and potential directions for future research, are discussed.     

The research university,entrepreneurship and regional development: Research propositions and current evidence

The objective of this paper is to set a framework for examining the conditions under which a research university becomes more than a latent asset [Power, D., and A. Malmberg. 2008. The contribution of universities to innovation and economic development: In what sense a regional problem? Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 1, no. 2: 233–46.] in regional economies. The framework is comprised of four propositions used to identify drivers of change, evidence of change and evidence of impact. As an exemplar, we examine the University of Oxford's growing engagement in its local region. This paper shows that the convergence between the interests of the university and the local high-tech economy is particularly associated with broader technological trends and with the University's capacity to draw on national funding programmes designed to stimulate ‘third-stream’ activities, including entrepreneurship courses and regional networking activities.     

Leadership for Collaboration

Abstract

‘Leadership’ and ‘collaboration’ are integral to twenty-first century governance and management but, despite a growing literature, understanding about leadership for collaboration is hampered by a lack of specificity and nuance in theory and empirical research. This article responds to these limitations by working within an interpretive framework and employing Q-method to uncover different interpretations of leadership for collaboration operant among public managers in Wales. The article uses the concept of situated agency to explain why public managers offer diverse interpretations of leadership for collaboration despite working within the same governance framework, and to identify challenges to public managers in determining appropriate leadership for collaboration.     

An investigation into gambling purchases using the NBD and NBD–Dirichlet models

Past research on gambling behavior has focused largely on cognitive and affective explanations, but has not explored the influence of past gambling behavior or habit. In this study, it was hypothesized that gambling behavior followed predictable patterns based on past behavior. We found that these patterns could be described by the negative binomial distribution (NBD) and NBD–Dirichlet models at game and category levels, respectively. An empirical study using the 1999 Australia Productivity Commission survey dataset provided some support for the usefulness of these models in describing gambling consumption. The paper explores the implications for identifying problem gambling and influencing gamblers’ behavior.     

Entrepreneurship and innovation in Ghana: enterprising Africa

This study adopts a multi-level theoretical framework to examine data from 496 entrepreneurs in Ghana. Seven types of innovation activity are analysed against three categories of variables: the characteristics of the entrepreneur, the internal competencies of the firm, and firm location. Across all respondents, the incidence of incremental innovation was far greater than novel innovation. The extent of innovation was related to the education level of the entrepreneur. Firm size and involvement in exporting were positively related to innovation, but firm growth is less systematically so. Innovation was greater in firms located in conurbations compared to firms located in large and small towns. We conclude with suggestions for policy to promote entrepreneurship and innovation in Ghana.      

Global Financial Integration and Real Estate Security Returns

Have globalization and increasing economic and financial integration affected the rates of return of publicly traded real estate companies around the world? Using a set of multifactor models for annual data for 946 firms from 16 countries over the sample period, 1995–2002, we estimate the impact of a country's economic openness on returns of publicly traded real estate firms, controlling for the effects of global capital markets, domestic macroeconomic conditions and firm‐specific variables. We find that a country's real estate security excess (risk‐adjusted) returns are negatively related to its openness. The results are robust across different multifactor model specifications and are a testament to increasing global financial integration and its interplay with the real estate sector.     

Bidding asymmetries in multi-unit auctions: Implications of bid function equilibria in the British spot market for electricity

This paper introduces and tests Bid Function Equilibria (BFE) in the British spot market for electricity. BFE extend von der Fehr and Harbord's (1993) multi-unit auction model of wholesale electricity markets by allowing firms to have heterogeneous costs for different generating units. Pure-strategy equilibria in BFE predict asymmetric bidding by producers: a single firm (the “price-setter") bids strategically while other firms (“non-price-setters") bid their costs. We test for asymmetries in firms' bid functions in the British spot market between 1993 and 1995 and find strong empirical support for the theory. We conclude that BFE have important implications for the design and governance of electricity markets.     

Signaling,Financial Slack and Corporate Acquisitions

This paper shows that under certain conditions a firm's decision concerning the optimal medium of exchange to use in acquiring another firm is related to the decision of which source of capital should be used to finance long-term projects. An example of this type of interaction occurs when the firm's only source of financing a positive net present value project is an equity issue. In a Myers and Majluf (1984) world of asymmetric information the value maximizing strategy for the firm is to forego the public equity offering and instead use a stock offer to acquire a firm possessing financial slack. The process is modeled using an extension of the Myers and Majluf (1984) model and demonstrates how the acquisition alternative allows managers to separate the signals regarding the investment and financing decisions. Including net pension assets into our measure of financial slack, we provide empirical supports for the ability of the extended model to explain observed merger activity.     

Estimating the Effect of Air Quality: Spatial versus Traditional Hedonic Price Models

Empirical studies of hedonic housing prices show that the spatial maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method is preferable to the traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) hedonic method. Current computing capabilities restrict the MLE method to relatively small data sets. This paper circumvents this limitation by coupling the spatial MLE method with block bootstrapping, a form of Monte Carlo simulation that accounts for spatially dependent data. Blocks are created based on monthly and census tract information for resampling. For each month, we obtained 50 resamples of 750 observations from a data set of 15,727 residential properties to compare OLS and MLE empirical results. We find that the spatial MLE method consistently outperforms the traditional OLS method under these simulated conditions and that air quality matters irrespective of the method used.