Environmental Impact Assessments from a Business Perspective: Extending Knowledge and Guiding Business Practice

Economic growth and development remain embedded in the very core of our current international economic system and the so called “material economy”. However, depleting natural resources and environmental degradation, which now threaten the well-being of future generations, has challenged this premise, and placed sustainable development as a necessary objective of business activity and expansion. Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) have emerged as a key tool for governments, businesses, and NGOs to manage the negative impact of their activities on the environment. Businesses in particular play a key role in averting or mitigating current environmental trends given that the economic growth they have stimulated has serious consequences for both the environment and social well-being. However, research on the use of EIAs has been conducted mostly from a governmental perspective producing a clear gap between research development and business (corporate) practice. To bridge this gap in knowledge, we develop a new EIA process tailored to real world business constraints and provide a range of propositions which we hope will stimulate future research efforts toward understanding and guiding how businesses integrate environmental issues into their decision-making processes.     

Displaying expected values in risk elicitation tasks: the effect of information in experimental risk research

We investigate the influence of providing expected lottery results to experiment participants in two common risk attitude elicitation tasks. In a between-subject design, either the Holt and Laury task or the Eckel and Grossman task is carried out by a sample of 208 students. We find no significant effect of shown expected values on the risk attitude measured by the tasks. This result even holds true if we divide the experiment participants into specific sub-groups, i.e. female and male, or lower numeracy and higher numeracy participants. Furthermore, comprehension and processing time are not significantly influenced by presented expected values. Therefore, we conclude that providing information on expected values does not influence decision-making in tasks involving risk. This result indicates the robustness of elicited risk attitudes to variation in common experimental methods, and demonstrates that more information could be provided without creating bias in the results.     

Enhancing student engagement in large management accounting lectures

The education literature suggests a student-focused teaching strategy to improve students’ engagement in a lecture. However, in traditional accounting lectures students take the role of passive and anonymous recipients of knowledge. This paper reports on two cycles of an action research project, developing and refining a blended learning model, with the purpose of enhancing students’ engagement in the lectures of a large management accounting course. Results of our study find that engagement was enhanced with the implementation of this model. This study contributes to the accounting education literature through reporting evidence from action research and the effective implementation of a blended learning model that accounting educators can use.     

Die Entwicklung sozialer Ungleichheit und ihre politischen Implikationen in den USA

Wirtschaftsdienst - Donald Trump won in 2016 because of the building despair that began under Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Economic dislocations played a crucial role in convincing voters in...     

You Don't Have to be German to be a "Hidden Champion"

The "hidden champions" among Germany's medium-sized companies are becoming a by-word for students of management. But do hidden champions exist outside Germany? What management processes distinguish them from other companies? And are there lessons from their success for other companies? This article, extracted from the author's forthcoming book, summarises his answers to these questions.     

Accounting for Investments in Human Capital: A Review

This paper provides an overview of the human capital literature, focusing on the firm's incentives and disincentives to invest in human capital and subsequently to account for the investments. The evidence suggests human capital investment decisions are intrinsically linked to the success of a business and ultimately to the probability of survival. However, disclosure is largely a voluntary choice by managers as there are few formal disclosure requirements. The conclusion from the evidence shows that the benefits to stakeholders of disclosing information relating to human capital investment are likely to outweigh the costs and suggests a wide range of topics for future research.