How resilient is the German banking system to macroeconomic shocks?

Macroeconomic stress testing studies often rely on rather short sample periods due to the limited availability of banking data. They may fail to appropriately account for the cyclicality in the interaction between the banking system and macroeconomic developments. In this paper, we use a newly constructed data set on German banks’ income and loss statements over the past 39 years to model the interaction between the banking sector and the macroeconomy. Our VAR analysis indicates that the level of stress in the banking sector is strongly affected by monetary policy shocks. The results rationalize the active behavior of central banks observed during periods of financial market crises.     

The effect of retaliation costs on employee whistleblowing

We use large increases in unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to study the effects of expected retaliation costs on employee whistleblowing. Increases in UI benefits reduce the costs that arise from a job loss, one of the costliest forms of retaliation. We find that increases in UI benefits increase the number of facility-level employee workplace safety complaints filed with the regulator. Furthermore, UI benefit increases also result in more violations and more penalties. The effects are concentrated in firms where retaliation is more likely as measured by weaker employee relations, internal controls, and monitoring. Our findings show the importance of reducing retaliation costs to tap into employees’ knowledge of misconduct.     

Structuration theory and mediating concepts: Pitfalls and implications for management accounting research

Giddens’ way of conceptualizing how structures work as both the medium for and outcome of human action – duality of structure – has been emphasized as a valuable point of departure when studying management accounting in its social context. However, we argue that in the literature there are different ways of using mediating concepts between social structure and action, whereby management accounting systems are conceptualized as both the medium for action, and human action as such. Using the often-cited article by Burns and Scapens [Burns J, Scapens RW. Conceptualizing management accounting change: an institutional framework. Management Accounting Research 2000;11(1):3–25] as an illustrative example, we discuss theoretical and methodological consequences of these different ways of conceptualizing management accounting. A main conclusion is that when management accounting is defined through concurrently referring to both ‘virtual’ structures that generate action and the situated doings of individuals, structure and action risk becoming conflated and there is a risk of drawing erroneous conclusions about structural change or stability. The paper closes with some methodological suggestions as to how these problems can be avoided.     

The medium is the message: Comparing paper-based and web-based course evaluation modalities

An increasing number of universities have moved student evaluation of faculty and courses out of the classroom, where it had resided for many years, and onto the web. The increased efficiency of the web-based administrative modality of these instruments seems self-apparent. However, whether the measures obtained using the new modality are the same as the old modality is unclear. This paper compares the results of questionnaires administered on the web with those collected from the same students while they were in class. Data from 181 course offerings over seven terms at one university were utilized. Significantly lower evaluation scores for both the instructor and the course are produced when a web-based modality is used. In general, these results did not vary for courses at different levels of matriculation or at different levels of student participation. However, the magnitude of modality differences varied between highly rated and poorly rated courses. Implications for faculty evaluation are offered.     

Can targeted food taxes and subsidies improve the diet? Distributional effects among income groups

This paper analyses distributional effects of revenue-neutral tax reforms aimed at improving dietary quality and encouraging healthier grain consumption. Using data on household grain purchases, we analyse both the impact on dietary quality and the tax incidence among income groups of VAT reforms and excise duty reforms. The VAT reforms include subsidies of healthy products (products labelled with the Swedish National Food Administration’s healthy symbol) funded by increased VAT on ‘less healthy’ products. The excise duty reforms contain a subsidy of fibre content, funded by excise duties on either added sugar or saturated fat. Our results suggest that the VAT reforms have a similar impact on dietary quality across all income groups, with increases in fibre intake, but also unwanted increases in the intake of nutrients frequently overconsumed: fat, salt and sugar. The impact on dietary quality of the VAT reforms is therefore difficult to evaluate. With the exception of the lowest income group, the excise duty reforms seem to have a positive health effect across all other income groups, with increases in the intake of fibre and reductions in the intake of saturated fat, sugar and added sugar. For the lowest income group we find the highest increase in the intake of fibre, but generally an increase in the intake of the other nutrients, too. The excise duty reforms also result in a more energy-dense grain diet, with increases in the intake of calories for all income groups. Both the VAT reforms and the excise duty reforms appear to be progressive. The lowest income group pays less food taxes and generally faces a lower overall post-reform price level. The income group that increases its tax payments most is the one with the highest income. This is also the income group that faces the largest increase in the overall post-reform price level.     

Curbing domestic violence: instantiating C–K theory with formal concept analysis and emergent self-organizing maps

We propose a human-centred process for knowledge discovery from unstructured text that makes use of formal concept analysis and emergent self-organizing maps. The knowledge discovery process is conceptualized and interpreted as successive iterations through the concept–knowledge (C–K) theory design square. To illustrate its effectiveness, we report on a real-life case study of using the process at the Amsterdam–Amstelland police in the Netherlands aimed at distilling concepts to identify domestic violence from the unstructured text in actual police reports. The case study allows us to show how the process was not only able to uncover the nature of a phenomenon such as domestic violence, but also enabled analysts to identify many types of anomaly in the practice of policing. We will illustrate how the insights obtained from this exercise resulted in major improvements in the management of domestic violence cases. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of tax reform on labor supply, tax revenue and welfare when tax avoidance matters

We examine how tax avoidance in the form of trade in well-functioning asset markets affects the study of labor supply. We discuss the implications for tax policy analysis, and we show that a failure to account for avoidance responses may lead to huge errors when analyzing how tax reform affects labor supply, tax revenue and the welfare cost of taxation. Our model may explain a number of otherwise hard to understand dimensions of taxpayer response.     

Contingent values as implicit contracts: estimating minimum legal willingness to pay for conservation of large carnivores in Sweden

Mean willingness-to-pay (WTP) based on multiple bounded, discrete choice responses from contingent valuation surveys are normally obtained using some kind of parametric estimator. This paper instead exploits the possibility to interpret the response to the discrete-choice question as an implicit contract between the researcher and the respondent, resulting in a minimum legal WTP (MLW) estimator. Never previously used in valuation literature, it is used in this paper to estimate the WTP for the preservation of large carnivores in Sweden, based on a large scale, national survey. Results show that MLW estimates only were 12–19% of the comparable parametric estimates. In keeping with other results in contingent valuation literature, we find that the MLW estimates are positively related to the educational level, income and the fraction of urban population, while negatively related to age. Among the advantages of the MLW estimator is its transparency as well as the fact that it rests on a contractual notion of WTP.