Consumers' Willingness to Pay for the Color of Salmon: A Choice Experiment with Real Economic Incentives

In most retail markets, sellers post the price and consumers choose which products to buy. We designed an experimental market with posted prices to investigate consumers' willingness to pay for the color of salmon. Salmon fillets varying in color and price were displayed in twenty choice scenarios. In each scenario, the participants chose which of two salmon fillets they wanted to buy. To induce real economic incentives, each participant drew one binding scenario; the participants then had to buy the salmon fillet they had chosen in their binding scenario. The choice data were analyzed with a mixed logit model.     

Current Accounts and Coordination of Wage Bargaining

Open Economies Review - This study provides novel evidence on the impact of labor market institutions on current account dynamics. Our results suggest that a high degree of coordination of wage...     

Effects of the European Monetary Union on High-Technology Exports

Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade - Our study estimates the effects of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on high-technology (HT) export and assesses the potential knowledge spillovers of...     

Design and cost optimization for hierarchical data

In this paper, we consider balanced hierarchical data designs for both one‐sample and two‐sample (two‐treatment) location problems. The variances of the relevant estimates and the powers of the tests strongly depend on the data structure through the variance components at each hierarchical level. Also, the costs of a design may depend on the number of units at different hierarchy levels, and these costs may be different for the two treatments. Finally, the number of units at different levels may be restricted by several constraints. Knowledge of the variance components, the costs at each level, and the constraints allow us to find the optimal design. Solving such problems often requires advanced optimization tools and techniques, which we briefly explain in the paper. We develop new analytical tools for sample size calculations and cost optimization and apply our method to a data set on Baltic herring.     

Psychometrically and qualitatively validating a cross-national cumulative measure of fear-based xenophobia

The article reports the results of a Mokken Scale Procedure (MSP) developing a hierarchical cross-national scale to measure xenophobia, and a qualitative validation of this scale. A pool of 30 xenophobic scale items were collected from several sources and edited according to established unidimensional criteria. The survey was administered to 608 undergraduate students in the USA, 193 undergraduate students in the Netherlands, and 303 undergraduate students in Norway. Fourteen scale statements measuring perceived threat or fear and meeting the criteria of the Stereotype Content Model (e.g., Fiske et al. in Trends Cogn Sci 11:77–83, 2006) were selected for further analysis. A separate item analysis and subsequently MSP analysis yielded a cumulative scale with the same five items for each of the three samples meeting criteria for homogeneity in all samples with H >.40. The result, a cross-national 5-item scale measuring fear-based xenophobia, was tested by means of the Three-Step Test-Interview (Hak et al. in Surv Res Methods 2:143–150, 2008) with 10 students in The Netherlands and 10 students in Norway. The analysis of these qualitative interviews shows that individual respondents’ criteria for the ranking of the scale items strongly depend on the way immigrants are framed. Ranking according to different levels of fear turned out to be only one criterion out of several possible ones used by individual respondents.     

The career competencies of self-initiated and assigned expatriates: assessing the development of career capital over time

Abstract

Building on a modern careers approach, we assess the effects of working abroad on individuals’ career capital. Given the dearth of longitudinal studies, we return to a sample of economics graduates in Finland eight years later. We measure changes in three dimensions of career capital; ‘knowing how’, ‘knowing whom’, ‘knowing why’ and find that company assigned expatriates learn more than self-initiated expatriates. All three career capital areas benefit from international experience and all are increasingly valued over time. Based on our findings, we conclude that a dynamic notion of career capital acquisition and use is needed. Managerial implications include the need for a wider view of talent management for international businesses.     

Review

In this study we extend prior research on the international analysis of accounting conservatism (Joos and Lang, 1994; Ball et al., 2000; Giner and Rees, 2001), by examining the level of accounting conservatism across eight European countries (United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Belgium), and assessing the statistical significance of the differences among them. The definitions of conservatism that we use are, on the one hand, the Feltham and Ohlson (1995) definition, which implies a persistent understatement of book value of shareholders' equity (balance sheet conservatism). On the other hand, we use the one proposed by Basu (1997), that is, a timelier recognition of bad news in earnings relative to good news (earnings conservatism). We also address the possible scale problems of the models used to measure balance sheet conservatism. Finally, we check whether our comparative results could be influenced by a different sample composition in each country. Our results show that there are both balance sheet and earnings conservatism practices in all countries under study. In addition, while continental countries show larger balance sheet conservatism, differences in earnings conservative practices between countries are not that pronounced, although they tend to be larger in the UK. We also find that the existence of balance sheet conservative practices is associated with reduced levels of earnings conservatism, which is consistent with the results in Pope and Walker (2003).     

Validation in interpretive management accounting research

This paper extends and contributes to emerging debates on the validation of interpretive research (IR) in management accounting. We argue that IR has the potential to produce not only subjectivist, emic understandings of actors’ meanings, but also explanations, characterised by a certain degree of “thickness”. Mobilising the key tenets of the modern philosophical theory of explanation and the notion of abduction, grounded in pragmatist epistemology, we explicate how explanations may be developed and validated, yet remaining true to the core premises of IR. We focus on the intricate relationship between two arguably central aspects of validation in IR, namely authenticity and plausibility. Working on the assumption that validation is an important, but potentially problematic concern in all serious scholarly research, we explore whether and how validation efforts are manifest in IR using two case studies as illustrative examples. Validation is seen as an issue of convincing readers of the authenticity of research findings whilst simultaneously ensuring that explanations are deemed plausible. Whilst the former is largely a matter of preserving the emic qualities of research accounts, the latter is intimately linked to the process of abductive reasoning, whereby different theories are applied to advance thick explanations. This underscores the view of validation as a process, not easily separated from the ongoing efforts of researchers to develop explanations as research projects unfold and far from reducible to mere technicalities of following pre-specified criteria presumably minimising various biases. These properties detract from a view of validation as conforming to pre-specified, stable, and uniform criteria and allow IR to move beyond the “crisis of validity” arguably prevailing in the social sciences.