Toward a political budget cycle? Unveiling long-term latent paths in Greece

Quality & Quantity - Empirical studies demonstrated the existence of political budget cycles in many countries, although mechanisms underlying such cycles remain substantially unclear. The...     

Regulating the Market for Audit Services: A Game Theoretic Approach

We apply game theory to model how alternative mandatory audit firm rotation regimes can affect the strategic interaction between auditee and auditor firms, and analyze potential consequences on detection risk and impairment of auditor scepticism. The major results suggest that: (1) relative to an initial state with no rotation requirement but high probability for impaired auditor scepticism, imposing either short-term or long-term mandatory audit firm rotation will remove the threat to auditor scepticism and lead to higher audit fees and lower detection risk; (2) relative to long-term mandatory audit firm rotation, imposing a short-term rotation will lead to lower audit fees and higher detection risk, resulting from greater informational frictions. We further find that imposing supplementary regulatory instruments, such as increased regulatory scrutiny of the auditee and/or auditor, can be used to lower the detection risk and increase audit quality. We discuss implications of these findings for empirical research.     

The Tourism Workforce and Policy: Exploring the Assumptions using Crete as the Case Study

The size of the tourism workforce has grown rapidly to the extent that today, travel and tourism is considered to be the world's largest employer. The potential of tourism for generating jobs in areas where there are few other alternatives for employment has resulted in many governments electing to expand their tourism industry. Nevertheless, tourism has been criticised for creating part-time, seasonal, low quality and informal jobs often occupied by migrants and females. This paper sets out the main characteristics of the tourism workforce as reported by academic papers, identifies whether the same characteristics are evident on the island of Crete (Greece), and discusses the issues surrounding tourism policy formulation in relation to the tourism workforce of Crete. The conclusion is that very often jobs in tourism are judged, and responses formulated, on a normative (value laden) basis (an ideal) without full consideration being given to the actual (technical) underpinnings and implications.     

Tourism in Crete: A Form of Modernisation

Tourism in Crete is an irreversible phenomenon that has resulted in a process of change under the form of modernisation. This modernisation has both positive and negative consequences. Specifically, tourism has been transformed into a primary source of income and employment generation for the island and has improved the quality of life for the locals. However, tourism development was directed to the increase of demand through the increase of the numbers of beds, as well as the concentration of tourist arrivals in space and time, rather than the balanced development of the tourism industry. In effect, various social and environmental strains have resulted, such as environmental degradation, cultural pollution, commercialisation of human relations and negative demonstration effects. It is the aim of this paper to review past studies, having examined various aspects of tourism in Crete in order to investigate the costs and benefits associated with the modernisation of the island through tourism expansion and to provide recommendations for future development.     

A Calibrated Group Decision Process

In practice most organisational decisions are made by groups that bring into the problem multiple perspectives, both complementary and contradictory. When having a group of decision makers, usually individuals’ preferences are either led to consensus or are aggregated with the use of some function like the median, the arithmetic or geometric mean. We focus in the second case, where individual’s preferences need to be aggregated. Our approach is based on the fact that when two decision makers are asked to give their preference between a pair of criteria using a specific scale, it is possible that they will give slightly different answers, even when they actually have the same opinion. This difference will not affect the case of a single decision maker, as it will be consistent throughout the whole process. However, it can affect a group decision when the values will be used as an input for the aggregation function. A novel approach is presented that enhances group decision making through a group calibration process. The proposed process adjusts individuals’ preferences based on their answers on a set of standardized questions prior to the aggregation phase. The method focuses The whole concept is applied to the group analytical network process method and it is illustrated through a telecommunications project case. The decision under examination concerns the selection of the right place for deploying a new telecom service of a multinational-based telecommunications company where a group of geographically dispersed decision makers form an ad-hoc virtual team in order to select the location for a new technical support centre.     

WHAT DO VARS TELL US ABOUT THE IMPACT OF A CREDIT SUPPLY SHOCK?

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, a variety of structural vector autoregression (VAR) models have been proposed to identify credit supply shocks. Using a Monte Carlo experiment, we show that the performance of these models can vary substantially, with some identification schemes producing particularly misleading results. When applied to U.S. data, the estimates from the best performing VAR models indicate, on average, that credit supply shocks that raise spreads by 10 basis points reduce GDP growth and inflation by 1% after one year. These shocks were important during the Great Recession, accounting for about half the decline in GDP growth.     

A Search Theoretic Approach on Environmental Taxation under Productive Differentials: A Note

A considerable amount of literature argues that environmental taxation fails to create a double-dividend outcome and leads to a trade-off between pollution levels and unemployment. In this paper, a simple search and matching model of labour market is developed where workers are characterized by heterogeneous productive abilities in order as to examine the impact of a pollution tax on employment. An attempt is made in order to determine the efficient level of taxation in the short run, dropping the assumption of free-entry (zero profits) of firms.     

Efficiency,technological change and output growth in Greek olive growing farms: a Box-Cox approach

This paper captures the relative contributions of input growth, technological change and technical efficiency to olive oil production growth for a panel data set of 125 Greek olive-growing farms for the period 1987 to 1993. A flexible generalized quadratic Box-Cox functional form is proposed to represent the underlying production technology. This functional specification copes with the problem of zero inputs and nests all widely used production frontiers. Empirical results show that the observed production growth is mainly due to increased input use since it was not accompanied by rapid introduction of technological innovations and improvements in efficiency levels.     

Accountability and stakeholder engagement in the airport industry: An assessment of airports’ CSR reports

This study assesses the comprehensiveness and quality of corporate social responsibility reports published by airports. A content analysis rating system is built using the global reporting initiative guidelines. The findings indicate that corporate social responsibility reporting is not a common practice among international airports and where it is done, there is considerable variability in the disclosure practices.