On accounting’s twenty-first century challenge: evidence on the relation between intangible assets and audit fees

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We inform the policy debate arising from the dramatic shift in US firms’ balance sheets towards intangible assets that has created a challenge...     

Antecedents to supplier integration in the automotive industry: A multiple-case study of foreign subsidiaries in China

Supplier integration has become an important concept for improving supply chain performance. The aim of this paper is to identify factors that facilitate and inhibit supplier integration in the context of the Chinese automotive industry. An inductive approach based on grounded theory was chosen as the research methodology, where data was collected through 30 detailed case interviews with subsidiaries of foreign automotive companies operating in China. The results indicate that buyer-side leadership is an important antecedent for building motivation, trust, and commitment among suppliers and for shaping their mindsets. This, in turn, facilitates strategic alignment and enables suppliers to build collaborative capabilities, which are finally shown to be a key enabler for successful supplier integration.     

A critical evaluation of alternative methods and paradigms for conducting mediation analysis in operations management research

Mediation as a theory testing approach has witnessed considerable adoption among Operations Management (OM) researchers. Although mediation-testing methods have evolved tremendously in the past decade, their dissemination in the OM field has not seen parallel growth. These advanced techniques facilitate the testing of existing and complex hypotheses in a more precise manner. With the intent of critically evaluating existing and alternative methods for conducting mediation analysis needed to support sophisticated empirical research, this paper first reviews OM studies that tested for mediation in the past eleven years (2002–2012) from top-tier OM journals. Four commonly used mediation approaches were identified. Based on principles of good theory building, type of mediation model, and properties of empirical data, we evaluate the existing methodologies and make recommendations on how to improve the rigor of OM mediation testing. Using published OM studies in top journals as examples, we then illustrate the relevance and advantages of these recommendations, as well as their ease of use. Furthermore, we empirically show that more robust and insightful results can be achieved by adopting these techniques, which in turn have the promise of leading to better theory building and testing in the field of operations management.     

巨额超额准备金挑战全球央行

【摩根士丹利11月12日】美国超额准备金将突破万亿美元大关 美联储资产负债表中的超额准备金即将突破1万亿美元大关。预计到2010年1月,美国的超额准备金将达到1．2万亿美元。另一方面,其他国家的资产负债表和准备金规模也普遍处于高位。     

Current Accounts and Global Adjustment: The Long and Short of It

Global rebalancing is underway, but still quite a distance from being done. Current account imbalances have been a persistent feature of the global economy for over 100 years, especially during the two eras of globalization—the period 1870 to 1914 and the present. Such imbalances have reflected underlying imbalances between savings and investment as well as the prevailing international monetary regime. One important lesson from the past 150 years is that capital flows play an important role in funding global investment opportunities—a role that would be harmed if policy makers responded to the perceived threat of global imbalances by imposing any sort of cap. During those periods when capital flows have been relatively unhindered, investment opportunities around the world have been financed by capital flows. Such flows have financed the growth of many erstwhile “emerging market” economies, including the U.S. in the early part of this century. And global capital flows are doing much the same for many emerging markets today, even though purchases of reserves by some countries have been offsetting inbound private capital flows in the aggregate. The other main lesson of history is that imbalances do not last forever, and tend to lead to adjustments and reversals. Experience shows that such adjustments are much easier for surplus countries than for deficit countries.     

The Allocation of Nutrient Load Reduction across a Watershed: Assessing Delivery Coefficients as an Implementation Tool

Delivery coefficients have long been used in economic analysis of policies that seek to address environmental problems like water pollution. However, the derivation and validity of delivery coefficients have not been examined carefully by empirical analyses. We derived estimates of delivery coefficients and then evaluated them as a bridge between complex simulation models and economic policies like water quality trading. We found that the allocations achieved outcomes that differed from intended water quality targets by less than 10% in most cases. For the least-cost allocation with heterogeneous costs, cost savings significantly outweighed deviations from water quality targets.     

How mutual fund investors’ objective and subjective knowledge impacts their information search and processing behaviour

Contrary to the popular belief that objective knowledge (OK) (that is, what is actually stored in the memory) and subjective knowledge (SK) (that is, what individuals perceive they know) differently impact information search and information-processing behaviour, an empirical study conducted on 268 mutual fund (MF) investors suggests no significant difference in the impact of OK and SK on the width and depth of information search and information processing. The study suggests that OK and SK significantly positively impact the width and depth of information search and information-processing behaviour, however, no significant difference exists in the way they impact. The possible explanation put forward is that even though MF investors may suffer from self-deception (that is, pseudo expertise) and report high knowledge (that is, high SK), the impact of SK on actual investment behaviour is not significantly different from that of OK. The implications of the findings are also discussed.