Conceptualizing data‐deliberation: The starry sky beetle,environmental system risk,and Habermasian CSR in the digital age

Building on an illustrative case of a systemic environmental threat and its multi‐stakeholder response, this paper draws attention to the changing political impacts of corporations in the digital age. Political Corporate Social Responsibility (PCSR) theory suggests an expanded sense of politics and corporations, including impacts that may range from voluntary initiatives to overcome governance gaps, to avoiding state regulation via corporate political activity. Considering digitalization as a stimulus, we explore potential responsibilities of corporations toward public goods in contexts with functioning governments. We show that digitalization—in the form of transparency, surveillance, and data‐sharing—offers corporations’ scope for deliberative public participation. The starry sky beetle infestation endangering public and private goods is thereby used to illustrate the possibility of expanding the political role of corporations in the digital sphere. We offer a contribution by conceptualizing data‐deliberation as a Habermasian variation of PCSR, defined as the (a) voluntary disclosure of corporate data and its transparent, open sharing with the public sector (b) along with the cooperation with governmental institutions on data analytics methods for examining large‐scale datasets (c) thereby complying with existing national and international regulations on data protection, in particular with respect to privacy and personal data.     

Trinkwasserversorgung: privat gleich teuer?

The article examines the relationship between the degree of private ownership and the price level in the German drinking water market. In addition to a compact overview of important characteristics of the German drinking water supply and the regulatory framework, the empirical study focuses on the 100 largest communities and is based on a multivariate OLS regression and a fixed effects analysis using annual data for 2009–15. The results do not conclusively indicate a rise in prices due to a higher degree of private ownership. For future surveys, it might be useful to include key economic figures of the respective water supply companies into the analysis.     

Journal entry anomaly detection model

Although numerous scientific papers have been written on deep learning, very few have been written on the exploitation of such technology in the field of accounting or bookkeeping. Our scientific study is oriented exactly toward this specific field. As accountants, we know the problems faced in modern accounting. Although accountants may have a plethora of information regarding technology support, looking for errors or fraud is a demanding and time-consuming task that depends on manual skills and professional knowledge. Our efforts are oriented toward resolving the problem of error-detection automation that is currently possible through new technologies, and we are trying to develop a web application that will alleviate the problems of journal entry anomaly detection. Our developed application accepts data from one specific enterprise resource planning system while also representing a general software framework for other enterprise resource planning developers. Our web application is a prototype that uses two of the most popular deep-learning architectures; namely, a variational autoencoder and long short-term memory. The application was tested on two different journals: data set D, learned on accounting journals from 2007 to 2018 and then tested during the year 2019, and data set H, learned on journals from 2014 to 2016 and then tested during the year 2017. Both accounting journals were generated by micro entrepreneurs.     

Vicarelli’s Keynes (and today’s international disorder)

The article speculates about the legacy of Fausto Vicarelli’s interpretation of John Maynard Keynes’s work in the times of a major global crisis. In particular, it puts an emphasis on those aspects of Keynes’s “method” that Vicarelli rightly considered as revolutionary in his Keynes, of 1977, as well as in other writings. The article then turns to Vicarelli’s reconstruction of Keynes’s early work in international economics (Indian Currency and Finance, Economic Consequences of the Peace) and reflects upon the continuing relevance of the philosophy inspiring Keynes’s plans of global reform in the Forties, also in the light of Vicarelli’s (Keynes-inspired) vision of the problem of policy space at the international level.     

Exploring the effects of leaders’ individualized consideration in extreme contexts

Abstract

Role clarity and trust in leadership are two crucial factors supporting soldiers in coping with uncertainty and imperfect knowledge. The present study examined the effects of leaders’ individualized consideration on both factors in a sample composed of 161 paratroopers from a parachute division of the NATO Airborne Forces. Conditional process modeling revealed that (1) leaders showing individualized consideration increase followers’ role clarity and, in parallel, develop a trusting relationship with them; (2) critical upward communication and perceived workload mediated and moderated these relationships, respectively. The implications of these findings for safety research and their practical applications are outlined.     

Robust martingale selection problem and its connections to the no‐arbitrage theory

We analyze the martingale selection problem of Rokhlin in a pointwise (robust) setting. We derive conditions for solvability of this problem and show how it is related to the classical no‐arbitrage deliberations. We obtain versions of the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing in models spanning frictionless markets, models with proportional transaction costs, and models for illiquid markets. In all these models, we also incorporate trading constraints.     

Appropriate technology in a Solovian nonlinear growth model

We propose a Solovian growth model with a convex–concaveproduction function and international technological spillovers.We test the empirical implications of the model, analysing theeffects of the productivity slowdown that followed the oil shocksof the 1970s. We argue that this slowdown, altering the worldincome distribution, affected the pattern of international technologicalspillovers, taking the poorest countries further away from thetechnological leaders, and therefore unable to exploit theirtechnologies. The result is the emergence of a poverty trapfor low-income countries.     

Mixing and matching: Prospective financial sector mergers and market valuation

Which types of mergers are likely to be most productive for banks and other financial firms in the US? From a management perspective, mixing disparate firms may be difficult, but may offer significant gains from diversification. The opposite applies to matching similar firms. This paper considers life insurance, property and casualty insurance, securities, and commercial firms as potential matches for banks. It examines a measure of diversification gains from potential consolidation, based on option pricing, and a model of the “building blocks” of the industries, based on arbitrage pricing theory. The results identify potential diversification gains from virtually all combinations involving banking and insurance, which arise because common factors are combined in different ways and because insurance is already well diversified.     

Asia’s Middle-Income Challenge: An Overview

Developing Asia has undergone a dramatic shift over the past five decades from a region of mainly low-income economies toward one that is largely middle income. The region faces the challenge of moving further to high income particularly because, as this study shows, it takes longer for economies to move from upper middle to high income than shifting from lower middle to upper middle income. The study finds that developing Asian economies transformed more quickly than the rest of the world, whether the transition is from lower middle to upper middle income or from upper middle to high income.     

R&D and performance persistence: Evidence from the United Kingdom

There is compelling evidence from both the United States and United Kingdom suggesting that R&D investment is positively related to operating and/or market performance. This study extends prior research on R&D and valuation by further examining the sustainability or persistence of operating growth and market performance as a result of R&D investments.We use a large dataset of U.K. companies during the period 1990–2003 and our findings confirm the relation between R&D intensity and consistent growth in Sales and Gross Income, but only in the cases when a firm needs to engage in R&D activity because of the industry in which it operates. Moreover, our evidence indicates not only a positive relation between R&D intensity and subsequent risk-adjusted excess returns among firms that engage in R&D as testified by prior literature, but we also show that R&D intensity improves persistence in excess stock returns: the highest R&D-intensity firms are found to earn higher risk-adjusted excess returns more consistently than the sample median return, compared to lower R&D-intensity firms, as well as firms with no R&D. We interpret this finding as consistent with at least some form of market mispricing.