Auditors' and governmental financial officers' views on expanding the Sarbanes–Oxley Act provisions to state and local governments

This paper examines whether certain provisions of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX, 2002) should be expanded to include state and local governmental entities. Surveying governmental financial officials (GFOs) and their external auditors to gauge support for SOX-like legislation for governmental entities, we find the strongest support for auditor independence rules similar to SOX, management assessment of, and reporting on, internal controls, and severe penalties for destruction of records, fraud, and failure to report fraud.     

Attraction of marketing and sales professionals in the financial services industry: An analysis of pre-, during and post-financial crisis job postings

Attracting talent is key to a successful sales force, and financial services firms have long used online recruiting to achieve this. However, little is known about how firms attract financial services marketing and sales professionals. In this study, we present a content analysis of job postings for sales and marketing positions in the financial services industry that were posted before, during and after the financial crisis of 2008. Specifically, job postings in the United Kingdom and United States in 2006, 2009 and 2013 were examined. Implications for financial services firms are discussed.     

The Impact of Perceived Organizational Support on Self-Directed Learning in Sales Training

Perceived organizational support has a positive influence on the willingness of salespeople to use self-directed learning (SDL) projects. These SDL projects can be tailored to fit a salesperson's distinct learning needs, to increase performance, and to achieve the overarching goals of collaborative members of a marketing channel. Hence, it is beneficial for channel members to create a supportive learning culture that promotes the use of SDL projects by salespeople. Salespeople within the insurance industry play an essential role inside their marketing channel. Data collected from 392 insurance salespeople in over 170 firms is used to empirically test how perceived organizational support influences the use of two types of SDL projects. Salespeople encouraged to use elective SDL projects reported higher levels of performance than those required to use compulsory SDL projects.     

Agriculture and climate change in global scenarios: why don't the models agree

Agriculture is unique among economic sectors in the nature of impacts from climate change. The production activity that transforms inputs into agricultural outputs involves direct use of weather inputs (temperature, solar radiation available to the plant, and precipitation). Previous studies of the impacts of climate change on agriculture have reported substantial differences in outcomes such as prices, production, and trade arising from differences in model inputs and model specification. This article presents climate change results and underlying determinants from a model comparison exercise with 10 of the leading global economic models that include significant representation of agriculture. By harmonizing key drivers that include climate change effects, differences in model outcomes were reduced. The particular choice of climate change drivers for this comparison activity results in large and negative productivity effects. All models respond with higher prices. Producer behavior differs by model with some emphasizing area response and others yield response. Demand response is least important. The differences reflect both differences in model specification and perspectives on the future. The results from this study highlight the need to more fully compare the deep model parameters, to generate a call for a combination of econometric and validation studies to narrow the degree of uncertainty and variability in these parameters and to move to Monte Carlo type simulations to better map the contours of economic uncertainty.     

Pflege aus der Kräuterküche: Erlaubt ist,was gefällt?

Rechtliche Sicherheit bei der Verwendung von Tee, Kohlblatt & Co. - Die Anwendung von Kr?utern oder Heilpflanzen in der Pflege erfreut sich wachsender Beliebtheit. Doch nicht alles, was angewendet wird, ist in dieser Form auch erlaubt. Was müssen Sie beachten, um rechtlich auf der sicheren Seite zu stehen?     

When consumers follow their feelings: The impact of affective or cognitive focus on the basis of consumers' choice

The authors assumed that automatic preferences based on lower‐order affective processes have a greater impact on choice when people focus on their affective response to choice options (affective focus) than when they try to find reasons for their preferences (cognitive focus). They further supposed that the impact of the focus during decision making is less important when the cognitive resources of consumers are constrained. In an experiment, participants had to choose between two options while the cognitive or affective focus and processing resources were manipulated. Measures of automatic preferences correlated with choice under an affective, but not under a cognitive, focus. In contrast to expectations, this effect of focus was not moderated by the manipulation of processing resources. Interest‐ingly, the automatic measures contributed to the prediction of choice under an affective focus independently and apart from self‐report measures. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Spitzenkandidaten im Wahlkampf

This articles investigates the degree to which the image of political candidates can experience change during the campaign, by campaigning on the one hand and by the political coverage of the mass media on the other. Empirical analyses of the Northrhine-Westphalian state election of May 14, 2000, are based on longitudinal survey data for the five weeks before the election and a cross-sectional pre-election study representative of Northrhine-Westphalia. For three effect criteria — first the information the population holds about the leading candidates, second the evaluation of various candidate qualities, and third the weight candidate evaluation carries for the voting decision — it is shown that both effects of campaigning and effects of media coverage on political attitudes and the voting decision can be identified.     

Arranger Certification in Project Finance

Using a sample of 4,122 project finance loans worth $769 billion arranged from 1991 to 2005, we demonstrate that certification by prestigious lead arranging banks creates economic value by reducing overall loan spreads compared to loans arranged by less prestigious arrangers. Banks participating in these loan syndicates, rather than the project sponsors, pay for this certification. They do so by allowing top tier arrangers to keep larger fractions of the upfront arranging fees. Results are robust to the correction for the endogenous choice of loans by prestigious arrangers and indicate that certification is even more valuable during periods of extreme financial stress.     

The optimal-drift model: an accelerated binomial scheme

We introduce the optimal-drift model for the approximation of a lognormal stock price process by an accelerated binomial scheme. This model converges with order o(1/N), which is superior compared to today??s benchmark methods. Our approach is based on the observation that risk-neutral binomial schemes converge to the lognormal limit independently of the choice of the drift parameter. We verify the improved order of convergence by an asymptotic expansion of the binomial distribution function. Further, we show that the above result on drift invariance implies weak convergence of the binomial schemes suggested by Tian (in J. Futures Mark. 19, 817?C843, 1999) and Chang and Palmer (in Finance Stoch. 11, 91?C105, 2007).