Local sites of globalisation: A look at the development of a legislative framework for auditing in Russia

The central focus of the study is on the evolution of a legislative framework for auditing in Russia. Particularly, the study looks at three episodes of audit policy making pertinent to the development of the Russian audit law and auditing standards. Largely drawing on the concept of transnational communication, the study analyses the manner in which international policy templates penetrate the local audit environment focusing on relevant actors and motivations behind it. The study concludes that the representation of globalisation as an impersonalised power ruling the world fails to convey the increasingly transnational nature of the present-day world order where, apart from the nation states, cross-border activities of various private and public actors and organisations with transnational jurisdiction increasingly shape national practice localities.     

The impact of Milton Friedman on modern monetary economics: Setting the record straight on Paul Krugman's “Who was Milton Friedman?”

Paul Krugman's essay “Who Was Milton Friedman?” seriously mischaracterizes Friedman's economics and his legacy. In this paper, we provide a rejoinder to Krugman on these issues. In the course of setting the record straight, we provide a self-contained guide to Milton Friedman's impact on modern monetary economics and on today's central banks. We also refute the conclusions that Krugman draws about monetary policy from the experiences of the United States in the 1930s and of Japan in the 1990s.     

Underwork,Work‐Hour Insecurity,and A New Approach to Wage and Hour Regulation

When it was passed in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sought to address the “evils” of underpay and overwork by establishing an hourly minimum wage and requiring premium overtime pay. However, today's low‐wage, hourly workers more often face underwork than overwork, as well as fluctuating, unstable schedules, neither of which is addressed by the FLSA. This paper presents and assesses the effectiveness of an alternative approach to wage and hour regulation, the “reporting pay” guarantee. We begin by examining the problem of work‐hour insecurity, particularly employers’ practice of sending workers home early from scheduled shifts. We then move to a detailed assessment of state laws that require reporting pay, as well as reporting pay guarantees in union contracts and private‐employer practices that attempt to address the problem of work‐hour insecurity. We conclude by considering paths for strengthening such protections in law.     

Is the FHA Creating Sustainable Homeownership?

We produce first estimates of the sustainability of homeownership for recent Federal Housing Administration (FHA) borrowers. Unfortunately, the FHA does not produce its own statistics on sustainability. Neither does it permit researchers access to its data on internal refinances. This imposes significant barriers to entry for researchers who wish to track FHA borrower performance over time. We carefully construct the required tracking data to overcome this barrier. We forecast that no more than 75% of the 2007–2009 vintages of FHA borrowers will be able to successfully exit the FHA system. Our work raises questions about FHA's role, its accounting and its accountability.     

Dynamic supernetworks for the integration of social networks and supply chains with electronic commerce: modeling and analysis of buyer–seller relationships with computations

In this paper, we develop a dynamic supernetwork framework for the modeling and analysis of supply chains with electronic commerce that also includes the role that relationships play. Manufacturers are assumed to produce a homogeneous product and to sell it either through physical or electronic links to retailers and/or directly to consumers through electronic links. Retailers, in turn, can sell the product through physical links to consumers. Increasing relationship levels in our framework are assumed to reduce transaction costs as well as risk and to have some additional value for both sellers and buyers. Establishing those relationship levels incurs some costs that have to be borne by the decision-makers in the supernetwork, which is multilevel in structure and consists of the supply chain and the social network. The decision-makers, who are located at distinct tiers in the supernetwork, try to optimize their objective functions and are faced with multiple criteria including relationship-related ones and weight them according to their preferences. We establish the optimality conditions for the manufacturers, retailers, and consumers, derive the equilibrium conditions, and provide the variational inequality formulation. We then present the projected dynamical system, which describes the disequilibrium dynamics of the product transactions, relationship levels, and prices on the supernetwork, and whose set of stationary points coincides with the set of solutions of the variational inequality problem. We also illustrate the dynamic supernetwork model through several numerical examples, for which the explicit equilibrium patterns are computed.     

Marking your trade: Cultural factors in the prolongation of trademarks

Trademarks protecting the brand name and associations are crucial in a brand's strategy, but little is known about the factors that determine a trademark's prolongation. To explain the prolongation of trademarks, the research estimated a multilevel hazard model accounting for trademark characteristics, firm's characteristics, and firm's country of origin national culture. The dataset comprises a census of 2911 trademarks in the US software security industry across an eight-year period, belonging to firms originating from 11 countries. The results indicate that a firm's culture of origin has a systematic effect on the types of trademark the firm is more likely to prolong and on the length of the prolongation. The age of the trademark, the number of categories where a particular trademark is present, and the age of the firm increase the likelihood of a trademark's prolongation. Larger and more innovative firms tend to terminate their trademarks earlier.     

Controlling the commercialisation of science across inter-organisational borders: Four cases from two major Swedish universities

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how different types of controls are applied in different mechanisms for commercialising science, depending on the inter-organisational interactions involved. To achieve this purpose, we followed a multiple-case study design and selected four cases from Uppsala University and the Karolinska Institutet that provided variation in the commercialisation mechanisms (PET Centre, Ångström Materials Academy, Actar, and Karolinska Development). We find that action and result controls dominate in linear ‘spin-out’ funnel mechanisms, while interactive mechanisms entail a combination of action, result and personal controls. However, the inter-organisational interactions also impact which controls are applied in a commercialisation mechanism: conflicting goals between a few closely related organisations or limited external interactions are associated with result controls, while action controls dominate in the absence of external interactions if time and efficiency are key goals. Result controls also assume very different roles, depending on the inter-organisational context of a specific commercialisation mechanism.     

Integrated assessment of public investment in land-use change to protect environmental assets in Australia

A framework for comprehensive integrated assessment of environmental projects is developed and applied in partnership with a regional environmental body. The framework combines theory with practice, bringing a pragmatic and efficient approach to the rigorous assessment of projects for a large number of environmental assets in the north central region of the state of Victoria, Australia. The approach is codified as the Investment Framework for Environmental Resources (INFFER). The analysis assisted the environmental body to make strong business cases for a number of environmental projects, resulting in funding for those projects. Key features of the study include extensive participation of decision makers and stakeholders, integration of a comprehensive set of information about projects, explicit assessment of uncertainties and information gaps, and analysis of the most appropriate policy mechanism for each project. The process of applying the framework involved four steps: identification of around 300 important environmental assets in the region, filtering the list of assets to remove those that are less likely to provide opportunities for cost-effective public investment, development and detailed assessment of projects for a subset of assets, and negotiation of funding for projects. Implications for land-use policy include that environmental projects vary widely in their cost-effectiveness, requiring careful targeting of funds if environmental benefits are to be maximised. Many existing environmental programs use simplistic analyses to support decision making, resulting in missed opportunities for substantially greater environmental benefits. Promoting adoption of improved analytical methods is very challenging, requiring changes in mind-set and culture in environmental organisations. Widespread adoption is unlikely unless funders create incentives by rewarding those project proponents who undertake rigorous and comprehensive project assessments that focus on achievement of environmental outcomes.     

Earthquake effects on tourism in central Italy

This paper proposes an approach to economic assessment of the impact on tourist flows of the earthquake that hit the Umbria region in Central Italy on September 26, 1997. Local arrivals in Assisi fell drastically the month following the main shock, compared to the same month of the previous year. The event study methodology, frequently applied in finance, is employed to evaluate the statistical relevance of the shock over time and space. A further and straightforward application of the event study analysis assesses the substantial amount of loss between October 1997 and June 1998 due to the drop of tourism business.     

Effects of ethnic advertising on consumers of minority and majority groups: the moderating effect of humor

The effects of portrayals of ethnic endorsers in advertising are ambiguous. These portrayals strengthen the ethnic identity of ethnic minority groups, thus leading to positive responses toward the ad. They can lead to negative responses, because these portrayals can be perceived as stereotyped. Humor is a tool that can increase positive effects of identity-building and reduce negative effects of stereotyping. In this study, we investigate how humor moderates the effects of ethnic advertising on consumers from ethnic minority and majority groups. We find that humor supports the effects of traditional portrayals for both groups. Moreover, the effect of traditional portrayals combined with humor is strongest for the minority group. These findings provide evidence for the positive effects of humor in ethnic advertising and thus provide new insights to the stereotyping, ethnic advertising, and humor literature. The findings have practical implications for advertising using ethnic endorsers, humor, or targeted at ethnic minority groups.