The co-worldly executive

The traditional American executive lived in the world of the company; the world of his family life was expected to reflect company priorities. But men are less willing now to pay high personal costs for corporate success, or to limit their private lives (or even their career potentials) to the demands of a single company. This new ethic of co-worldliness will require companies to learn to deal with new kinds of values and loyalties.     

Brain Drain in Developing Countries

An original data set on international migration by educationalattainment for 1990 and 2000 is used to analyze the determinantsof brain drain from developing countries. The analysis startswith a simple decomposition of the brain drain in two multiplicativecomponents, the degree of openness of sending countries (measuredby the average emigration rate) and the schooling gap (measuredby the education level of emigrants compared with natives).Regression models are used to identify the determinants of thesecomponents and explain cross-country differences in the migrationof skilled workers. Unsurprisingly, the brain drain is strongin small countries that are close to major Organisation forEconomic Co-operation and Development (OECD) regions, that sharecolonial links with OECD countries, and that send most of theirmigrants to countries with quality-selective immigration programs.Interestingly, the brain drain increases with political instabilityand the degree of fractionalization at origin and decreaseswith natives' human capital.     

Energy productivity and greenhouse gas emission intensity in Dutch dairy farms: A Hicks–Moorsteen by-production approach under non-convexity and convexity with equivalence results

The agricultural sector is currently confronted with the challenge to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, whilst maintaining or increasing production. Energy-saving technologies are often proposed as a partial solution, but the evidence on their ability to reduce GHG emissions remains mixed. Production economics provides methodological tools to analyse the nexus of agricultural production, energy use and GHG emissions. Convexity is predominantly maintained in agricultural production economics, despite various theoretical and empirical reasons to question it. Employing non-convex and convex frontier frameworks, this contribution evaluates energy productivity change (the ratio of aggregate output change to energy use change) and GHG emission intensity change (the ratio of GHG emission change to polluting input change) using Hicks-Moorsteen productivity formulations. We consider GHG emissions as by-products of the production process by using a multi-equation model. Given our empirical specification, non-convex and convex Hicks-Moorsteen indices can coincide under certain circumstances, which leads to a series of theoretical equivalence results. The empirical application focuses on 1,510 observations of Dutch dairy farms for the period of 2010–2019. The results show a positive association between energy productivity change and GHG emission intensity change, which calls into question the potential of on-farm, energy-efficiency-increasing measures to reduce GHG emission intensity.     

Tourism yield measures for Cambodia

This paper develops new measures of tourism yield in the context of Cambodia, a developing country in South East Asia. It first sets out some data regarding tourism in Cambodia and the reasons for tourism being identified as a tool for economic development and poverty alleviation. It then sets out the method and findings of a study by the International Finance Corporation-Mekong Private Sector Development Facility to develop standard and extended measures of tourism yield to assess the pro-poor impact of international tourism in Cambodia. These yield measures extend earlier work undertaken by the first author. It then discusses the policy implications of the findings. It is concluded that while tourism goes some way in reducing poverty in Cambodia, informed policy initiatives can enhance the effect. It is argued that different visitor yield measures provide an important basis for the development of strategies to increase tourism's pro-poor impact. A substantial barrier to the formulation of appropriate policies to increase the pro-poor benefits of Cambodia arises from the limited data available in poor countries generally.     

Judges' Attitudes toward the Public Accounting Profession

Abstract

This paper presents the results of two related studies. In Study One we examine US judges' attitudes toward the public accounting profession and the extent to which those attitudes have changed over three distinct periods of time: (a) early in the decade of the 1990s, (b) late in the decade of the 1990s, but before the Enron and subsequent corporate debacles, and (c) three years after the Enron debacle. We anticipate that attitudes of judges toward the public accounting profession will be relatively stable over time, but nonetheless subject to change if given a substantial stimulus. In Study Two we compare the most current judges' attitudes with those of law students, MBA students and auditors. In total, we find that judges' attitudes are significantly (1) more negative towards the profession in the most recent survey, (2) equivalent to attitudes exhibited by law students and MBA students, and (3) divergent from attitudes of practicing auditors. Conclusions and future research are also discussed.     

Auditor liability: A comparison of judge and juror verdicts

This research examines differences between judges and jurors in rendering liability judgments in auditor litigation cases. While any number of case contexts would allow us to contrast and compare judges and jurors, we chose one that we believed would also address a second timely issue, auditor reliance or non-reliance upon the work of others. Within the general context of litigation of an alleged audit failure, we manipulated, between-participants, external auditor reliance on the work of others (relied on outsourced work, relied on in-house internal auditors’ work or did not rely). Our results show differences in the liability assessments of judges and jurors. Judges assign more liability to auditors that rely on the work of in-house internal auditors, less liability to auditors that rely on outsourced internal auditors and the least liability to auditors that choose not to rely on the work of internal auditors (but re-perform the work themselves) while jurors assess higher liability regardless of the work done by the auditors. Mediation analyses suggests the differences found in the overall liability assessments of jurors and judges are partially driven by their divergent attitudes towards the public accounting profession with jurors’ unfavorable attitudes leading to them assign liability regardless of the work performed. Further analysis suggests juror insensitivity to our reliance manipulations may reflect a strict liability perspective (consistent with prior work by Charron and Lowe (2008)); while judges consider other factors when making liability assessments.     

Evidence on the Usefulness of Capital Expenditures as an Alternative Measure of Depreciation

Investment professionals often suggest that accounting earnings is a more useful indicator of share value if adjusted by substituting current capital expenditures for reported depreciation. We investigate the usefulness of this alternative depreciation measure by comparing the ability of reported earnings and adjusted earnings to explain the cross-sectional distribution of stock prices for a large sample of manufacturing firms. We find that adjusted earnings explains a much smaller fraction of the variation in share prices than earnings based on reported depreciation, and provide evidence on the reasons for this difference.     

A Classification Scheme for Negotiation in Electronic Commerce

In the last few years we have witnessed a surge of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce operated on the Internet. However, most current electronic commerce systems are little more than electronic catalogues that allow a user to purchase a product under predetermined and inflexible terms and conditions. We believe that in the next few years we will see a new generation of electronic commerce systems emerge, based on automated negotiation. In this paper, we identify the main parameters on which any automated negotiation depends. To show the applicability of our classification framework, we use it to categorise a representative sample of some of the most prominent negotiation models that exist in the literature.     

Judges' attitudes toward the public accounting profession: An update

This study examines U.S. judges' attitudes toward the public accounting profession and the extent to which they have changed over the last 16 years: (a) early in the decade of the 1990's (1993), (b) late in the decade of the 1990's, but before the Enron and subsequent corporate accounting debacles (1997), (c) three years after the Enron debacle (2003), and (d) following the recent market collapse related to the failures of our financial institutions (2009). As previously reported (Reckers et al., 2004) attitudes of judges toward the public accounting profession are known to be representative of the views of other stakeholders (lawyers, jurors and MBAs) and would be expected, and have been found, to be relatively stable over time. Nonetheless attitudes are subject to change if given a substantial stimulus and the corporate debacles at the beginning of this decade, the corresponding CPA firm litigation and the demise of Arthur Andersen arguably constituted such a stimulus. It was reported that a significant erosion of judges' attitudes toward the public accounting profession could be measured in 2003 (Reckers et al, 2004). Given that judicial attitudes have been found to be significantly correlated with judgments rendered in a laboratory experiments, sharp erosion of attitudes is a concern. Judges were re-examined in 2009 to determine if attitudes had potentially rebounded. Reasons to expect attitudes may have rebounded include (a) expectations related to federal reforms of the auditing profession (e.g., SOX, PCAOB), (b) lack of recent accounting scandals, and (c) the financial institutions debacles of 2008. In comparison to the perceived abuses of the financial industry revealed in 2008, the earlier accounting abuses may have faded away.