Points to Consider When Self‐Assessing Your Empirical Accounting Research

We provide a list of points to consider (PTCs) to help researchers self‐assess whether they have addressed certain common issues that arise frequently in accounting research seminars and in reviewers’ and editors’ comments on papers submitted to journals. Anticipating and addressing such issues can help accounting researchers, especially doctoral students and junior faculty members, convert an initial empirical accounting research idea into a thoughtful and carefully designed study. Doing this also allows outside readers to provide more beneficial feedback rather than commenting on the common issues that could have been dealt with in advance. The list, provided in the appendix, consists of five sections: Research Question; Theory; Contribution; Research Design and Analysis; and Interpretation of Results and Conclusions. In each section, we include critical items that readers, journal referees, and seminar participants are likely to raise and offer suggestions for how to address them. The text elaborates on some of the more challenging items, such as how to increase a study's contribution, and provides examples of how such issues have been effectively addressed in previous accounting studies.     

Microelectronics,industry, and the third world

As microelectronics revolutionises production in the developed countries, the traditional export successes of the Third world (eg garments and electronics) are threatened. That trade, which has grown rapidly in the past decade, relies heavily on the comparative advantage of low-wage high-skill labour. People are flexible—they can learn new skills and adapt to new fashions. But microprocessors are eroding that advantage. The newly industrialised countries, in particular, may be able to respond by competing in a wider range of exports. However, there is an urgent need for government intervention to ensure that the less developed countries acquire the software capabilities needed to make full use of the new technology.     

Urban agriculture in Dar es Salaam: Its contribution to solving the economic crisis and the damage it does to the environment

This article discusses urban agriculture in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and how it helps people to cope with the country's economic crisis. Urban agriculture is also associated with environmental degradation. The article identifies factors that encourage urban agriculture at four different levels and suggests that to check further environmental degradation, concerted efforts should be made at all four levels. Such efforts should be coordinated and integrated into a holistic view of sustainable urban development.     

AN EMPIRICAL SURVEY OF RESIDENTIAL WATER DEMAND MODELLING

Abstract The increased reliance on demand‐side management policies as an urban water consumption management tool has stimulated considerable debate among economists, water utility managers, regulators, consumer interest groups and policymakers. In turn, this has fostered an increasing volume of literature aimed at providing best‐practice estimates of price and income elasticities, quantifying the impact of non‐price water restrictions and gauging the impact of non‐discretionary environmental factors affecting residential water demand. This paper provides a synoptic survey of empirical residential water demand analyses conducted in the last 25 years. Both model specification and estimation and the outcomes of the analyses are discussed.     

How to acquire customers on the Web

Most retailers on the Web spend more to acquire customers than they will ever get back in revenue from them. Many think that sky-high spending on marketing is necessary to stake out their share of Internet space. But is it really? How do retailers know how much to pay? Consider CDnow, which has developed a multifaceted customer-acquisition strategy that reflects a clear understanding of the economics of an on-line business. At the heart of its strategy is affiliate marketing, a concept the company pioneered. Under its BuyWeb program, anyone can put a link to CDnow on his or her Web site, and if a customer uses that link to arrive at CDnow and make a purchase, the referring site owner gets a percentage of the sale. CDnow pays no money if no sale is made, which makes the marketing program completely efficient. But CDnow didn't stop there. Being a Web store, it had complete data on the number of visitors to its site and what they bought, which it used to work out the lifetime value of an average customer. CDnow used that figure to determine how much to wager on the expensive and risky world of traditional advertising to reach a wider audience that wasn't already on-line. CDnow's experience, still a work in progress, contradicts John Wanamaker's oft-quoted lament: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half." As the CDnow example demonstrates, there is a way to find out which half really works.