Top Income Adjustments and Inequality: An Investigation of the EU-SILC†

This paper provides a novel assessment of how the World Inequality Database (WID) top income adjustment applied by Blanchet, Chancel, and Gethin (2021) to European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data for 26 countries over 2003–2017 for Distributional National Accounts purposes affects inequality in equivalized gross and disposable household income. On average, the Gini is increased by around 2.4 points for both gross and disposable income, with notable differences across countries but limited impact on trends. EU-SILC countries that rely on administrative register data see relatively small effects on inequality. Comparing with two other recent studies, differences in impacts on measured inequality depend less on the adjustment method and more on whether external data sources are used.     

Celebrity altruism: the good,the bad and the ugly in relationships with fundraising charities

• Enlisting or retaining the support of celebrity volunteers is a crucial element in the fundraising and communications strategies for many third sector organisations. But whilst there is a plethora of literature on volunteer motivations, there has been little exploration of the relationships between celebrity volunteers and the charities that they support. Furthermore, the limited theory that exists appears to be based on the experiences of fundraisers and other media specialists with little primary research on attitudes of celebrities themselves. This paper therefore considers celebrity/charity relationships on the basis of existing volunteer motivation theory and attitudinal data from a sample of 208 celebrity volunteers associated with a major fundraising charity in the UK. The findings indicate that the motivation of celebrity volunteers may be much closer to those of other charity volunteers than might be expected from other literature on celebrities. In addition, the study found that amongst other factors, celebrity volunteers typically prefer their engagements to be simplistic and expedient in nature, but that where possible, the engagement activity should be fun and rewarding. It also reveals that individual motives for supporting charities are varied in nature and range from purely altruistic tendencies at one end of the continuum to egoistic motives at the other. In addition, the study indicates that factors such as security and trust in the endorsed organisation are a key motivating factor for many.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A comparison of six sampling schemes for price index construction in a COICOP food group

This article compares the behaviour of sampling techniques for price indices using a scanner data set as a model population. Indices produced by two purposive deterministic cut-off designs and four probabilistic sampling schemes are compared with each other and with the ‘true’ population index from the whole data set. We found that the two deterministic cut-off sampling schemes show much different behaviour from the probabilistic sampling schemes. This is not unexpected, as the former schemes have a very restricted focus with respect to the variety of products. We also found that the probabilistic schemes are generally closer to each other and the ‘true’ value than the deterministic cut-off designs. The jackknife resampling technique is also explored as a means of estimating the SE of the index and compared with the actual results from repeated sampling.     

Meeting the evolving corporate reporting needs of government and society: arguments for a deliberative approach to accounting rule making

We review ways in which corporate reporting might be useful for the government's management of the macro economy and for society's needs for more comprehensive reporting of corporate social and environmental performance. We highlight the constitutive as well as the representational nature of corporate reporting and how accounting subtlety impacts the culture and focus of governments, societies and corporations. Prominent examples are the ways accounting encourages financialisation and fails to account for externalities and the environment. While many proposals for the reform of corporate reporting emphasise more standards and rules, we suggest that what is needed instead are different rules, brought about by a more deliberative approach. A move to deliberation, however, requires that accountants highlight the pervasive but often subtle impacts of accounting.