Sign and phase asymmetry: News, economic activity and the stock market

In this paper, we present a general model of the joint data generating process underlying economic activity and stock market returns allowing for complex nonlinear feedbacks and interdependencies between the conditional means and conditional volatilities of the variables. We propose statistics that capture the long and short run responses of the system to the arrival of news, conditioning on the sign and time of arrival of the news. The model is applied to US data. We find that there are significant differences between the short and long run responses of economic activity and stock returns to the arrival of news. Moreover, for certain classifications of news, the respective responses of economic activity and stock returns vary according to the nature of the news and the phase of the business cycle at which the news arrives.     

The Determinants of Racial Harassment at the Workplace: Evidence from the British Nursing Profession

This paper examines which individual and work-related characteristics increase the probability of an employee being racially harassed at the workplace using a unique sample of NHS nurses. The reported incidence of racial harassment at the workplace is staggeringly high — 8.9 per cent of all nurses report such episodes involving work colleagues and 22.4 per cent have experienced such abuse from patients (or their families). Nurses who are young, male or from the ethnic minorities are the most likely to be affected. The findings have important implications for equal opportunities policies and the retention of nursing staff in the NHS.     

Attributions,cognitive processes and control systems

This paper reports two experiments which are designed to provide insights into how superiors and subordinates make perceptual or cognitive mappings from accounting signals to causal agents. The experiments focus on superiors' and subordinates' information seeking and causal attribution utilization to explain the subordinate's reported performance. Particular attention is given to (1) asymmetric causal attribution utilization by the superior and the subordinate and (2) the attribution mappings the two actors make when they receive ambiguous signals about the subordinate's reported performance.     

Cost uncertainty and budget overspending: A safety-first perspective

In this study we model a cost center manager's decision about how to achieve a required level of output. The spending plan that the manager adopts is expected to result in successful performance, but at an uncertain cost. The uncertainty associated with the spending plan is inversely related to the expected cost. The analysis presented in this article suggests that a manager who exhibits Safety-First behavior and wishes to avoid large budget deviations is more likely to exceed what he or she perceives to be the overspending limit rather than the underspending limit. That manager will tend to incur costs in excess of the budget. This mathematical result has an intuitive appeal; a manager is willing to pay a certain “risk premium” to avoid the risk of large budget deviations and accompanying adverse consequences. This result has implications for both performance evaluation and budget setting, particularly in the public sector. Under the circumstances that we describe, using budgets in evaluating managerial performance may be misleading. Another application of our study relates to the “budget creep” phenomenon and how, under particular circumstances, its size can be reduced.     

Mobile Applications: Situating Leadership Education

Florida State University has recently introduced the LEAD (Lead, Engage, Apply, Develop) Mobile Application for undergraduate students. The innovative platform has situated potential building of leadership capacity directly into the hands of students. Individual modules are available in the mobile application and designed to introduce leadership concepts, activities for users to practice applying these theories to their own reality, and reflection for students to make meaning from the theories learned and their application. The current article explores the application's innovative features, lessons learned from the development, and implications for leadership educators and learners.