Cultural Crossvergence and Social Desirability Bias: Ethical Evaluations by Chinese and Canadian Business Students

The purpose of this study is to determine whether there are cross-cultural differences between Chinese and Canadian business students with respect to their assessment of the ethicality of various business behaviors. Using a sample of 147 business students, the results indicate cultural crossvergence; the Chinese (72 students) and Canadians (75 students) exhibit different ethical attitudes toward questionable business practices at the individual level but not at the corporate level. A social desirability bias (a tendency to deny socially unacceptable actions and to admit to socially desirable ones) is also found to be a cross-cultural phenomenon, with the Canadians demonstrating a greater bias than the Chinese. Finally, this bias causes respondents to increase their assessment of the un-ethicality of questionable business activities.

On a general equilibrium model of the incidence of the corporation tax under uncertainty

This paper addresses two issues. First, we demonstrate that when there is uncertainty in a general equilibrium model of a large country the usual rule for the auctioneer, that of searching for a set of relative prices at which excess demand in each market is zero, is no longer appropriate. It is suggested that the setting of expected demand to expected supply in each market would be a convenient generalization. Secondly, results on the incidence of the corporation income tax when there is uncertainty in the corporate sector, and alternatively when there is uncertainty in the noncorporate sector, are presented.