The evolution of socio-economic modeling in Canada

For the past 15 years the authors have been associated with a research program concerned with the development of structural economic models that had their origins in the input-output models of Leontief. This program has produced a set of conceptual tools embracing a new approach to socio-economic modeling which we term the “design approach.” This approach draws on general systems theory and control theory in application to large social systems. Also emerging from this program as its test prototype is a particular set of models designed for society wide resource analysis and a set of software tools within which design approach models can be designed, implemented, and operated. The design approach provides a new method of assessing technologies in regard to their overall socio-economic resource impact. The objective of this paper is to describe the unique institutional setting and the particular issues which provided the setting and the motivation for embarking on a large scale modeling program. The paper is organized chronologically, describing first of all the evolution of the program approach, the software tools, the Socio-Economic Resource Framework (SERF), which is the prototype set of models that have been implemented, and some results obtained from it.     

The effect of constrained processing on auditors’ judgments

This study examines whether constraining experienced auditors’ processing by having them process evidence in a pre-established sequence (an experimental control technique used in previous studies) prevents them from using their usual processing strategies and thereby affects their judgments. We compare the relative attention to evidence and judgments of experienced and inexperienced auditors in a constrained versus an unconstrained processing condition. Consistent with expectations, experienced auditors’ going-concern judgments differed from inexperienced auditors’ judgments only when processing was unconstrained. This difference in judgments was the result of differential attention to evidence. These results demonstrate that the failure to consider how experienced auditors process evidence can result in inadvertently adopting control techniques that limit the generalizability of experimental findings. Although our study used a going-concern task, our conclusions are likely to apply to a variety of ill-structured audit tasks that require a goal-oriented, directed evaluation of evidence.     

Feature: Taking Africa Seriously: A Case for Enhanced Resource Flow to Facilitate Development and Reduce Poverty

Despite considerable improvements in the policy environmentin many African countries in the last two decades, it is stilldifficult for the rest of the world to take Africa seriously.Not taking Africa seriously affects the growth and developmentoutcomes. Investors do not show much optimism about the region'sfuture, hence the relatively slow flow of private capital intothe region. Capable Africans also show little enthusiasm aboutthe future, hence the flight of financial wealth and human capitalout of the region. In the last decade, African countries havestepped up the campaign to make their reform efforts appearmore credible, adopting more cooperative approaches and greaterinterest in governance issues within a more global and regionalframework. This article seeks to show why the current effortsat broader reform need to be considered more seriously by therest of the world.     

Situational Ethics Across Borders: A Multicultural Examination

Managers throughout the world regularly face ethical dilemmas that have important, and perhaps complex, professional and personal implications. Further, societal consequences of decisions made can be far-reaching. In this study, 210 financial services managers from Australia, Chile, Ecuador and the United States were queried about their ethical beliefs when faced with four diverse dilemmas. In addition, the situational context was altered so the respondent viewed each dilemma from a top management position and from a position of economic hardship. Results suggest a complex interaction of situation, culture and issue when individuals make ethical judgments. Specifically, Chileans were found to have different beliefs about sex discrimination and child labor dilemmas when compared to their colleagues from the other three nations. Chileans and Australians also disagreed on the bribery dilemma. Anglo managers were more likely than Latin American managers to change their ethical responses when the situation was altered. For multinational firms interested in maintaining healthy ethical climates, the findings suggest that culturally contingent ethical guidelines, or policies adapted to the local customs, must be considered. Further, managers must remain aware of issues related to specific situations, both internal and external, that would cause subordinates to alter their moral judgment.     

The iconography of the tourism experience

Guides to tourism planning typically lack a language for dealing with the destination's experiential content. This article argues that tourism planning has as its central challenge the design of effective touristic experiences, and can find conceptual sources for this task in iconography, the field that studies the meanings of images. In search of iconographie principles for tourism design, the article investigates Niagara Falls, still one of the foremost attractions in North America. At Niagara Falls, the article identifies two main compositional elements: staging, which situates a desirable motif (in this case a waterfall) in a stage setting; and thematizing, which links the motif to concepts (like terror or romance) that make it evocative.     

Ethics,CSR, and Sustainability Education in the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Financial Times</Emphasis> Top 50 Global Business Schools: Baseline Data and Future Research Directions

This paper investigates how deans and directors at the top 50 global MBA programs (as rated by the Financial Times in their 2006 Global MBA rankings) respond to questions about the inclusion and coverage of the topics of ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability at their respective institutions. This work purposely investigates each of the three topics separately. Our findings reveal that: (1) a majority of the schools require that one or more of these topics be covered in their MBA curriculum and one-third of the schools require coverage of all three topics as part of the MBA curriculum, (2) there is a trend toward the inclusion of sustainability-related courses, (3) there is a higher percentage of student interest in these topics (as measured by the presence of a Net Impact club) in the top 10 schools, and (4) several schools are teaching these topics using experiential learning and immersion techniques. We note a fivefold increase in the number of stand-alone ethics courses since a 1988 investigation on ethics, and we include other findings about institutional support of centers or special programs; as well as a discussion of integration, teaching techniques, and notable practices in relation to all three topics.     

Reflections of a Professional Life-Long Fed Watcher

Policymaking at the Fed and Fed watching by the markets have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. In the 1970s, targets and instruments shifted constantly, and the prevalent belief in the Fed was that its deliberations should be as opaque as possible. Moreover, communications technology for those who would divine the Fed’s direction was limited to snail mail, faxes, and telephones. In the early 1980s, the Fed began to focus more directly on inflation and on increasing transparency. The future is likely to reveal continued restrictive Fed policy and an inverted yield curve due to eight factors that contribute to this “conundrum.” Diversification away from the dollar by foreign central banks is likely to put continued pressure on the value of the dollar and some modest upward pressure on inflation and interest rates, but a dollar meltdown is unlikely. Despite this relatively benign outlook, however, Fed watchers will continue to be busy and valued. JEL Classification E5, E58     

Women and Work: A Survey of Textbooks

The third Marshall–Hicks–Allen rule of elasticity of derived demand purports to show that labor demand is less elastic when labor is a smaller share of total costs. As Hicks, Allen, and then Bronfenbrenner showed, this rule is not quite correct, and actually is complicated by an unexpected negative relationship involving labor's share of total costs and the elasticity of substitution. The standard intuitive explanation for the exception to the rule presented by Stigler and referenced in many textbooks describes a situation rather different than the one described in the rule. The author presents an example that illustrates the peculiar negative impact of labor's share operating via the elasticity of substitution and then explains why the unexpected relationship between labor's share of total cost, the elasticity of substitution, and the elasticity of labor demand holds.