Is the Well-being of Children Converging in the European Union?

Recent discussion of convergence in the European Union has focused on macroeconomic indicators, in line with requirements for participation in the single currency. But it is reduction of disparities in living standards that is an ultimate goal of European integration – the greater 'economic and social cohesion' emphasised by the Treaty on Union. We assemble evidence on whether the well-being of children in Member States has been converging over the last two decades, taking a variety of indicators: poverty, household worklessness, youth unemployment, child mortality, youth suicide, educational enrolment, teenage fertility, and self-reported 'life satisfaction'.     

Multiple Bids, Management Opposition, and the Market for Corporate Control

We use regression analysis to disentangle the wealth effect for acquired firm shareholders of management opposition and multiple bids (e.g., multiple bidders and bid revisions). Although multiple bidders and bid revisions occur more frequently for opposed acquisitions, opposition is not associated with incremental acquisition returns for acquisitions with multiple bidders. We also find that management opposition has no significant incremental effect on single bidder acquisitions unless the acquiring firm revises its initial bid. These findings indicate that rather than amplifying acqiuisition returns directly, management opposition instead serves as a negotiating tool to solicit additional bids.     

Unemployment assistance in Hungary

Low outflow rates from unemployment and cuts in benefit entitlement periods resulted in sharp reductions in the coverage by Unemployment Insurance of the unemployed stock in Central and Eastern European countries during the 1990s. From mid-1994 in Hungary the most common benefit received by the registered unemployed stock is means-tested Unemployment Assistance (UA) but so far very little is known about its receipt. In the paper, using microdata from the unemployment register we investigate the operation of the UA scheme in Hungary, including the benefit levels, the characteristics of benefit recipients and the determinants of flows to and from receipt.     

Are Academics Committed to Accounting Ethics Education?

This paper reviews the current commitment of accounting academics to teaching accounting ethics. In the course of the review it assesses the recent initiative of the American Accounting Association; namely, Ethics in the Accounting Curriculum: Cases and Readings, 1994. This collection of cases has not been widely adopted despite an identified lack of case materials available to those teaching accounting ethics. The question becomes whether the lack of adoption suggests that accounting academics are not particularly interested in incorporating ethical issues in the classroom or whether there are difficulties with the quality of the collection. The paper continues by examining the current state of research in accounting ethics and again asks what this tells us about commitment to teaching accounting ethics. While the conclusions of this examination are far from definitive, there are signs that all is not well with the accounting ethics discipline.     

The Nature of Business Planning Undertaken by General Practitioner Fundholding Practices in the North West Region

This article focuses on a central feature of the former Conservative Government's approach to the National Health Service (NHS), the introduction of General Practitioner Fundholding. It examines the nature of business planning undertaken by fundholding practices in the North West Region by looking at the participation of various stakeholders in the business planning process, the business planning techniques adopted and the extent to which fundholding practices set and monitor their objectives.     

Tax Reform,Sector‐specific Labor Supply and Welfare Effects*

This paper focuses in particular on the 1992 tax reform in Norway. In this reform the top marginal tax rates were cut considerably. We find that the impact on overall labor supply is rather modest, but these modest changes shadow for stronger sectoral changes. The tax reform stimulated the women to shift their labor from the public to the private sector and to work longer hours. A calculation of mean compensated variation, calculated within the framework of a random utility model, shows that the richest households benefited far more from the 1992 tax reform than did the poorest households.