Attitudes of Business and Non-business Students Toward Corporate Actions

This study examined differences in the attitudes of business and non-business students toward economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary corporate actions. The results from a sample of two hundred and forty-two (242) university students indicated differences across three background variables (college major, gender, and race).     

The relative efficiency of king's,ecclesiastical, and lay estates in Domesday Essex, 1086

In the Domesday survey of 1086, information on the inputs and output of most production units in the English economy was carefully collected by questionnaire survey and verified in court. In this paper, Essex estate data are used to assess whether similar production functions describe production for the three major classes of production unit in the economy – king's, ecclesiastical, and lay estates. A data envelopment analysis is undertaken to determine whether production on one class of estate was more efficient than on the others. The evidence suggests that production processes and management performance were similar on the three classes of estate.     

Who in Brazil Will Gain from Global Trade Reforms?

The potential impacts of multilateral trade liberalisation on developing countries are the subject of numerous controversies. One particular concern is that Brazil, a major agricultural exporter and a country with one of the world's most unequal income distributions, will reap a substantial share of the potential benefits to developing countries from agricultural trade reform, and that most of those benefits will go to large‐scale commercial farmers rather than to the country's smallholders. This claim is explored via a global general equilibrium model and a national model of Brazil containing multiple agricultural and non‐agricultural households. Brazil is found to account for nearly one‐half of all the benefits to developing countries deriving from global agricultural trade reform. These gains are associated with improvements in the welfare of each group and a lower incidence of poverty. Large‐scale producers gain more than smallholders as they tend to be relatively specialised in export products, but there are important gains to agricultural employees, who are relatively poor, and to urban households, who benefit from the expansion of the agro‐food sector. Overall, there is no discernible impact on income inequality, and no evidence that the gains to commercial farmers occur at the expense of poorer households.     

Cycle and Trend in Models of the Range of Equilibria

This paper investigates the potential of models of the range of equilibria to yield a pattern of equilibrium rates of unemployment that is consistent with the observed mix of cycle with no trend in the rate of unemployment. To do this the paper considers a model in which wages are determined by a group of unionised insiders bargaining with an employer. In the model the supply of labour is endogenous. Specifications of the utility function are found which are consistent with the mix of cycle and no trend in the rate of unemployment. Of these it is concluded that loss aversion in the evaluation of wage relativities is a crucial ingredient for models of the range of equilibria.     

Review of Categorical Models for Classification Issues in Accounting and Finance

Recent studies have extensively used the logit or probit models for classification problems in accounting and finance. More than 289 articles in prestigious journals have used these or similar methods from 1989 through 1996. This paper reviews several categorical techniques and compares the performance of logit or probit with alternative procedures. Intuitive and mathematical explanations of how the models examined differ in terms of underlying assumptions and other attributes are provided. The alternative techniques are applied to two substantive research questions: predicting bankruptcy and auditors' consistency judgements. Four empirical criteria provide some evidence that the exponential generalized beta of the second kind (EGB2), lomit, and burrit (all new to the accounting and finance literature) improve the log-likelihood functions, and the explanatory power, compared with logit and other models. EGB2, lomit and burrit also provide significantly better classifications and predictions than logit and other techniques.