Code of ethics quality: an international comparison of corporate staff support and regulation in Australia,Canada and the United States

The objective of this paper is to examine the ‘Code of Ethics Quality’ (CEQ) in the largest companies of Australia, Canada and the United States. For this purpose, a proposed CEQ construct has been applied. It appears from the empirical findings that while Australia, Canada and the United States are extremely similar in their economic and social development, there may well be distinct cultural mores and issues that are forming their business ethics practices. A research implication derived from the performed research is that the construct provides a selection of observable and measurable elements in the context of CEQ. The construct of CEQ consists of nine measures divided into two dimensions (i.e. staff support and regulation). They should not be seen as a complete list. On the contrary, it is encouraged that others propose and elaborate revisions and extensions. A practical implication of this paper is a structure of what and how to examine the CEQ in a managerial setting. It may assist companies in their efforts to establish, maintain and improve their ethical culture, norms and beliefs within the organization and supporting them in their ethical business practices with different stakeholders in the marketplace and society. The dimensions and measures of the construct may be used as a frame of reference for further research. They may be useful and applicable across contexts and over time using similar samples when it comes to large companies, as small‐ or medium‐sized ones may not have considered all areas nor have the elements in place. This is a research limitation, but it provides an opportunity for further research.     

Spatial Evolution of Social Norms in a Common-Pool Resource Game

We study the conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource (CPR) game. We consider three types of agents: cooperators, defectors and enforcers. The role of enforcers is to punish defectors for overharvesting the resource. Agents are located on a circle and they only observe the actions of their two nearest neighbors. Their payoffs are determined by both local and global interactions and they modify their actions by imitating the strategy in their neighborhood with the highest average payoffs on average. Using theoretical and numerical analysis, we find a large diversity of equilibria to be the outcome of the game. In particular, we find conditions for the occurrence of equilibria in which the three strategies coexist. We also derive the stability of these equilibria. Finally, we show that introducing resource dynamics in the system favors the occurrence of cooperative equilibria.      

Variance analysis and linear contracts in agencies with distorted performance measures

This paper investigates the role of variance analysis procedures in aligning objectives under the condition of distorted performance measurement. A risk-neutral agency with linear contracts is analyzed, whereby the agent receives post-contract, pre-decision information on his productivity. If the performance measure is informative with respect to the agent’s marginal product concerning the principal’s objective, variance investigation can alleviate effort misallocation. These results carry over to a participative budgeting situation, but in this case the variance investigation procedures are less demanding.     

Do public budget deficits crowd out private capital expenditures?

Those economists who expected the increasing US budget deficits in recent years to have a negative impact on private investment spending have so far been proved wrong. Hans-Peter Fröhlich provides an analysis of what has happened and examines the interrelation between public sector deficits and private capital expenditures.