Trading incentives to meet the analyst forecast

We examine stock sales as a managerial incentive to help explain the discontinuity around the analyst forecast benchmark. We find that the likelihood of just meeting versus just missing the analyst forecast is strongly associated with subsequent managerial stock sales. Moreover, we provide evidence that managers manage earnings prior to just meeting the threshold and selling their shares. Finally, the relation between just meeting and subsequently selling shares does not hold for non-manager insiders, who arguably cannot affect the earnings outcome, and is weaker in the presence of an independent board, suggesting that good corporate governance mitigates this strategic behavior.

Teaching Technological Knowledge: determining and supporting student learning of technological concepts

This paper reports on findings related to Technological Knowledge from Stage Two of the Technological Knowledge and Nature of Technology: Implications for teaching and learning (TKNoT: Imps) research project undertaken in 2009. A key focus in Stage Two was the trialing of different teaching strategies to determine how learning related to the components Technological Modelling (TM), Technological Products (TP) and Technological Systems (TS) could be supported. These components fall within the Technological Knowledge (TK) strand of technology in the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) (Ministry of Education, 2007) and as such, reflect the key generic concepts or ‘big ideas’ of technology. During this stage of the research further exploration was also undertaken to determine how student understanding of these three components of technology education progressed from level 1 to 8 of the NZC (Ministry of Education, 2007). This resulted in a significant review of the Indicators of Progression for TM, TP and TS, providing clarification of the nature of the progression expected of students in each component as well as increased teacher guidance to support such progression. Common misconceptions, partial understandings and alternative concepts related to these components were confirmed and explained and five case studies were developed to illustrate strategies employed by teachers and their impact on student learning related to these three components.     

Complex home care: part III--economic impact on family caregiver quality of life and patients' clinical outcomes

Family caregivers perform a significant role in the care of patients with chronic illnesses and prescribed life-long complex home care treatments. Both quantitative and qualitative data from this study suggest the mental health burdens and financial costs of home parenteral nutrition (HPN) caregiving are extensive. In this study, the variability in HPN out-of-pocket expenses and the uncertainty of incurring such extensive costs created additional financial worries within already stressed families. Based on these data, interventions to improve caregivers' sleepiness, depression, and physical health could be hypothesized to improve both patients' and caregivers' quality of life and reduce the frequency of patients' catheter-related infections. These specific nursing interventions also could improve caregiver health and subsequently reduce the costs of caregivers' health care.     

Managerial decision making in customer management: adaptive, fast and frugal?

While customer management has become a top priority for practitioners and academics, little is known about how managers actually make customer management decisions. Our study addresses this gap and uses the adaptive decision maker as well as the fast and frugal heuristics frameworks to gain a better understanding of managerial decision making. Using the process-tracing tool MouselabWEB, we presented sales managers in retail banking with three typical customer management prediction tasks. The results show that a majority of managers in this study are adaptive in their decision making and that some managers use fast and frugal heuristics. Usage of adaptive decision making seems to be mainly driven by low objective task difficulty, the use of fast and frugal heuristics by experience. While adaptive decision making does not impact predictive accuracy, usage of fast and frugal heuristics is associated with proportionally greater use of high predictive quality cues and a significant increase in accuracy. Hence, the existing skepticism concerning heuristics should be questioned.