Islamic Religiosity and Auditors’ Judgements: Evidence from Pakistan

Journal of Business Ethics - We extend the literature by providing evidence that a cultural variable, intrinsic Islamic religiosity is important in understanding auditors’ judgement in the...     

Effect of scenario planning on field experts' judgment of long‐range investment decisions

We present the results of three field experiments demonstrating the effect of scenario planning on field experts' judgment of several long‐range investment decisions. Our results show, contrary to past findings, that the use of multiple scenarios does not cause an aggregate increase or decrease in experts' confidence in their judgment. Rather, expert judgment changes in accordance with how an investment fares in a given scenario: it becomes more favorable if the investment is found to be useful for a particular scenario used by the expert, and vice versa. This scenario‐induced change is moderated by the expert's confidence in his/her judgment before using the scenario. Finally, our results show that field experts prefer more flexible options to make specific long‐range investments after using multiple scenarios. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysing Service Quality in the Hospitality Industry Using the SERVQUAL Model

This study reports an application in the hospitality industry of the SERVQUAL model developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry. Although originally developed for application within the financial services sector, the model is designed to measure those components of service that generate satisfaction within five dimensions. This study identified the existence of gaps between clients' and management perceptions of attributes of the hotel, and between client expectation and perception of the services offered. It is argued that the existence of these gaps is a source of dissatisfaction with services provided. Factor analysis identified five dimensions explaining 78 per cent of variance, but these differed from the SERVQUA L model.     

Marketing Closed‐End Fund IPOs: An Analysis of the International Stock Funds

Various studies argue that underwriting fees are excessive and investment bankers prolong the price stabilization period in aftermarket trading of closed‐end fund (CEF) shares. The poor performance of these funds also raises questions about the financial sophistication of initial public offering (IPO) buyers. In this study, we examine these issues for a sample of international stock CEFs. Our findings indicate that underwriting fees are not excessive relative to industrial issues, and we do not find that investment bankers prolong the stabilization period to camouflage the underwriting cost. Our findings are consistent with earlier studies that discounts contribute significantly to the poor performance during the first six months of aftermarket trading.     

A bounds analysis of school completion rates in Australia

Official estimates of school completion rates in Australia increased in the 1980s, peaked in 1992, and fell immediately thereafter before stabilizing. The official estimates were a specific focus of Australian education policy. The decline caused concern at the time. We use data from the Australian Youth Survey (AYS) to gain insight into the behavior of the official estimates. The AYS suffers from nonrepresentativeness, attrition and nonresponse, which means that parameters of interest are not identified. Our bounds analysis is suggestive that school completion was overstated in the official estimates at their peak. Our analysis points to repetition as a key factor in inflating the official estimates. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Delivering quality accommodation for small businesses in London despite market difficulties

Public policy on the subject of small business support generally concentrates on tackling market failures in delivering finance, innovation, technical development, skills and entrepreneurship. However, in growing city regions such as London, the difficulty in obtaining good quality fit-for-purpose accommodation can be an important factor inhibiting the growth of otherwise successful business. The rate of business formation is very high in London, but paradoxically, the very vibrancy of the economy creates a real estate market that can be hostile to the needs of small businesses, particularly those which achieve rapid growth. This article will consider the factors that cause this situation and will then outline some practical examples of how they can be overcome by smart public sector intervention.     

Market structure and the efficiency of European insurance companies: A stochastic frontier analysis

This paper is motivated by the progressive liberalisation of the European insurance market in recent years. It uses stochastic frontier analysis to estimate Flexible Fourier cost functions for European insurance companies. Separate frontiers are estimated for life, non-life and composite companies. We adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of both one-sided and two-sided error terms is modelled jointly with the frontiers. This approach allows us to simultaneously control for the impact of heteroskedasticity on the estimation of scale economies as well as estimating the effect of firm size and market structure on X-inefficiency. The study draws on Standard & Poor’s Eurothesys data set of financial reports for the period 1995 to 2001. This provides technical and non-technical accounts at year-end for life, non-life and composite insurance businesses in 14 major European countries. Our estimates suggest that over this period most European insurers were operating under conditions of decreasing costs (increasing returns to scale), and that company size and domestic market share were significant factors determining X-inefficiency. Larger firms, and those with high market shares, tend to have higher levels of cost inefficiency.     

Income, Cohort Effects, and Occupational Mobility: A New Look at Immigration to the United States at the Turn of the 20th Century

How did turn-of-the-20th-century immigrants perform in the American economy relative to native-born Americans? This article reassesses this question using data from the 1900 and 1910 American census files. I find in both cross sections that American immigrants perform well in blue-collar and white-collar occupations, with either faster growth in earnings or an outright earnings advantage over native-born Americans in the same occupational sector. Estimates of within-cohort growth reveal that the cross-sectional results do not overstate immigrant progress due to cohort effects. Immigrants also exhibit a high degree of mobility into the well-paid white-collar sector of the American economy, and the progress of the immigrant population as a whole was not slowed by the emergence of the “new” immigration.