Accounting for Sustainable Development over the Long‐Run: Lessons from Germany

We construct long‐run sustainability indicators based on changes in Comprehensive Wealth – which we refer to as Genuine Savings (GS) – for Germany over the period 1850–2000. We find that German sustainability indicators are positive for the most part, although they are negative during and after the two World Wars and also the Great Depression. We also test the relationship between these wealth changes and a number of measures of well‐being over the long‐run: changes in consumption as well as changes in average height and infant mortality rates. We find a positive relationship between GS and our well‐being indicators over different time horizons, however, the relationship breaks down during WWII. We also test if the GS/Comprehensive Wealth framework is able to cope with massive disinvestment at the end of the Second World War due to war‐related destructions and dismantlement. We find that negative rates of GS were by and large avoided due to the accumulation of technology and growth‐friendly institutions. We demonstrate the importance of broader measures of capital, including measures of technological progress, and its role in the process of economic development; and the limits of conventional measures of investment to understand why future German consumption did not collapse.     

Investigating the Impacts of Organizational Factors on Employees’ Unethical Behavior Within Organization in the Context of Chinese Firms

Unethical behavior is under-examined in the workplace. To date, few studies have attempted to explore the antecedents of an employee’s ethical decisions, particularly with respect to unethical behavior and its effects. To capture an employee’s psychological perception of unethical behavior in the workplace, this paper integrates organizational factors (codes of conduct, likelihood of detection, and performance pressure) into the Theory of Reasoned Action. By conducting an empirical study in a Chinese firm, we found that codes of conduct and performance pressure have a significant influence on an employee’s attitude toward and social beliefs about unethical behavior. We also demonstrated that employees’ unethical behaviors affect the firm performance of an entrepreneurial venture. The insights gleaned from the findings on this Chinese company have a number of important implications for both research and practice.     

Estimating local average treatment effects in aggregate data

In some contexts, the effect of a treatment can be estimated with easily accessible aggregate rather than individual data, using difference-in-difference estimation. However, under imperfect assignment within groups, this produces intent-to-treat estimates, which may not be the treatment effect of interest. This article provides a method for estimating local average treatment effects using aggregate data. I also suggest a data source that allows the method to be applied when treatment rates are not recorded.     

Home and away: Why do consumers shy away from reporting negative experiences in the peer‐to‐peer realms?

This study investigates how customers use their construct of “home” in evaluating their experience in peer‐to‐peer rented accommodation, as opposed to traditional hotels. The literature has paid considerable attention to people's perceptions of destinations, but almost none to their perceptions of “home” and its complexities whilst visiting a destination. We examine the relationships between the concepts of “home” or “here” represented in peer‐to‐peer accommodation and the construct of “away” or “there” represented in traditional hotels. A mixed‐method approach determines the existence of bias in reporting behavior. Our findings indicate that there is a consistent review gap between institutional actors and peer‐to‐peer actors. Also, consumers of peer‐to‐peer accommodation prefer not to engage in negative reporting if a bond with the host is developed. This perception of a home shapes consumers' relationship with the host and leads to reporting bias. This study provides clear theoretical insights to advance our knowledge about the underlying motives behind reporting behavior of negative experiences. Furthermore, it offers practical implications for both institutional and peer‐to‐peer contexts.     

A Next Step in Debt Enforcement: the Merger of Debt Help and Debt Collection

Since the 1990s, each Member State of the European Union designed a policy that infused the liberal American fresh start policy into its own social institutions and legal culture. Especially in countries with a civil law tradition, the legal position of the consumer has improved. The paradigm of lifelong liability of debts has been replaced by a form of limited liability. Discharge of debts has established itself as a firm legal principle in all European jurisdictions. In most European countries, the new approach consists of a combination of legal and extrajudicial instruments. Under the umbrella of the courts, social workers, trustees, and administrators perform a broad range of activities in monitoring and helping debtors. The so-called new-chance approach has dramatically changed the playing field amongst debtors and creditors. The new legal equilibrium worked rather well in most European countries in the 1990s and 2000s. However, the systems are obviously far from perfect as almost all European governments are still fine-tuning their laws. Recently, two innovations have appeared on the European stage: Some Nordic countries have opted for a centralized state-controlled enforcement system, while in the UK, commercial debt management plans were developed, mainly by commercial suppliers. In 2005, the US Bankruptcy Code was changed in favour of the creditors. The 2008 credit crunch and its aftermath present a window of opportunity for the next step in the modernization of debt enforcement policy. I will suggest a merger of the fields of debt relief and debt collection, with a pivotal role for independent trustees.     

A Conditional Approach to Measure Mortality Reductions Due to Cancer Screening

The prevailing lack of consensus about the comparative harms and benefits of cancer screening stems, in part, from the inappropriate calculations of the expected mortality impact of a sustained screening programme. There is an inherent, and often substantial, time lag from the time of screening until the resulting mortality reductions begin, reach their maximum and ultimately end. However, the cumulative mortality reduction reported in a randomised screening trial is typically calculated over an arbitrarily defined follow‐up period, including follow‐up time where the mortality impact is yet to realise or where it has already been exhausted. Because of this, the cumulative reduction cannot be used for projecting the mortality impact expected from a sustained screening programme. For this purpose, we propose a new measure, the time‐specific probability of being helped by screening, given that the cancer would have proven fatal otherwise. This can be decomposed into round‐specific impacts, which in turn can be parametrised and estimated from the trial data. This represents a major shift in quantifying the benefits due to a sustained screening programme, based on statistical evidence extracted from existing trial data. We illustrate our approach using data from screening trials in lung and colorectal cancers.     

Management Speaks,Investors Listen: Are Investors Too Focused on Managerial Disclosures?

Market regulators are concerned about the completeness of management-provided explanations in financial reports and other venues. In particular, the Securities and Exchange Commission has articulated the growing problem of firm managers selectively emphasizing information that is favorable to their firm's financial status. In this two-experiment study, we examine whether investors are adversely influenced when firm managers provide only a partial explanation for a firm's financial outcomes, even though the investors have information about all of the causes for a firm's financial outcomes. Our results reveal that investors are misled by partial management explanations. We demonstrate that this effect occurs in situation both when qualitative information is known about the causes and when quantitative information is known about the causes. We document that one way in which this overreliance on management-provided partial information can be mitigated is when investors are provided with a quantitative analysis of the management explanation; with this quantitative analysis we observe that investors are able to distinguish between partial and complete explanations. Our study has implications for regulators and researchers.     

Interpersonal Targets and Types of Workplace Aggression as a Function of Perpetrator Sex

We investigated the relationship between biological sex of the perpetrator and enactment of two forms of psychological workplace aggression (i.e., overt and covert) against two different interpersonal targets (i.e., supervisors and co-workers). Based on theories of power, we tested hypotheses using two samples (n ₁  = 155, 57% females; n ₂  = 152, 54% females). In comparison to women, results showed that men enacted greater levels of overt aggression against both supervisors and co-workers. Men and women reported enacting equal levels of covert aggression against both supervisors and co-workers. Taken together, these findings suggest that although biological sex of the perpetrator distinguishes levels of enacted overt aggression in the workplace, there are no differences between the sexes on levels of enacted covert aggression in the workplace.