“What’s the Harm in Being Unethical? These Strangers are Rich Anyway!” Exploring Underlying Factors of Double Standards

Previous studies show evidence of double standards in terms of individuals being more tolerant of questionable consumer practices than of similar business practices. However, whether these double standards are necessarily due to the fact that one party is a business company while the other is a consumer was not addressed. The results of our two experimental studies, conducted among 277 (Study 1) and 264 (Study 2) participants from a Western European country by means of an anonymous self-administered online survey, demonstrate that the respondents were not only harsher in their judgments of unethical business (vs. consumer) behavior, but also harsher in their judgments of unethical behavior by prosperous (vs. non-prosperous) consumers and prosperous (vs. non-prosperous) business companies (Study 1). Further, they were also less tolerant of unethical behavior by consumers (vs. one’s best friend) and business companies with which they have a less than good (vs. a good) relationship (Study 2). These results indicate that double standards are due to differences in perceived wealth between subjects and in the individual’s relationship with subjects. These two factors imply that double standards are not strictly reserved to consumer–business relations, but might also be used in business–business and consumer–consumer relations. Further, these results indicate that companies need to be aware of the fact that good financial figures may backfire as they might lead individuals to be more critical of a company’s deceptive practices. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of businesses investing resources—and to keep investing resources—in developing a good relationship with stakeholders as these good relationships lead to stakeholders being less prone to make moral condemnations.     

Intra-Industry Specialization in United States–China Trade

Frictions in U.S.–China bilateral trade relations have intensified in recent years. Changes in intra-industry specialization indicators are used to assess factor adjustment pressures that may have been experienced by U.S. and Chinese industries from recent growth in bilateral trade. Many industries experienced large increases in intra-industry trade over the 2000–10 period. Only 14 of 62 U.S. industries may have experienced factor adjustment pressures. Most U.S. industries gained from growth in U.S.–China trade. Nine Chinese industries may have faced factor adjustment pressures. The United States should refrain from using trade remedy measures to address bilateral trade frictions and focus instead on improving trade relations.     

Understanding Recent Empirical Evidence on Race and Labor Market Outcomes in the USA

The concepts of path dependence and lock-in have received growing acceptance but have generally been thought of as driven by positive feedback on the supply side of the economy. A case through example is made here of how endogenous preferences positive feedback in utility from consumption, social considerations, and institutional considerations can all lead to path dependence and the persistence of suboptimal consumption choices. The case here specifically relates to meat consumption and utilizes behavioral, institutional, as well as neoclassical approaches to justify the conclusion. It is argued that increased meat consumption, which at one time may have had positive value, has developed increasingly negative consequences both at the individual and social level. Negative impacts include health consequences, low production efficiency, and environmental damage, among others. Nevertheless, preferences for meat are maintained by multiple factors including historical dependence of tastes, socially established meanings of consumption choices, and institutional inertia.     

Institutional change and academic patenting: French universities and the Innovation Act of 1999

The Innovation Act was introduced by the French government in 1999, with the aim of encouraging academic institutions to protect and commercialize their scientists’ inventions. We explore the effects of the Act on the distribution of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over academic scientists’ inventions. We find that, before the Act, academic institutions had a strong tendency to leave such IPRs in the hands of their main funders, namely public research organizations (such as CNRS or INSERM), and business companies. After the introduction of the Act, French academic institutions increased their propensity to claim IPRs over their employees’ inventions, mainly under the form of co-ownership with business companies. This result varies with the technological class of the patent, the presence and age of a technology transfer office within the university, and the university size and type.     

Bankruptcy in the pulp and paper industry: market’s reaction and prediction

This paper examines North American pulp and paper company bankruptcies that occurred between 1990 and 2009. We demonstrate that shareholders suffer substantial losses (37 %) during the month a bankruptcy occurs. Encouragingly, we show that financial ratios are useful in predicting firm failure and that failed firms are less profitable, more liquidity constrained and higher in debt leverage. Using a binary logit model in the spirit of Ohlson (J Acc Res, 19, 109–131, 1980), we predict financial distress for pulp and paper firms 1 to 2 years ahead of the bankruptcy. We also adapt and re-estimate the empirical model on a sample of pulp and paper firms and perform in-sample and out-of-sample forecasts. For the out-of-sample analysis, our re-estimated Ohlson models correctly predict 93 % of bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy outcomes.     

Evaluating the long-run impacts of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on US domestic airline travel

As a result of the Public Utilitie Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), state public utility commissions have begun to implement cost-based rate-setting procedures in order to rationalize energy choices made by utilities and utility customers. This rationalization had been necessary in view of the increased competition characterizing the eletric utility industry. Taking these regulatory and competitive change as a point of departure we develop and implement an electricity rate-setting model which is cost based, which explicitly accounts for static and dynamic competitive pressures, and which is welfare maximizing. The model extends standard Ramsey methods to include bothshort-run andlong-run price responses in the inverse elasticity rule. We use the estimated model to evalute and design alternative rates. Our analysis takes a distincly strategic approach, explicitly addressing competition from other fuels and the possibility of competitive bypass.     

A comparative analysis of funding schemes for public infrastructure spending in Quebec

The economic literature has been investigating the positive relation between public infrastructure spending and the productivity of the private sector since Munnell (1992). We have introduced this relationship into a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the Quebec economy to investigate various funding schemes to scale up infrastructure spending in the province. We draw our assumptions from Estache et al. (2010) combined with sectoral elasticity parameters. We conduct a comparative analysis where the funding comes from debt alone, and debt with sales tax, income tax and business tax. Our main finding is that the income tax seems to produce the most positive effects and the businesses tax the most negative effects, though differences are small.     

A DSGE model of China

We use available methods for testing macro models to evaluate a model of China over the period from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms up until the crisis period. Bayesian ranking methods are heavily influenced by controversial priors on the degree of price/wage rigidity. When the overall models are tested by Likelihood or Indirect Inference methods, the New Keynesian model is rejected in favour of one with a fair-sized competitive product market sector. This model behaves quite a lot more ‘flexibly’ than the New Keynesian.     

Corporate Governance and Performance of Externally Managed Singapore Reits

This paper employs a new scoring framework designed by the Asia Pacific Real Estate Association (APREA) to examine the link between corporate performance and quality of corporate governance among externally managed REITs listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange (S-REITs). The empirical tests provide evidence supporting a positive correlation between corporate governance practices and stock performances. However, we find no positive correlation with operating performance proxied by accounting measures. In other words, S-REITs with higher corporate governance tend to register better risk-adjusted returns but do not outperform operationally. To test for market efficiency, the study shows that S-REITs with the best corporate governance practices also have less information asymmetry.     

Ontology-based e-Assessment for Accounting Education

Abstract

This summary reports on a pilot of a novel, ontology-based e-assessment system in accounting. The system, OeLe, uses emerging semantic technologies to offer an online assessment environment capable of marking students' free text answers to questions of a conceptual nature. It does this by matching their response with a ‘concept map’ or ‘ontology’ of domain knowledge expressed by subject specialists. This article describes the potential affordances and demands of ontology-based assessment and offers suggestions for future development of such an approach.