Testing for Vertical Fiscal Externalities

The purpose of this paper is to design a test of whether the vertical external effects associated with tax base sharing among local and regional governments have become internalized via the intergovernmental transfer system. Such tests are important in the sense that the income tax rates chosen by different levels of government will generally be correlated, even if the resource allocation is optimal from society's point of view. By using panel data for the Swedish local and regional public sectors, the results imply that an increase in the regional income tax rate induces the municipalities in the region to decrease their income tax rates. In addition, we are able to reject the null hypothesis that the vertical external effects have become internalized.     

Worker separations in a nonstationary corporate environment

Assessing ten years of unique personnel data from a large firm, this paper investigates how determinants of worker turnover differ between periods of corporate expansion and decline. Performance and career progress considerably reduce the hazard of job separation during downsizing for blue-collar workers, but are less important for white-collar workers. Effects of firm-tenure, occupation, education, training, part-time status, and gender are largely in accordance with the implications from existing models. But no model generates all patterns observed in the data. Age effects are sensitive to retirement options and discontinuous, dropping in response to the anticipation of becoming eligible for early retirement during downsizing and jumping at the actual retirement age.     

Responsible Leaders as Agents of World Benefit: Learnings from “Project Ulysses”

Research from the fields of criminology and social psychology suggests that the deterrent effect of security countermeasures is not uniform across individuals. In this study, we examine whether certain individual characteristics (i.e., computer self-efficacy) or work arrangement (i.e., virtual status) moderate the influence of␣security policies, security education, training, and awareness (SETA) program, and computer monitoring on information systems misuse. The results suggest that computer savvy individuals are less deterred by SETA programs and computer monitoring, while these countermeasures are also less influential (from a deterrence perspective) on employees that spend more working days outside the office. Implications for both the research and practice of information security are discussed.     

The Cosmopolitical Corporation

Moral issues have been included in the studies of consumer misbehavior research, but little is known about the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment on the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. This study aims to understand the consumer’s use intention of pirated software in Taiwan based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) proposed by Ajzen (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179, 1991). In addition, moral intensity and moral judgment are adopted as a joint moderator to examine their combined influence on the proposed research framework. The results obtained from this Taiwan case reveal that the antecedent constructs proposed in the TPB model–an individual’s attitude and subjective norms toward using pirated software, and perceived behavioral control to use pirated software–indeed have positive impacts on the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. In addition, the joint moderating effect of moral intensity and moral judgment is manifested in the consumer’s use intention of pirated software. The results of this study not only could substantiate the results of consumer misbehavior research, but also could provide some managerial suggestions for Taiwanese government authorities concerned and the related software industries devoted to fighting pirated software.     

Schmerzen erkennen

Schmerzeinsch?tzung im Alter und bei Demenz - Menschen mit Demenz k?nnen h?ufig keine Selbstauskunft über ihr Schmerzerleben geben. Sie sind darauf angewiesen, dass die Schmerzen von anderen erkannt werden. Welche pflegerischen Instrumente erleichtern die Fremdeinsch?tzung von Schmerzen?     

Strategy Development: Conceptual Framework on Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its action-oriented offspring Corporate Citizenship (CC) currently trigger an intensifying debate on ethics, role and behavior of companies within civil society. For companies, CSR raises the question of what may be the “good reason(s)” for acting responsible towards its members, customers or society. In order to answer this question, we face the debate on CSR and its strategic engagement drivers on the levels of corporate culture, social innovation, and civil society. In this article, we provide a conceptual framework based on the analytic distinction of legitimation and sensemaking. The conceptual framework developed in this article can serve as a basis to develop a company’s CSR strategy. It provides measures and instruments to make complex CSR processes more visible and manageable.     

Cash balance pension plans: A case of standard-setting inadequacy

Accounting for and ownership of U.S. private employee pensions has long been a controversial and politically contested terrain. The uniqueness in the U.S. of using employers as the principal provider of pensions makes the reporting of pensions more problematic since the corporate employers providing pensions are not strictly accountable to only the pensioners. Over the last quarter century there has been a marked swing in power toward management and away from employees making it possible for increasing numbers of U.S. companies to switch from conventional defined benefit plans to cash balance plans. This paper provides a “case” study of how accounting standard-setters framed the pension reporting problem vis-à-vis how they frame the “reporting problem” in general. Utilizing various sources of commentary about the phenomenon of cash-balance conversions, we triangulate on the pension problem to demonstrate how current FASB disclosure rules fail to satisfy the condition of neutrality and how those rules have facilitated the shifting of economic risk from shareholders to employees.     

Sovereign wealth funds: National security risks in a global free trade environment

The proliferation of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) has resulted in an unstable political, legal, and regulatory environment for this form of foreign direct investment (FDI). This article explains SWF growth over the last half‐century; discusses issues surrounding SWF “transparency” and host‐country national security risk; reviews the legal and regulatory structures governing FDI in major national economies; examines proposed regulatory approaches to structure the FDI environment; and concludes with a discussion of SWF regulatory policy recommendations addressing corporate governance principles, national security restrictions on equity investment, and investment reciprocity, and suggests recommendations for executives considering engaging an SWF investment partner. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Effect of the ban on short selling on market prices and volatility

We examine the effects of the short‐selling ban, imposed by Australian regulators in the wake of the global financial crisis, on the trading of financial stocks. Our findings argue against commonly stated reasons for imposing short‐sale bans. We find no evidence that short‐sale restrictions provide support for stock prices or that they reduce volatility. Moreover, stocks subject to the short‐selling ban suffered a severe degradation in market quality. Controlling for the adverse effects of the financial crisis on markets, we show that short‐selling restrictions increase intraday volatility, reduce trading activity and increase bid–ask spreads.