The Impotence of Accountability: The Relationship Between Greater Transparency and Corporate Reform

This paper explores the role of accounting in the attempted reform of the corporation during the “progressive era” in the United States. Focusing on the activities of three institutional bodies in the early twentieth century, the paper documents how their repeated recourse to “publicity,” which relied crucially on accounting technologies, failed to turn the corporation into an entity more sensitive to the public interest. Specifically, two interrelated contributions are made to existing literature on accounting and corporate governance. Firstly, the paper documents the early historical development of the now taken‐for‐granted phenomenon of accounting and adjudicating at the entity level (Miller and Power 2013). Secondly, the paper offers a rejoinder to present‐day projects of corporate governance which identify better and enhanced accountability as key to the successful reform of the corporation. During the progressive era, accounting expanded and territorialized new spaces, bringing trusts out of a hitherto secretive, private realm and into the view of the public. Yet this was not enough to engender substantive corporate reform.     

Customer Rage Episodes: Emotions, Expressions and Behaviors

In this research, we examine customer rage-associated emotions, expressions, and behaviors following service failure. Three independent studies involving 656 respondents and multiple methods are employed to investigate customer rage. Scales for each form of rage emotion, expression, and behavior were developed and used to assess their interrelationships. Results suggest that different forms of customer rage emotions tend to be linked to different types of expressions and behaviors. For example, both Rancorous Rage and Retaliatory Rage emotions tend to increase Verbal expressions (such as raising one's voice, yelling, and making insulting remarks). In contrast, Retaliatory Rage emotion increases Physical expressions (tried to physically harm a service employee, tried to cause damage to property, and threatened to damage property) and Displaced expressions (took anger out on other people nearby, yelled at other people, and took their anger out on other people later on) whereas Rancorous Rage emotion decreases Physical and Displaced expressions. Interestingly, Verbal expressions are linked to passive-aggressive behaviors, such as switching service providers and spreading negative word of mouth while Physical expressions are linked to relatively aggressive behavior, such as a desire for revenge. Implications for scholarly research and retailers are discussed.     

RENT-SEEKING: VALUING TULLOCK'S REJECTS

This paper demonstrates that Gordon Tullock's articles on rent seeking continue to be cited, often far more frequently than the papers which journals chose to publish when they rejected Tullock's submissions.     

Optimal Concentration and Deadweight Losses in Canadian Manufacturing

When economies of scale are impontant, there may be too many firms in a market to effectively exploit these scale economies. Although more firms imply reduced market power, this may not offset the adverse impact of higher unit cost. We explore this trade-off by estimating for 107 Canadian industries optimal concentration, this being the concentration that maximizes, for given firm conduct, producers and consumers' surplus. We then calculate deadweight losses as the difference between total surplus at optimal concentration and total surplus at current concentration levels. Among the conclusions are that the majority of industries have concentration that is too low.     

Bank loan-loss provisions and the income-smoothing hypothesis: An empirical analysis, 1976–1984

This article tests an income-smoothing hypothesis for a sample of 106 large bank holding companies for the period 1976 to 1984. Our focus is on the behavior of the provision for loan losses as a function of bank income and alternative measures of business conditions likely to affect loan portfolio risk-taking or quality. Using an econometric model with pooled time-series, cross-sectional data, we find evidence of income-smoothing behavior over our test period. Our dummy-variable models indicate that regional banking companies tend to engage in income smoothing more than money-center banks. Alternative motivations for income-smoothing behavior, which include bank regulatory policy, risk management, agency theory, and compensation policy, are explored and their policy implications considered.     

Exploration of the Dimensionality of the Consumer Ethnocentric Tendencies Scale in Mozambique

The objective of the study is to validate the Consumer Ethnocentric Tendencies (CET) scale in Mozambique and to explore its dimensionality. The study was carried out using a questionnaire-based survey to collect data from 273 respondents in Mozambique. A back-translation technique was applied in combination with a pilot study to verify the quality of the instrument in the Portuguese language. The study results showed that Mozambican consumers surveyed were moderately ethnocentric and that the CET scale demonstrated a four-dimensional structure.     

Why are some favourite-longshot biases positive and others negative?

Most studies of both pari-mutuel and fixed-odds betting markets have shown a systematic tendency for the expected return to bets at lower odds to exceed those at higher odds. Some work, however, has revealed in certain markets the absence or even reversal of this bias. We present a model which distinguishes two separate types of bettor, and use this to demonstrate how transactions costs, the extent of public information, and consumption benefits of betting can explain the disparities. Our empirical evidence, taken from a fixed-odds market, lends support to our theoretical conclusions.     

Crisis, Committees and Consultants: The Rise of Value-For-Money Auditing in the Federal Public Sector in Canada

This paper investigates the key drivers behind the origins of value-for-money (VFM) audit in Canada and the aims, intents, and logics ascribed by the original proponents. Drawing on insights from governmentality and New Public Management, the paper utilizes analysis methods adapted from case study research to review a wide range of primary documentation (e.g., Hansards from the Public Accounts Committee, House of Commons debates, the so-called Wilson report and the FMCS study) and secondary documentation (newspaper articles, Office of the Auditor General internal publications, journal articles). Major findings indicate a rise of a management consulting culture within the Auditor General’s office following the appointment of James Johnson Macdonell. VFM legislation effectively operationalized practices drawn from management consulting expertise by invitation of the consultant. It was offered as an answer to the growing scope and size of government, which had become problematized by the Auditor General in terms of parliament losing control over the public purse. The Auditor General’s invocation of financial crisis led to a substantial broadening of mandate and increase in resources for that office.     

Fiscal Sustainability in the EU

We assessed the sustainability of fiscal policy in the 28 European Union countries over the 1980-2015 years. Panel unit root tests in the presence of cross-sectional dependence showed that government revenues, expenditures, the primary balance, and debt were non-stationary series. However, cointegration tests reveled that a long-run relationship exists between government revenues and expenditures as well as between government primary deficit and debt. The results of causality tests were in line with the neutrality hypothesis: government revenues do not cause the expenditures, and vice versa. Furthermore, mixture models analyses indicated the presence of three homogeneous clusters, one of which included Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (PIIGS), whose coefficient of 0.68 indicates the absence of sustainability, since government expenditures grow faster than revenues.