Environmental Valuation with Imperfect Information The Case of the Random Utility Model

This paper considers welfare analysis with therandom utility model (RUM) when perceptions ofenvironmental quality differ from objectivemeasures of environmental quality. Environmental quality is assumed to be anexperience good, so that while perceptions ofquality determine choices, ex postutility is determined by objective quality. Given this assumption, I derive a measure ofthe welfare impact of changes in environmentalquality, and I show how this new welfaremeasure differs from the traditional welfaremeasure developed by Hanemann (1982). This newwelfare measure provides an approach tomeasuring the value of information aboutenvironmental quality within the framework ofthe random utility model.     

The teaching of ethics in management accounting: progress and prospects

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed.     

Risk Management by Securities Settlement Agents

As developing countries search for ways to promote capital formation through the establishment of organized exchanges, they will need to pay more attention to the role of risk management in the securities settlement process. The delivery-versus-payment (DVP) agents that facilitate the process of exchanging securities for funds in most world markets have both the incentive and comparative informational advantage to monitor, measure, and manage risks inherent in the securities settlement system.
Unfortunately, most DVP agents have accomplished this task to date through the cumbersome use of position and net debit limits, capital requirements, and collateral requirements. Such limits and requirements are almost everywhere based on relatively arbitrary criteria that may have no relation to the actual replacement cost, principal, or liquidity risk of the transaction, portfolio, or participant on which they are imposed.
To remedy this shortcoming in the current state of risk management at DVP agents, this article holds out the possibility of integrated, comprehensive risk management processes that emphasize and rely on forward-looking measures of risk for individual brokers and across brokers. Many risk measures could serve the settlement agent's purposes, including "value at risk" (or "VaR"), "below target risk,""below-target probability," and "downside semi-variance." The actual summary risk measure used for risk monitoring and control is not as important as the methodology used to generate that risk measure. "The goal of such a process," as the authors put it, "is to ensure that the risks to which a settlement agent and its residual claimants are exposed are those risks to which the agent's shareholders think they are and want to be exposed."     

The service sector of Cuba: An analysis and critique

The Cuban economy has experienced a significant increase in foreign direct investment over the past decade due to the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of more liberal trade policies. Although the U.S. embargo of trade with Cuba still exists, there has been movement lately that suggests the end of the four‐decades‐old policy. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current Cuban business environment and to identify potential entrepreneurial opportunities in the service sector. Major trade partners are also reviewed and managerial implications discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Impact of Cannabis Use on Health

Summary Chronic daily cannabis use has been shown to have long term harmful health effects, which in turn is expected to reduce labour market productivity. The evidence is less clear on the health impact of less frequent consumption, which is the more typical mode of use, and previous empirical studies fail to find robust evidence of an adverse impact of these modes of use on labour market productivity. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by directly estimating the impact of cannabis consumption in the past week and past year on health status using information on prime age individuals living in Australia. We find that cannabis use does reduce self-assessed health status, with the effect of weekly use being of a similar magnitude as smoking cigarettes daily. Moreover, we find evidence of a dose-response relationship in the health impact of cannabis use, with annual use having roughly half the impact of weekly use.Helpful comments on an earlier draft were received from Jan van Ours, Rosalie Pacula, two anonymous referees and participants at the 81st Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association International.     

Umpire and batsman: Is it cricket to be both?

The paper is a response to Richard De George's essay, Theological Ethics and Business Ethics. It defends the possibility of theologically oriented approaches to business ethics by pointing out certain deficiencies in business ethics narrowly based on the premisses of analytic moral philosophy. In particular it argues, in a manner consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), that such a program of business ethics is insufficiently critical of its own roots in the social fiction of bureaucratic rationality. After showing how this ideology governs De George's negative judgments on theological approaches to business ethics, the author outlines a program of critical reflection that would draw from the intellectual traditions of both theology and philosophy in order to facilitate a dialogue in business ethics that no longer is captive in the Iron Cage of bureaucratic rationality. Dennis P. McCann is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at De Paul University. He has served on the faculties of Reed College and Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Christian Realism and Liberation Theology (1981) and a co-author of Polity and Praxis: A Program for American Practical Theology (1985).