Teaching ideas for the commencement of the governmental accounting source

Many undergraduate accounting students enter their first course in governmental accounting with a negative attitude about the subject. This is due, in part, to the fact that after several courses in “accounting,” the governmental course presents methods and procedures which are quite different and are, therefore, suspect. This paper encourages an approach to the course which can overcome this bias by providing an appropriate context from which to commence the course.     

The impact of jump risks on nominal interest rates and foreign exchange rates

This article investigates the relationship between the nominal interest rate and inflation and also the forward exchange rate under a general specification of the underlying processes govering the foreign exchange rate. There are three distinct risks that affect the relation between the real rate of interest and the nominal rate namely, consumption risk, diffusion risk, and the existence of jump risks of inflation. Jump risks lower the nominal interest rate because of jump hedging of a nominal bond. The forward exchange rate depends on the expected depreciation of the domestic currency as well as these three risks. As the domestic jump risks increase, the domestic nominal interest rate decreases and the forward exchange rate decreases.     

Interest and reaction time analysis of credit card offers: Managerial implications of high level research procedures

This paper presents a new approach to the optimisation of direct mail offers. Conjoint measurement will be used to identify two aspects of an offer: the degree of interest; and the speed at which an individual processes the information. The approach allows the marketer to create offers that are simultaneously attractive to customers and easy to understand. The approach is illustrated by a credit card case study.     

In search of global leaders

For all the talk about global organizations and executives, there's no definitive answer to the question of what we really mean by "global." A presence in multiple countries? Cultural adaptability? A multilingual top team? We asked four CEOs and the head of an international recruiting agency--HSBC's Stephen Green, Schering-Plough's Fred Hassan, GE's Jeffrey-lmmelt, Flextronics's Michael Marks, and Egon Zehnder's Daniel Meiland--to tell us what they think. They share some common ground. They all agree, for example, that the shift from a local to a global marketplace is irreversible and gaining momentum. "We're losing sight of the reality of globalization. But we should pay attention, because national barriers are quickly coming down", Daniel Meiland says. "If you look ahead five or ten years, the people with the top jobs in large corporations ... will be those who have lived in several cultures and who can converse in at least two languages." But the CEOs also disagree on many issues--on the importance of overseas assignments, for instance, and on the degree to which you need to adhere to local cultural norms. Some believe strongly that the global leader should, as a prerequisite to the job, live and work in other countries. As Stephen Green put it, "If you look at the executives currently running [HSBC's] largest businesses, all of them have worked in more than one, and nearly all in more than two, major country markets." Others downplay the importance of overseas assignments. "Putting people in foreign settings doesn't automatically imbue new attitudes, and it is attitudes rather than experiences that make a culture global," says Fred Hassan. The executives' essays capture views that are as diverse and multidimensional as the companies they lead.     

Capital as Embodied Knowledge: Some Implications for the Theory of Economic Growth

Capital goods are embodied knowledge of how to produce. Therefore, capital development is a learning process, through which knowledge gets embodied in new capital goods. Because the necessary knowledge is dispersed among many people who must interact to communicate their particular, often tacit knowledge, capital development is a social process. Because this interaction takes time and continually changes the capital structure, capital development is an on-going process. Capital development is a social learning process. Neither traditional nor new growth theory illuminates how the capital structure evolves. Traditional growth theory, by modeling capital as single variable in the production function, ignores the heterogeneity of capital goods and their varied structural relationships of complementarity, substitutability, feedback, and feed-forward. New growth theory, while accounting for technological change, still treats capital as aggregable and thus implicitly homogeneous. That capital development is a learning process suggests that growth rates can increase. What prevents exponential growth is neither diminishing returns nor upper bounds to human capital, as growth models assume. It is the constant challenge of maintaining capital complementarities in a world of incomplete and rapidly changing knowledge.     

The Impacts of Remittances, Residency Status and Financial Attachment on Housing Tenure for Mexican-Heritage Americans: Inferences from a New Survey

Immigration has and will continue to alter the composition of housing demand in the United Sates. In this article, we analyze results from a new survey of Mexican-heritage households to draw some inferences about tenure choice within that group. Some measures of attachment to the United States—residency status and the amount of money sent to relatives and friends in Mexico—suggest that, among Mexican immigrants, permanence is a key determinant of homeownership in the United States. More specifically, being a citizen increased the probability of ownership, whereas being undocumented reduces the probability. Surprisingly, after controlling for residency status, length of tenure in the United States does not predict tenure status, except that those who refused to report length of tenure were more likely to have higher tenure status. Those who sent remittances home to Mexico were less likely to become homeowners.     

Agriculture in the EEC taking stock

The focus of this assessment is the European Community's ‘Stocktaking of the Common Agricultural Policy’. While the CAP has attracted considerable scrutiny and controversy, the Stocktaking represents the most authoritative review of agricultural policy from within the EEC bureaucracy. The authors evaluate first the extent to which the Stocktaking's own analysis is a fair reflection of achievements under the objectives which the CAP has set for itself. Second, they ask whether the proposals for policy reform advocated in the Stocktaking are appropriate. They conclude that the Stocktaking's proposals — and their subsequent interpretation within the EEC — are not adequate to tackle the problems facing EEC agriculture.