The Americanization of ‘Account Planning’

How Ogilvy & Mather, New York, reassessed and reorganised itself, and looked towards London for new ideas encompassed in ‘Planning’ accounts.     

The Global and the Local; The Cultural Interfaces of Self-determination Movements

This paper uses Indian data to investigate the existence and nature of gender bias in the intra-household allocation of expenditure. An extended version of the collective household model is estimated where the welfare weights, i.e. the bargaining power of the adult decision-makers, are simultaneously determined with the household's expenditure outcomes. Significant gender bias is detected in some items, most notably in education, and it is found that the bias is considerably stronger in the more economically backward regions of the country. It is also found that the results of the test of gender bias vary sharply between households at different levels of adult literacy. This is particularly true of household spending on education. The gender bias in the case of this item is, generally, more likely to prevail in households with low levels of adult educational attainment than in more literate households. This result is of considerable policy importance given the strong role that education plays in human capital formation.     

The ERM Effect,Conflict and Inflation in the European Union

This paper investigates price inflation expectations and wage determination in the ERM member countries with the aim of assessing the importance of the ERM effect and distributional conflict. We have found strong evidence of an ERM effect in the inflationary process of participating countries, but this effect manifests itself primarily through structural changes in labour markets rather than through importing Bundesbank's reputation. This evidence questions the tendency to model the ERM as a credibility-reputation game. Inflation expectations for all ERM countries are strongly influenced by movements in unit labour costs and demand, and secondarily by world commodity and oil prices. The empirical results provide strong support for the conflict approach to wage inflation.     

A socio-technical framework for assessing the viability of carbon capture and storage technology

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is seen as a key technology to tackle climate change. The principal idea of CCS is to remove carbon from the flue gases arising from burning fuels for electricity generation or industrial applications and to store the carbon in geological formations to prevent it from entering the atmosphere. Policy makers in several countries are supportive of the technology, but a number of uncertainties hamper its further development and deployment. The paper makes three related contributions to the literatures on socio-technical systems and technology assessment: 1) It systematically develops an interdisciplinary framework to assess the main uncertainties of CCS innovation. These include technical, economic, financial, political and societal issues. 2) It identifies important linkages between these uncertainties. 3) It develops qualitative and quantitative indicators for assessing these uncertainties. This framework aims to help decision making on CCS by private and public actors and is designed to be applicable to a wider range of low carbon technologies. The paper is based on a systematic review of the social science literature on CCS and on insights from innovation studies, as well as on interviews about assessment of new technologies with experts from a range of organisations and sectors.     

Withdrawn: Three One‐Factor Processes for Option Pricing with a Mean‐Reverting Underlying: The Case of VIX

The above article from the Financial Review, published online on 6 January 2019 in Wiley Online Library ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/fire.12183 ), has been withdrawn by agreement between Srini Krishnamurthy and Richard Warr, the Editors‐in‐Chief, and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The withdrawal has been agreed because it became evident after publication that sufficient written permission from the coauthors was not collected by the corresponding author prior to publication.     

A Tribute to Joel Stern

The co‐founder of corporate finance consulting firm Stern Stewart and Co. pays tribute to Joel Stern, the well‐known popularizer of “modern corporate finance” and consultant to hundreds of companies worldwide who died on May 21, 2019. During a 45‐year career that spanned his graduation from the University of Chicago's School of Business in 1964, a 14‐year stint at the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the formation of Stern Stewart (and its successor, Stern Value Management), Stern traveled the world over, always eager to address and make converts among legions of corporate executives, board members, and MBA students. One key to his success was a passionate reverence for the academic scholars who developed modern finance. Joel's translation of the Miller‐Modigliani valuation model into a practical framework for evaluating corporate performance gained a following among a generation or two of corporate leaders, leading ultimately to the development of EVA, or Economic Value Added, a practical framework for value‐based financial management.     

The effect of experience and complexity on order and recency bias in decision making by professional accountants

Recently, questions have been raised regarding the impact of experience on the susceptibility of professional accountants to judgment bias—particularly order and recency biases as predicted in the Belief‐Adjustment Model. The Belief‐Adjustment Model predicts recency effects will always exist in complex decision domains (regardless of experience). Complexity is defined within the model as a function of task familiarity and information load. The prior studies on experience and bias in accounting domains have focused on varying task familiarity and have found that task familiarity can mitigate order/recency bias. In this study, complexity is operationalised through heavy information load (a condition more consistent with professional accounting environments) while maintaining a high level of task familiarity. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment utilised a going concern decision using highly experienced partners and managers. The second experiment was conducted in the insolvency domain and used 87 experienced insolvency practitioners. The results indicate that experience does not mitigate order/recency bias under conditions of heavy information load.