Innovation or renovation: effective project design for accounting and MBA students

It has long been recognized that accounting and finance students need multidisciplinary skills and most degree courses reflect this in the curriculum. In addition, the growth of business administration courses, with a high accounting and finance content, and the constant call for relevance and ‘real world’ application, has persuaded many academics that educational progress can be made by employing project-based group work to bring together diverse skills and disciplines. This paper endorses that view, but suggests that careful thought is required to match the aims of the project with the developing skills and experience of the student groups. It explores the role of project clients and student learning and also the level of faculty involvement necessary to fulfil learning objectives. These issues are explored within the context of a project on mergers and acquisitions, which combines strategy, economics, accounting and behavioural considerations and has been employed on full-time MBA courses at one UK university (disguised as ‘Utopia’ in the paper) for more than 20 years. Experience from the project suggests that renovation of old methods is often preferable to major innovations and that the involvement of outside clients needs to be thought through carefully. A semi-live close-bounded version of the project is shown to work better than an open-ended pure consultancy project.     

Demand Revelation,Hypothetical Bias,and Threshold Public Goods Provision

We examine the issues of hypothetical bias, demand revelation, and gender differences in a threshold public goods experiment with heterogeneous induced-values. First, we find no evidence of hypothetical bias in our threshold provision public goods experiments, despite the fact this is an open-ended type mechanism. Our results support recent experimental findings that use induced-values to investigate hypothetical bias. Second, we investigate the demand revealing performance of real and hypothetical payments and find no evidence that real payment performs better than hypothetical payment in our experiments. Third, we examine whether payments, real and hypothetical, are positively related to induced-values. Our results suggest there is statistical evidence that payments are positively related to true values. Finally, we examine the effect of gender on real and hypothetical payments in our experiment. The results show that gender matters for contributions through both real and hypothetical payments, after controlling for true values as well as socio-economic variables. Results also indicate that females are more likely to truthfully reveal their value than males through hypothetical payments, but gender is not significant for truthfully revealing their value through real payments.     

THE ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CONDITIONING INFORMATION ON PORTFOLIO EFFICIENCY IN THE PRESENCE OF COSTLY SHORT‐SELLING

The economic significance of conditioning information in the presence of costly short‐selling is investigated. Using a compact testing framework, results demonstrate that fixed‐weight stock‐bond portfolios appear inefficient with respect to stock‐bond portfolios with weights determined by extant predictors. However, this result is highly dependent on ex ante knowledge of the predictor set and the ability to short‐sell at low cost. In the absence of such conditions, fixed‐weight stock‐bond portfolios appear efficient with respect to conditioning information.     

On the spatial nature of the groundwater pumping externality

Most existing economic analyses of optimal groundwater management use single-cell aquifer models, which assume that an aquifer responds uniformly and instantly to groundwater pumping. In this paper, we develop an economic model of groundwater management that explicitly incorporates spatial dynamic groundwater flow equations. Calibration of our model to published economic studies of specific aquifers demonstrates that existing studies generally incorrectly estimate the magnitude of the groundwater pumping externality relative to spatially explicit models. In particular, for large aquifers with surface areas of thousands of square miles, the marginal pumping externality predicted by single-cell models may be orders of magnitude less than that predicted by a spatially explicit model, even at large distances from a pumping well. Conversely, for small aquifers with areas of a few hundred square miles or less, single-cell models reasonably approximate the pumping externality. Application of single-cell models to inappropriate settings may result in misleading policy implications due to understatement of the magnitude and spatial nature of the groundwater externality.     

EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF FOREIGN AID ON CORRUPTION: HAS THE “ANTI‐CORRUPTION MOVEMENT” BEEN EFFECTIVE?

Though many studies have referred to an “anti‐corruption movement” beginning in the 1990s by major international organizations, none has empirically tested its effectiveness on corruption. The data show that from 1997 onward, the impact of multilateral aid is strongly and robustly associated with lower corruption levels, while bilateral aid is shown to be an insignificant determinant. An increase in any official development assistance (ODA) pre‐1997 is associated with higher levels of corruption or has no impact at all. Using panel data from 1986 to 2006, this study reveals a more nuanced relationship between ODA and corruption than previous studies and demonstrates that when disaggregating the time periods, there are sensitive temporal effects of ODA's effect on corruption overlooked by earlier studies, and provides initial evidence of the effectiveness of the international organization anti‐corruption movement in the developing world.     

Credit default swaps and stock prices： Further evidence of mean and volatility transmission using a GARCH-M model

This paper empirically investigates the association between the stock market and the credit default swap （CDS） market in terms of mean and volatility spillovers. The analysis uses daily observations from four stock markets and two European CDS indices, along with the error correction （EC） methodology and the generalized heteroskedasticity in mean （GARCH-M） modelling. The authors find that stock returns across European and US markets are negatively related to European CDS spread changes, that the CDS market seems to lead the stock market （implying that information contents coming from the firm＇s environment impacts first on the CDS market and then on the stock market）, and that CDS spreads volatility has a positive impact on stock market returns, both in mean and in volatility.     

Perfect competition in asymmetric information economies: compatibility of efficiency and incentives

The idea of perfect competition for an economy with asymmetric information is formalized via an idiosyncratic signal process in which the private signals of almost every individual agent can influence only a negligible group of agents, and the individual agents’ relevant signals are essentially pairwise independent conditioned on the true states of nature. Thus, there is no incentive for an individual agent to manipulate her private information. The existence of incentive compatible, ex post Walrasian allocations is shown for such a perfectly competitive asymmetric information economy with or without “common values”. Consequently, the conflict between incentive compatibility and Pareto efficiency is resolved exactly, and its asymptotic version is derived for a sequence of large, but finite private information economies.