Financing Local Police Spending in England and Wales: Fiscal Federalism in Practice

Since 1995, police forces in England and Wales have been able to raise revenues locally to supplement grants from central government. We analyse the variation across police force areas in locally raised police revenues over the 2000s, and we find that three‐quarters of the temporal and spatial variation in local revenues per head can be explained by differences in incomes, prices and local preferences. A particularly robust parameter is the effective local community tax price associated with raising revenue. We discuss the police funding model in the wider context of fiscal federalism, and we point to alternative funding structures that could be adopted.     

Does Employing Older Workers Affect Workplace Performance?

Using a panel of workplaces in Britain, we investigate the implications for businesses of employing older workers. Workplace labor productivity falls where the proportion of older or younger workers rises. These raw associations are attenuated somewhat after controlling for aspects of human capital. In contrast, there is no significant association between age shares and workplace financial performance, suggesting that any reluctance by employers to employ greater numbers of older workers may be misplaced.     

Chinese Cultural Values and Personal Referral Sources in International Education Choice

China offers the greatest growth potential for international education across the global markets. To better understand the motivations of students, a survey of 420 university students was conducted and results revealed that students who rated abasement and personal activity orientation as important values were more likely to find personal referral sources influential. Students who rated situation orientation and interdependence as important values were less likely to find personal referral sources more influential. However, there is no significant difference in authority, face, and group orientation. This suggests the complex role of Chinese cultural values in the process of globalization and industrialization.     

Feeling the Effects of a Competitor’s Product Recall: Lessons Learned by Quebec SMEs in the Cheese Sector

This article explores learning opportunities and portrays the product recall as a crisis situation from which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) indirectly impacted by the event can and must learn. It describes the raw milk cheese recall in Quebec. A semistructured interview guide was used. The population studied comprises 12 cheese makers specializing in processing partly or totally raw milk and presents the results of interviews with managers of companies that survived the ordeal. Excerpts from interviews show that cheese makers took advantage of this crisis to improve their capacity to manage product recalls. The comments by the producers interviewed indicate that the crisis had a marked influence on knowledge creation related to prevention and preparedness for product recalls.     

Agricultural Land Prices: The Effect of the Terms of a Sale

Cash sales are often made at a discount. This is as true for farmland as it is for commodities purchased in everyday commerce.
A recent investigation of agricultural land prices in the central part of Wellington County, Ontario, since the mid-1920s confirms the lower price that all-cash can secure, but it finds that price does not increase progressively as the proportion of cash decreases. This seemingly aberrant behavior of farmland price is satisfactorily explained by three separate effects. The first is related to the security potential of loans on different terms; the second, to the market for mortgages; while the third concerns interest rates.     

Social and Environmental Disclosure and Corporate Characteristics: A Research Note and Extension

This paper is concerned with the attempts to explain the disclosure of social and environmental information in the annual reports of large companies by reference to observable characteristics of those companies. An extensive literature has sought to establish whether variables such as corporate size, profit and industry segments can explain corporations' disclosure practices. The results from that predominantly North American and Australasian literature are largely inconclusive. This paper provides an extension of that literature by considering a more disaggregated specification of social and environmental disclosure and by employing a detailed time-series data set. By so doing, the paper tests two possible explanations for the inconclusiveness of prior research: namely that any relationships between corporate characteristics and disclosure are dependent upon the type of disclosure and that any such relationships are not stable through time. The results provide support for these explanations as sufficient, if not necessary, conditions for explaining the inconsistency in prior results.     

Fast-tracking expatriate development: the unique learning environments of international volunteer placements

International volunteering has traditionally been viewed as a pursuit that, while admirable, provided little benefit for the volunteer beyond altruistic satisfaction. Yet several recent studies suggest that an international volunteer placement can fast-track the development of valuable global skills and capabilities. To date, no research has offered a systematic explanation for this. This article presents a framework that outlines the unique mechanisms of international volunteer placements that contribute to them being fertile learning environments for expatriates. In doing so, it draws on evidence from a longitudinal study of the learning experiences of a sample of international volunteers from Australia and New Zealand.     

Social Accounting Research as If The World Matters

Abstract

This essay is intended as a self-reflective, auto-critique of the ‘social accounting community’. The essay is directed at the academic community of accountants concerned with social accounting. This `community' is predominantly concerned with English language accounting journals and is preoccupied with the social and environmental practices of the larger private sector organisations. The essay is motivated by a concern over our responsibilities as academics in a world in crisis and a concern that social accounting is losing its energy and revolutionary zeal. This community's social accounting endeavours have taken place in almost complete ignorance of the activities and developments in non accounting communities and, in particular, developments in the public and third sectors. The essay reaches out to the public and third sector work and literature as an illustration of one of the ways in which ‘our’ social accounting can try to prevent itself from becoming moribund.     

Responding to a Monetary Superpower: Investigating the Behavioral Spillovers of U.S. Monetary Policy

Between 2002 and 2006, the Federal Reserve set interest rates significantly below the rates suggested by well-known monetary policy rules. There is a growing body of research suggesting that this helped fuel an excess of liquidity in the U.S. that contributed to the 2008 worldwide financial crash. It is less well known that a number of other central banks also lowered interest rates during this period. An important question, then, is what role the Federal Reserve played in influencing other central banks to alter their own monetary policies, which could have magnified the Fed’s actions in creating global liquidity. This paper addresses the issue by showing how spillovers in central bank behavior occur in theoretical rational expectations models. It then establishes empirically how U.S. monetary policy actions affect the actions of other major central banks, particularly in terms of interest rates and currency interventions. The models and data suggest that the U.S. lowering its policy rate, either in general or in reference to a monetary policy rule, influences other central banks to lower their own policy rates and intervene in currency markets, even when controlling for worldwide macroeconomic trends. It thus appears that U.S. actions were a factor in the worldwide lowering of interest rates and the increase in currency reserves in the early 2000s that may have contributed to the subsequent global liquidity boom.