Is there really an Asian connection? Professional service quality perceptions and customer satisfaction

Scenarios involving dental services investigate whether Asian cultures are similar enough to allow standardization of service offerings. The authors control and manipulate levels of service quality and performance to yield a 2 × 2 experimental design, with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean subjects (N = 637) selected to test the invariance of the measures. The findings yield significant cultural differences with the Chinese respondents perceiving significantly higher service quality and expressing greater customer satisfaction when performance is high and expressing less customer satisfaction when performance is low than do the Japanese and Korean respondents. Thus, even though all three countries are considered high-context cultures, having their roots in Confucianism, differences in national culture lead to the conclusion that “one size does not fit all” in terms of service offerings.     

Do macroeconomic forecasters use macroeconomics to forecast?

Faced with an uncertain future, forecasters often rely on textbook relationships to build a coherent narrative for their macroeconomic forecasts. We focus on two cornerstones of modern macroeconomics – Okun’s law and the Phillips curve – and examine whether or not professionals forecast in a way that is consistent with these. Using microdata from the US, Euro Area, and UK surveys of professional forecasters, we examine forecasts over the period 1981-2017 at the level of the individual and across different time horizons. Our findings show that the majority of forecasters produce their forecasts in a manner that is consistent with macroeconomic theory.     

国际内部审计执业准则修正草案探讨

2008年1月公布的国际内部审计执业准则修正草案与原轨业准则相比，在结构和内容上都有较大变化，有助于内部审计质量的追一步提高。为了更好地理解该准则修正草案，本文对其修正前后内容进行了对比分析，井指出修正意义及影响。     

Ersatz Academics and Scholar-saints: The Supply of Financial Accounting Research

Watts and Zimmerman, in a widely acclaimed article, concluded that accounting theories serve to supply excuses for policies determined by political processes. This paper presents a critical review of Watts and Zimmerman's hypothesis, and in return, suggests that the academic reward system in the leading universities does not encourage that kind of activity. The alternative hypothesis is that there are two markets, one for excuses and the other for scholarly research.     

Factors affecting success in the professional entry exam for accountants in Brazil

This paper explores factors that have affected the success of candidates in the professional entry exam conducted by Brazil’s Federal Council of Accounting. We analyse results of 18,948 candidates who sat for the exam in 2012, using a logistic regression model and the key indicators used by government to monitor the performance of higher education institutions (HEIs) and the characteristics of candidates. We find that success is related positively to the quality of the HEIs from which candidates graduated and to a measure of student ability that is used widely in Brazil. We find also that males perform better than females and that younger candidates perform better than older candidates. The geographical region of Brazil within which candidates completed the exam was also significant. The insights provided will help public policy-makers in Brazil, and the Brazilian accounting profession, to understand key factors associated with current low pass rates.     

Establishing a system for innovation in a professional services firm

Professional service firms are facing new competitive challenges in a global market with more value-focused clients, service commoditization, regulatory changes, and new Internet-enabled business models. They increasingly need to improve competitiveness through sustained innovation of the value they provide and the efficiency with which they provide it. But how can firms establish an effective and sustainable innovation system? This Executive Digest shares a best practice model for innovation based on academic research and honed by a decade of practical experience in application across professional service firms in consulting projects. This work covers how to develop innovation strategies by establishing processes and organization to support innovation, providing innovation training, developing new services, and re-engineering existing services. The author, Alastair Ross, details the practices required and shares some of the challenges encountered in realizing them. This article draws heavily on his latest book, Innovating professional services: Transforming value and efficiency.     

The perfect match: Factors that characterize the AACSB International initial accreditation host school and mentor relationship

Initial Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International accreditation involves a process of pairing mentor and host schools to provide guidance and feedback on the congruence of the host school with the accreditation standards. The mentor serves as the primary resource for assisting the host school in identifying gaps with the standards, and the development and implementation of an initial self-evaluation report to detail steps to meet the standards. Matching mentors and host schools to encourage an effective relationship over a 5-year period would seem to be critical to achieving initial accreditation. In the present study, eight factors related to matching the mentors and host schools were identified. Results revealed only two significant differences between host business schools and mentors, indicating that the process is working well. Based on the results, ways to sustain and enhance the mentor–host school relationship are discussed.     

中国家族企业成长的困境

“家族企业”这一概念在不同国界、不同文化背景、不同市场环境下存在着明显的差异，学者们对于其定义至今没有达成一致。华人家族企业在特殊的成长环境中更是具有其复杂性。本文对家族企业融合金融资本和社会管理资源的困境进行了分析，并提出一些对策建议。     

Anchored or de-anchored? That is the question

Using a variety of approaches, this paper shows that long-term inflation expectations have de-anchored from the ECB’s inflation aim. The long-term expectations reported in the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters have not regained the levels that prevailed before the 2013-14 disinflation. Long-term expectations have also become sensitive to short-term expectations and to negative surprises to inflation. Forecasters who participated in most of the survey rounds were highly sensitive to short-term developments in inflation.     

Evaluating the conditionality of judgmental forecasts

We propose a framework for evaluating the conditionality of forecasts. The crux of our framework is the observation that a forecast is conditional if revisions to the conditioning factor are incorporated faithfully into the remainder of the forecast. We consider whether the Greenbook, Blue Chip survey and Survey of Professional Forecasters exhibit systematic biases in the manner in which they incorporate interest rate projections into the forecasts of other macroeconomic variables. We do not find strong evidence of systematic biases in the three economic forecasts that we consider, as the interest rate projections in these forecasts appear to be incorporated efficiently into the forecasts of other economic variables.