Vacation decisions,activities, and satisfactions

Vacations are a major consumer expense category. People devote considerable attention to deciding whether to take one or not (generic decision), to making joint decisions as husband, wife, and children, and to acquiring information from different sources and media. Information functions to sensitize, persuade, heighten appreciation, and legitimize choices. Several vacation types can be distinguished. Life-style, as a broader concept, may server as a good basis of explanation for vacation behavior. Equity and attribution are important concepts in understanding vacationer (dis)satisfaction and complaint behavior.     

Predicting Business Failures in Canada*

Empirical researchers and practitioners frequently use the bankruptcy prediction models developed by Altman (1968) and Ohlson (1980). This poses a potential problem for practitioners in Canada and researchers working with Canadian data because the Altman and Ohlson models were developed using U.S. data. We compare Canadian bankruptcy prediction models developed by Springate (1978), Altman and Levallee (1980), and Legault and Véronneau (1986) against the Altman and Ohlson models using recent data to determine the robustness of all models over time and the applicability of the Altman and Ohlson models to the Canadian environment. Our results indicate that the models developed by Springate (1978) and Legault and Véronneau (1986) yield similar results to the Ohlson (1980) model while being simpler and requiring less data. The Altman (1968) and Altman and Levallee (1980) models generally have lower performance than the other models. All models have stronger performance with the original coefficients than with re‐estimated coefficients. Our results regarding the Altman and Ohlson models are consistent with Begley, Ming, and Watts (1996), who found that the original version of the Ohlson model is superior to the Altman model and is robust over time. Les chercheurs empiriques et les praticiens ont souvent recours aux modèles de prédiction des faillites élaborés par Altman (1968) et Ohlson (1980). Or, le fait que ces auteurs aient utilisé des données des États‐Unis dans l'élaboration de leurs modèles soulève un problème particulier pour les praticiens canadiens et les chercheurs qui traitent des données canadiennes. Les auteurs comparent les modèles canadiens de prédiction des faillites mis au point par Springate (1978), Altman et Levallée (1980) et Legault et Véronneau (1986) aux modèles proposés par Altman et Ohlson, en se servant de données récentes pour évaluer la robustesse de tous ces modèles dans le temps et l'applicabilité des modèles d'Altman et Ohlson au contexte canadien. L'analyse révèle que les modèles de Springate (1978) et de Legault et Véronneau (1986) produisent des résultats similaires à ceux du modèle d'Ohlson (1980), bien qu'ils soient plus simples et exigent moins de données. De façon générale, les modèles d'Altman (1968) et d'Altman et Levallee (1980) sont moins performants que les autres modèles. Tous les modèles sont plus efficaces lorsqu'ils font usage des coefficients initiaux que lorsqu'ils sont appliqués à de nouvelles estimations des coefficients. Les résultats obtenus en ce qui a trait aux modèles d'Altman et d'Ohlson corroborent ceux de Begley, Ming et Watts (1996) qui constatent que la version initiale du modèle d'Ohlson est supérieure au modèle d'Altman et résiste au passage du temps.     

Liberal Jansenists and interest-bearing loans in eighteenth-century France: a reappraisal

Abstract

This article is an attempt to prove that although the liberal Jansenists – Jansenism being the most powerful Christian protest movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – were not the first and the only ones to address the prohibition of interest-bearing loans, their writings on the issue shifted and fuelled the debate during the French Enlightenment, especially among the Encyclopédistes and the economists. By refuting the very logic of “extrinsic titles” of the Scholastics and their extension later on by the Jesuits, the liberals Jansenists redefined “interest” as the price to be paid for the use of money.     

Structural replacement or structural inducement: government ties of Chinese business executives

We suggest that the structural replacement thesis, which proposes that managers in Chinese nonstate-owned enterprises (NSOEs) possess more government ties than managers in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), is theoretically incomplete because it considers only the motivation of managers of NSOEs. The extensiveness of social ties is influenced also by the capability and opportunity for social actors to cultivate these social ties. We introduce the structural inducement thesis, which holds that SOE managers have more government ties than do NSOE managers, as an alternative to the structural replacement thesis. Our analysis of 250 Chinese managers' ties supports this structural inducement thesis. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tourism's external account and the balance of payments

This paper argues that the balance of payments on tourism account is not the best measure of economic tourism activity needed for good policy formulation at the government level. The balance on tourism should be replaced with a broader concept, tourism's external account, which includes expenditures and receipts from tourists together with those other international transactions which follow indirectly from tourism. This concept will provide a broader understanding of the tourism industry so that better policy decisions can be made.     

Reporting Bias and Monitoring in Clean Development Mechanism Projects*

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a flexible carbon market mechanism managed by the United Nations. The program grants tradable carbon emissions credits (Certified Emission Reductions) for carbon‐reducing projects in developing countries. A project can only be admitted to the program if it is not financially profitable, and thus would not take place without the emission credits granted through the CDM. In this paper, we examine how monitoring reduces incentives of companies to bias the reported expected financial viability of potential CDM projects to gain admission to the program. We find that reported rates of return, which are a key factor for admission to the program, tend to be downwardly biased and are negatively associated with the expected benefits stemming from forecasted greenhouse gas reductions. However, monitoring from various sources mitigates some of the distorted incentives and related reporting bias. Furthermore, the monitoring effect becomes much stronger after 2008, when the CDM Executive Board implemented a series of measures to strengthen the additionality testing that provides guidance for program applications.     

Audit Quality and the Market Valuation of Banks’ Allowance for Loan Losses*

The recent banking crisis has led market participants to focus on the adequacy and quality of banks’ balance sheet items such as the allowance for loan losses. Beaver and Engel (1996) document that the capital market prices the nondiscretionary component of loan loss allowance negatively and the discretionary component less negatively. Using data from the pre‐crisis period and three measures of audit quality, auditor type (i.e., Big 5 versus non–Big 5), auditor industry specialization/expertise, and audit and nonaudit fees paid to auditors, we examine the effect of audit quality on the market valuation of the discretionary component of the allowance for loan losses. We find that, relative to the nondiscretionary component, the market valuation of the discretionary component of loan loss allowance is higher for banks audited by Big 5 auditors than for banks audited by non–Big 5 auditors. We also find that the relative market valuation of the discretionary component of loan loss allowance is increasing in auditor expertise. Regarding the impact of fees paid to auditors, we find that banks paying higher audit fees have higher relative market valuation of the discretionary component of the allowance for loan losses, but banks that pay higher nonaudit fees do not.     

Identifying and Managing Control System Benefits and Costs

A well‐functioning management control system is essential to ensure the organization's strategy is executed as planned. While accounting students are provided many opportunities to master the design of management control systems, students are provided fewer opportunities to practice applying management control systems. This interactive role play allows students to experience the challenges managers face when applying organizational control systems. The role play fits best at the end of the unit where instructors have reviewed management control system design and application and is best suited for undergraduate and MBA students who have little or no supervisory experience. Students rated the role play as highly effective, as 97 percent (n = 38) of the students recommend that instructors at other institutions adopt this exercise.     

The business of blacklisting

The omission of ideology from managerial discourse leaves unacknowledged the dominant influences that shape patterns of thinking and acting. The Cold War offers one such framework for analyzing the intersection of management and ideology. Specifically, the anti‐Communist blacklist in the United States offers a rich opportunity to explore the actions of business leaders and to test the assumptions on which those actions were based. Businessmen played a key role in creating and supporting the blacklist. This study suggests that enforcers of the blacklist distorted the nature of public response. The evidence suggests that businessmen were responding from an ideological rather than a pragmatic position and that, from a pragmatic perspective, they might have been well advised to ignore the blacklisters. Copyright © 2008 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Qualitative Research in the Service of Understanding Learners and Users of Statistics

This paper seeks to add to a scholarly dialogue regarding the role and value of qualitative techniques in research on learning and using statistics. The paper briefly outlines some of the core assumptions of qualitative research methods, and presents four examples to illustrate selected qualitative methods that are used by educational researchers and service organizations. The discussion emphasizes the need to integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches in research on learners and users of statistics, and suggests that such integration may be needed to study emerging web-based communities of learners and users of statistics.