Sustainability adrift: An evaluation of the credibility of sustainability information disclosed by public organizations

This article aims to evaluate the credibility of information disclosed by public organizations in terms of sustainable development. It focuses on an under-studied aspect in the sustainability reporting literature—namely, the factors that may affect the credibility of disclosure practices. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of the sustainable development content of annual management reports disclosed by 113 ministries and public bodies in the province of Quebec, Canada. The findings shed more light on the main factors that affect the credibility of the information disclosed therein, particularly in terms of lack of transparency and flawed monitoring mechanisms.     

The designing of corporate accounting law in Japan after the Second World War

After the Second World War, during the neutralization of the controlled economy of wartime Japan, a design for a Corporate Accounting Law was elaborated by the Investigation Committee on the Business Accounting System. The Investigation Committee tried to establish not only new business accounting standards but also a central and independent administrative organ of corporate accounting regulation on the basis of the Corporate Accounting Law. The Corporate Accounting Law was expected to lay the legal foundation of the new corporate accounting regulation regime in Japan. Nevertheless, even though the original design of the fundamental accounting law was never realized, it should be considered the starting point for our understanding of external accounting history in post-war Japan.     

The effects of stringent capital requirements on large financial institutions

Journal of Regulatory Economics - With the growing size of the interbank financial market, it is often argued that capital regulations for large wholesale banks should be more stringent than for...     

Reliability parameters estimation for parallel systems under imperfect repair

We consider in this paper a parallel system consisting of \(\eta \) identical components. Each component works independently of the others and has a Weibull distributed inter-failure time. When the system fails, we assume that the repair maintenance is imperfect according to the Arithmetic Reduction of Age models (\(ARA_{m}\)) proposed by Doyen and Gaudoin. The purpose of this paper is to generate a simulated failure data of the whole system in order to forecast the behavior of the failure process. Besides, we estimate the maintenance efficiency and the reliability parameters of an imperfect repair following \(ARA_{m}\) models using maximum likelihood estimation method. Our method is tested with several data sets available from related sources. The real data set corresponds to the time between failures of a compressor which is tested by Likelihood Ratio Test (LR). An analysis of the importance and the effect of the memory order of imperfect repair classes (\(ARA_{m}\)) will be discussed using LR test.     

A decision model for adopting an extended warranty under different maintenance policies

Numerous products are sold with a warranty period and the possibility of buying an extended warranty for a given additional cost. The buyer has then to decide to take the extended warranty or not when purchasing the product. We develop in this paper a mathematical model to study the opportunity provided by the extended warranty for the buyer as well as for the manufacturer. The total average cost incurred by each side during the product’s life cycle is expressed in order to determine the maximum extra cost the consumer should pay and the minimum price at which the manufacturer should sell the extended warranty. This is done under different options in terms of maintenance strategies adopted during the product’s lifecycle.     

Lessons from the Specific Factors Model of International Trade

The Specific Factors model is an excellent learning tool. It provides insights into the meaning of economic efficiency, how complex economies simultaneously determine prices and quantities (and that it is relative prices that matter), and how changes in demand conditions or technology can affect income distributions among owners of factors of production. The authors develop this model using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets help students deal with “what-if” questions within prepared spreadsheets. They also give students the chance to look into the workings of the model and to change its structure. The exercise spreadsheets provide important advantages over using “black-box” presentations. Moreover, using spreadsheets gives students an opportunity to practice their use of spreadsheet software.