Same Work,Different Pay? Evidence from a US Public University

Abstract

This study examines detailed data for faculty at a typical public research university in the United States between 1995 and 2004 to explore whether gender wage differentials can be explained by productivity differences. The level of detail – including the number of courses taught, enrollment, grant dollars, and number and impact of publications – largely eliminates the problem of unmeasured productivity, and the restriction to one firm eliminates unmeasured work conditions that confound investigations of wider labor markets. The authors find that direct productivity measures reduce the gender wage penalty to about 3 percent, only 1 percentage point lower than estimates from national studies of many institutions and with fewer productivity controls. The wage structure for women faculty differs markedly from the wage structure for men. Interpreted against the institutional features of wage setting for this population, the paper concludes that penalties for women arise at the department level.     

The effects of country and industry on implementing value chain cost analysis

This study provides evidence based on data collected from 65 US and 34 Hong Kong companies regarding current implementation of value chain cost analysis. The findings indicate significant differences in cost systems of companies in these two regions under value chain framework. The US manufacturing firms have invested more of their resources in upstream activities than have their Hong Kong counterparts, but this observation did not hold in the service industry. Overall, however, the results support a positive link between the percentages of cost and degrees of cost tracing, particularly for upstream activities, for firms in both regions. Implications of this study in cost management for the US and Hong Kong companies are also discussed.     

Accounting education,firm training and information technology: a research note

Rapid developments in information technology (IT) have posed many challenges to the accounting profession. In this study we examined what has been done in US colleges by polling auditors' perceptions to investigate whether US accounting firms provide their auditors with more information on current IT topics than colleges do. Also educators in the USA are surveyed to find out what they are planning to do in college courses to ensure that accounting graduates acquire necessary IT knowledge/skills. The results indicate that the entry-level auditors have had significantly more exposure to IT topics while in college than the senior auditors had, which suggests that educators have modified their curricula by incorporating more IT topics into accounting programmes. According to the findings, educators recognize the importance of IT topics, but only a few IT topics can/will be covered in accounting curricula. Implications, limitations, and future research directions of this study are also discussed.     

Comparing tests of the theory of exhaustible resources

The empirical relevance of Hotelling’s exhaustible resource theory has been tested with primarily negative results. Tests have been performed on various resources, at different levels of aggregation, with varying market structures, and over different time periods. Consequently, it is difficult to draw any general conclusions concerning the theory’s applicability in explaining producer behavior, given the assumptions and restrictions implicit in the data and tests. This paper compares test results when the implicit restrictions associated with the data are removed. Employing a single data set we compare the results for four published tests. Even with this uniform data set, two approaches reject the theory while two do not.     

Litigation environment and auditors’ decisions to accept clients’ aggressive reporting

This study contributes to accounting and auditing literature by addressing two empirical questions: (1) whether litigation environment affects auditors’ decisions to accept clients’ aggressive reporting and (2) whether litigation environment, client business risk, and client retention pressure interact and jointly affect auditors’ decisions to go along with clients’ preferred accounting choices. Fifty-nine (59) US and sixty-one (61) Hong Kong auditors employed by the Big-4 accounting firms participated in this study. The result shows that litigation environment has a significant effect on auditors’ decisions. Auditors who practice in more litigious environments tend to be less willing to go along with clients’ aggressive reporting than those who practice in less litigious environments. This study also confirms that there is a significant interactive effect between litigation environment, client business risk, and client retention pressure on auditors’ decisions to accept clients’ aggressive reporting choices. Implications of the empirical findings for policymakers, standard-setting organizations, and international accounting firms, as well as directions for future studies, are discussed.     

The Demand for Water: Consumer Response to Scarcity

Provision of water raises several issues for municipal utility companies and other suppliers, including reliability of supply in arid regions or during droughts, equity issues that arise because water is literally a necessity, and heterogeneity in consumer response to regulatory policy. We combine experimental and survey responses to investigate demand for water. The experiments simulate water consumption from a potentially exhaustible source, revealing heterogeneous demand for water. We estimate econometrically water demand for different consumer groups. A regulator could use estimates of disaggregated demand to attain conservation goals by designing an incentive compatible pricing system. The example given achieves a conservation goal while minimizing enforcement costs and welfare loss.     

Organizational Ethical Standards and Organizational Commitment

Organizations interested in employee ethics compliance face the problem of conflict between employee and organizational ethical standards. Socializing new employees is one way of assuring compliance. Important for longer term employees as well as new ones, however, is making those standards visible and then operable in the daily life of an organization. This study, conducted in one large organization, found that, depending on organizational level, awareness of an organization's ethical standards is predicted by managerial adherence to and organizational compliance with those standards and/or discussions with peers. Regardless of level, organizational commitment was predicted most strongly by managerial adherence to organizational standards. These findings have theoretical implications for the fields of business ethics, organizational identity and organizational socialization and practical implications for the implementation of ethics policies.     

Judgment and Decision Making in Project Continuation: A Study of Students as Surrogates for Experienced Managers

This work explores the efficacy of using students as surrogates for experienced managers in escalation studies. Participants were 222 managers with substantial project planning and evaluation experience and 146 undergraduate business students. Our results show that the experienced managers exhibited a strong tendency to continue projects, with this tendency being positively related to the degree of project completion. The managers also tended to invest a greater amount of additional resources in response to favourable rather than to unfavourable information, contingent on the degree of project completion. In contrast, the students' decisions showed little sensitivity to the contextual information, and they exhibited no association between the likelihood they would continue a project and how much funding they would allocate to the project. These results suggest that caution is needed in generalizing student-based escalation findings to real-world business settings.     

The Effects of Moral Development and Adverse Selection Conditions on Managers’ Project Continuance Decisions: A Study in the Pacific-Rim Region

According to agency theory, agents base their economic decisions on self-interests when adverse selection conditions exist. However, cognitive moral development theory predicts that ethics/morals may influence decision-makers not to behave egoistically. Rutledge and Karim (1999; Accounting, Organizations and Society 24(2), 173–184) find both the moral reasoning level of the managers and an adverse selection condition affect a manager’s project evaluation decisions significantly. Since prior studies have shown that national␣culture might influence the application of agency theory in project evaluation, this current study uses a different moral development measurement to reexamine Rutledge and Karim’s hypotheses in another culture. A total of 73 Taiwanese executive MBA students with an average of 12.17 years work experience participated in this study. We found that both moral development level and adverse selection conditions significantly affect managers’ project continuance decisions. The interaction effect of these two factors indicates that, when adverse selection conditions exist, participants with a high level of moral development exhibit less of a tendency to continue an unprofitable project than those with a low level of moral development. With subjects from a different culture, our results confirm the findings of Rutldege and Karim. That is, the effects of moral development and adverse selection conditions on managers’ project continuance decisions are robust and can be generalized to different cultures. Implications of the findings of this study to multinational firms are also discussed. C. Janie Chang, Ph.D., is the Vern Odmark Professor of Accountancy at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. She is the co-editor of the Review of Accounting and Finance, and has published in the areas of auditing, managerial accounting, and information systems to investigate information processing of experts. She has also studied cross-cultural issues related to professional judgments and decisions in auditing and managerial accounting. Sin-Hui Yen, Ph.D., is currently a Professor of Accounting at Tamkang University in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. from national Taiwan University. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Contemporary Accounting, and has published in the areas of accounting and finance to investigate human information processes, as well as ethical issues related to business professionals.     

The economic possibilities of natural gas conservation: Antithetical results of prorationing regulation

State prorationing regulations for natural gas production are intended to conserve resources, prevent waste, and, if necessary, protect the rights of property owners. This paper examines the effects of conservation regulations on the stock of the resource and on production costs. Results indicate rules that do not consider the nature of the physical stock and how it is recovered, as well as the heterogeneous nature of the reservoir, may result in sub-optimal production paths for individual wells. Such inefficiencies increase production costs and may in some cases, reduce the recoverable stock; results antithetical to the intended goals of the regulation.I'd like to thank Robert H. Patrick, Duncan Woodliff, and Bob Meyers for helpful discussions, Barry Douglas, Johannes Van Lierop, and participants at the 7th Annual Western Conference Advanced Workshop in Regulation and Public Utility Economics for insightful comments on a previous version of this paper, as well as two anonymous referees and the editor of the journal for helpful comments on an earlier draft. The usual caveat applies.