Following the money: The globalization of capital flows and private equity

Global capital flows have long been the domain of the developed nations. The emerging markets, at best, have been nominal players. Today, the tables have begun to turn. The developing nations have become bigger players as global growth increasingly shifts toward the Middle East, Asia, Central Europe, and Latin America. Accordingly, global capital flows are slowly being reconfigured; in the future, flows will increasingly take the form of north‐south movements, or flows between the developed and developing nations. They will also become south‐south in nature, as well as south‐north. Private equity, long driven by U.S. players, will become less U.S.‐centric in the future. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Industrial property letting: Traditional v radical approaches

Following the earlier article on GLC and GLEB property letting, this contribution argues that an industrial lettings policy is inadequate for the promotion of good employment practices and sector strategy.     

Alternative Forms of Mixing Banking with Commerce: Evidence from American History

Much of the discussion about banking and commerce in America has failed to make several crucial distinctions and has not accounted for many arrangements that have promoted the mixing of these activities. We investigate the history of banking and commerce in the United States, looking both at bank control of commercial firms and commercial firms' control of banks. We trace how these controls have changed with shifting definitions of "bank" and changing methods of "control." Despite the regulations prohibiting some arrangements that promote financial control, we find evidence of extensive linkages between banking and commerce in the United States. These linkages usually build on devices that are very close substitutes to the arrangements prohibited by law. Altogether, our findings question the often made claim that traditionally banking in the United States has been separated from commerce. Furthermore, given that research on Japan and Germany has shown that the mixing of banking and commerce matters for a variety of issues, our evidence also raises some questions on similar research in the United States which makes the simplifying assumption that these industries are separated.     

Regulation And The Rise In Asset-Based Mutual Fund Management Fees

In this article I explain why asset‐based fees are common for mutual fund management companies and why the average fee has increased recently. I argue that Securities and Exchange Commission fee regulations make alternative fee types illegal or unattractive. Management companies can maintain higher fees because regulations and brand‐name capital partly insulate them from competition and because investors cannot easily distinguish between performance‐oriented and marketing‐oriented fund companies. Index funds and unit investment trusts may offer competition to mutual funds in the future because they are designed to minimize management fees.     

Learning during audit tasks in the field: A model, methodology, and experiment

Learning during performance of auditing tasks in the field is modeled as a change in the state of an auditor's knowledge base that results from experience during performance of a task. Several hypotheses are proposed and, along with data obtained by means of behavior observation and concurrent verbal protocols, used to interpret the problem-solving behaviors of four first-year auditors who performed an unfamiliar but audit-related task in simulated auditing environments. Significant findings of learning during performance of the experimental task are reported. While the data show that the auditor-subjects continuously encountered new learning situations throughout the task, they are inconclusive regarding learning through improved knowledge content. On the other hand, significant evidence is found that the learning that did occur was manifest by a greater availability of the auditor-subjects' knowledge. The implications of these findings in terms of the nature of audit tasks and the development of more expert-like task behavior are discussed.     

On Testing for the Nullity of Some Skewness Coefficients

Three tests for the skewness of an unknown distribution are derived for iid data. They are based on suitable normalization of estimators of some usual skewness coefficients. Their asymptotic null distributions are derived. The tests are next shown to be consistent and their power under some sequences of local alternatives is investigated. Their finite sample properties are also studied through a simulation experiment, and compared to those of the √ b ₂-test.