Peers Versus National Culture: An Analysis of Antecedents to Ethical Decision-making

Given the recent ethics scandals in the United States, there has been a renewed focus on understanding the antecedents to ethical decision-making in the research literature. Since ethical norms and standards of behavior are not universally consistent, an individual’s choice of referent may exert a large influence on his/her ethical decision-making. This study used a social identity theory lens to empirically examine the relative influence of the macro- and micro-level variables of national culture and peers on an individual’s intention to behave ethically. Our sample consisted of respondents from Germany, Italy, and Japan. The results indicated that both national culture and peers were found to act as significant referents in ethical decision-making dilemmas. Although peers exerted a much stronger influence on an individual’s ethical decision-making, the impact of peers varied depending on the national culture levels of individualism and power distance. James W. Westerman is an Associate Professor of Management at Appalachian State University. He received his Ph.D in Management from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MBA from Florida State University. His research interests include person-organization fit, compensation, and employee ethics, and has been published in the Journal of Organizational Behaviour, Journal of Business Ethics, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Group and Organization Management and the Journal of Business and Psychology, among others. Rafik I. Beekun (Ph.D., the University of Texas at Austin) is Professor of Management and Strategy in the Managerial Sciences Department at the University of Nevada. Reno, and Co-director, Center for Corporate Governance and Business Ethics. His current research focuses on business ethics, national cultures and the link between management and spirituality. He has published in such journals as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Relations, Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics and Decision Sciences. Yvonne Stedham is a Professor of Management in College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received a Ph.D. in Business and an MBA from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas and undergraduate degrees in Economics and Business from the University of Bonn, Germany. She joined the University of Nevada, Reno in 1988 and served as Chair of the Managerial Sciences Department from 1999-2002. Dr. Stedham's research covers a broad spectrum of management issues with a special focus on international, business ethics and gender aspects, and has been published in the Journal of Management. Women in Management Review, the Journal of Management Studies, the Journal of Business Ethics,the Journal of European Industrial Training, and the Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resource, and others. Jeanne H. Yamamura, CPA, MIM, PHD, is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada Reno. Her research is focused in the area of the international management of accounting professionals and in ethical decision making. She has published in journals such as the International Journal of Accounting, the International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation and the International Journal of Human Resource Management.     

Empirically Effective Bond Pricing Model and Analysis on Term Structures of Implied Interest Rates in Financial Crisis

In his book (1993) Kariya proposed a government bond (GB) pricing model that simultaneously values individual fixed-coupon (non-defaultable) bonds of different coupon rates and maturities via a discount function approach, and Kariya and Tsuda (Financ Eng Japanese Mark 1:1–20, 1994) verified its empirical effectiveness of the model as a pricing model for Japanese Government bonds (JGBs) though the empirical setting was limited to a simple case. In this paper we first clarify the theoretical relation between our stochastic discount function approach and the spot rate or forward rate approach in mathematical finance. Then we make a comprehensive empirical study on the capacity of the model in view of its pricing capability for individual GBs with different attributes and in view of its capacity of describing the movements of term structures of interest rates that JGBs imply as yield curves. Based on various tests of validity in a GLS (Generalized Least Squares) framework we propose a specific formulation with a polynomial of order 6 for the mean discount function that depends on maturity and coupon as attributes and a specific covariance structure. It is shown that even in the middle of the Financial Crisis, the cross-sectional model we propose is shown to be very effective for simultaneously pricing all the existing JGBs and deriving and describing zero yields.     

How Do Female Spouses’ Political Interests Affect Male Spouses’ Views About a Women’s Issue?

This paper explores how the degree of female spouses’ political interest affects male spouses’ views about women’s empowerment using individual level data in Japan. Controlling for unobserved area-specific fixed effects, results show that males are likely to consider women’s empowerment important if their spouses are interested in politics. This spouse effect is observed for conservative males but not for progressive-neutral males. Results were unchanged when the endogeneity bias caused by spouses’ political interests were controlled for. These findings suggest that female family members’ political interests and views play an important role in determining male views regarding women’s issues.     

Relative Income Position and Happiness: Are Cabinet Supporters Different from Others in Japan?

During the period of 2001–2006, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) adopted a market‐oriented policy under the Koizumi cabinet. Using data covering the Koizumi and first Abe cabinets, the present paper attempts to examine whether the effects of relative income differ between supporters and non‐supporters of the Koizumi cabinet. Key findings are as follows: within the Koizumi cabinet period, a relatively low‐income position is negatively related to happiness for non‐LDP supporters but not for LDP supporters. However, under the period of the first Abe cabinet, the difference in the effect of relative income for LDP supporters and others disappears. These results imply that an expectation of market outcomes leads to a difference in the effect of relative income position on happiness levels.     

东北跨境民族的形成及文化传承发展研究的意义

中国东北有六个少数民族跨境而居.从民族形成的角度看,朝鲜族、 俄罗斯族是因为迁徙而形成的跨境民族;蒙古族、 赫哲族、 鄂伦春族和鄂温克族则是因为国家重新划界所造成的跨境民族.在政治和社会形态,以及文化生活方面已经因为所属国家的不同而有了鲜明的差异,但是在文化传统上、 在民族习俗上,以及文化发展传承上,这些跨境而居的民族却有着不可分割的血缘联系和相同的文化DNA.因此,探究和创新跨境民族文化传承具有特定的意义,同时对于全面建设小康社会,建设和平稳定、 与中国合作的周边环境,也是具有重要的借鉴意义.     

Identity,nostalgia and happiness among migrants: The case of the Kōshien High School Baseball Tournament in Japan

Public broadcasting of all games of high school baseball tournaments attests to their popularity in Japan. The present study uses individual‐level data to test the hypothesis that nostalgia influences the level of happiness of Japanese people. Its key findings were: (i) the number of wins by a prefecture team increased the happiness level of its residents; (ii) this effect applied only to residents of large cities; and (iii) for urban migrants, originally from rural areas, the effect of their home team wins exceeded that of the wins of their host area team. This effect was significant in cases where the host area cultural climate differed from that of the migrant home area. These findings suggest that a scarcity of ‘identity’ goods related to the residential community increases high school baseball influence on happiness. Furthermore, the influence of nostalgia for home on migrants’ happiness is greater than their attachment to their current residential community.     

Effects of justice and utilitarianism on ethical decision making: a cross‐cultural examination of gender similarities and differences

This study investigates the relationship between intention to behave ethically and gender within the context of national culture. Using Reidenbach and Robin's measures of the ethical dimensions of justice and utilitarianism in a sample of business students from three different countries, we found that gender is significantly related to the respondents' intention to behave ethically. Women relied on both justice as well as utilitarianism when making moral decisions. By contrast, men relied only on justice, and did not rely on utilitarianism when faced with the same ethical issues. Further, women's intention to behave was contextual, significantly affected by two national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism), whereas men's decisions were more universal, and not related to national culture dimensions.     

Government Size and Trust

This paper uses individual level data from the Japanese General Social Survey to examine how government size influences generalized trust. After controlling for the endogeneity of government size using instrumental variables, I found: (1) using all samples, government size is not associated with generalized trust, and (2) after splitting the sample into workers and non-workers, government size does not influence generalized trust for non-workers, whereas it significantly reduces generalized trust for workers. This suggests that workers, through their work experience, might have to face greater bureaucratic red tape coming from “larger government,” leading to negative externality effects on relationships of trust in the labor market.     

Effect of Linguistic Heterogeneity on Technology Transfer: An Economic Study of FIFA Football Rankings

This paper used Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) world ranking points data to examine how linguistic heterogeneity has an impact on technology transfer from the most developed countries. The major findings were that the learning effect from the most developed countries on team performance is larger for developing countries than for developed ones and that linguistic heterogeneity has a detrimental effect on technology transfer for developed, but not developing countries. The results presented here are interpreted to imply that the importance of common and proper comprehension of team strategy among members, which improves team performance but is hampered by linguistic heterogeneity, depends on the stage of development.