The teaching of ethics in management accounting: progress and prospects

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed.     

The Soviet Union after the failure of five years of economic reforms: Towards a new stage of transition?

Conclusion The measures taken by the Pavlov government, at the beginning of 1991, seem to initiate a new economic strategy where administrative power has regained its leading role.Regarding the whole approach of the government, there seem to be signals with very controversial meanings. First, there is the new stress on heavy industry, that could dangerously increase the already deep structural imbalance; the military industrial sector, in particular, could play a greater role since the better performing high technology industries (and services) belong to them. The loosening control over industrial management and discipline throughout the country, could justify the need for strong central control of the government: the heavy industry complex represents a powerful economic and political aggregation that could better defend the unified economic system.Secondly, the resistance to private ownership of enterprises is justified by the unrest engendered by the emergence of a sort of uncontrolled submerged privatisation. The fear of the State's capital assets being sold off cheaply, played an important part in the tightening of control over the process of destatalisation.Thirdly, the rejection of private ownership of land is also linked with the necessary alliance with the old economic structures of kolkhoz and sovkhoz, which represent the consolidated interests in the rural areas.From these different positions emerges the search for a very difficult compromise between the necessary political alliances around the Party, for the defence of central power, and the implementation of some economic reforms which, to become effective, need a substantial liberalisation of economic and political conditions. However, the fundamental limits to the implementation of this moderate programme has to be attributed to the disintegration of the economy by the republican claims. The confrontation on alternative economic programmes and the creation of different regional aggregations could become a very serious tendency towards the progressive disruption of the present Federation.     

Are Liberated Companies a Concrete Application of Sen’s Capability Approach?

Journal of Business Ethics - The capability approach (CA) developed by Amartya Sen focuses on the enhancement of people’s capabilities, i.e. their real freedom to choose a life course they...     

Global Value Chains in the Era of 4IR: New Paradigm of Business Models for SMEs

This paper presents a brief literature review of previous studies methodologies,models,and contexts in studying firms’upgrading in Global Value Chains(GVCs).The...     

Examining the Effectiveness of Fear Appeals in Prompting Help‐Seeking: The Case of At‐Risk Gamblers

With a sample of Australian at‐risk gamblers, this research examines the impact of gender and individual difference in experiential avoidance (EA; cognitive and emotional suppression) on the processing of fear appeals. Study 1, through thematic analysis, explores fear appeal perceptions among at‐risk gamblers. The results identify that relevant threats, such as social and psychological, should be integrated into fear‐inducing advertising stimuli. Study 2 uses multigroup comparisons in structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the robustness of the revised protection motivation model (RPMM) in predicting the effectiveness of fear appeals to induce help‐seeking intentions in at‐risk gamblers. This research examines the boundary conditions of the RPMM through the moderating roles of gender and EA. The results provide evidence that fear partially mediates the impact of perceived susceptibility (PS) on help‐seeking intentions in low experiential avoiders, whereas high experimental avoiders resist fear elicitation. Furthermore, evoked fear does not lead to help‐seeking intentions in male at‐risk gamblers. In female at‐risk gamblers, while fear prompts help‐seeking intentions, PS (i.e., probability of harm) does not translate to behavioral intentions via fear. For both genders and low and high experiential avoiders, cognitive appraisals of PS significantly and positively impact help‐seeking intentions. This research demonstrates the unique roles of gender and EA on fear appeal effectiveness in at‐risk gamblers.     

Implicit Contracts, Managerial Incentives, and Financial Structure

This paper examines how managers may be given incentives to exert effort, and to implement efficient implicit contracts with workers. Under certain assumptions, this can be achieved by tying managerial compensation to shareholder value. However, if reputation effects are weak, it is more efficient to adopt an incentive scheme in which the manager is punished by outside investor intervention when performance falls below a critical level, and otherwise retains control, receiving a fixed reward. The required form of outside intervention can be implemented through a financial structure combining hard debt with a dispersed ownership structure.     

Does access to credit improve productivity? Evidence from Bulgaria1

Although it is widely accepted that financial development is associated with higher growth, the evidence on the channels through which credit affects growth at the microeconomic level is scant. Using data from a cross‐section of Bulgarian firms, we estimate the impact of access to credit, as proxied by indicators of whether firms have access to a credit line or overdraft facility, on productivity. To overcome potential omitted variable bias of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates, we use information on firms’ past growth to instrument for access to credit. We find credit to be positively and strongly associated with TFP. These results are robust to a wide range of robustness checks.     

The determinants of firm start-up and entry in Italian producer services

In this paper the determinants of new firm formation in the producer services are studied by using National Security data on firms with at least one employee. Two ratios are computed and analysed for the 95 Italian provinces: an index of fertility represented by the share of new enterprises on employees, and a birth rate represented for each province by the ratio between new enterprises and resident population. On examination of the determinants of this process, we found that the average wage rates and the ratio of utilized credit to the total line of credit negatively affect both indexes, and that both indexes are affected positively by sector growth and by a measure of small firm presence. The index of fertility is also explained by a dummy variable which identifies for each province those policies which are aimed at fostering the process of new firm formation. The birth rate is instead affected by a dummy variable which is equal to one for the provinces in which the chief towns of each region are located and zero otherwise, and by the potential demand for new producer services arising from the industrial sector.     

Incubation matters: Measuring the effect of business incubators on the innovation performance of start‐ups

This article explores the role of business incubators on the innovation performance of start‐ups; in addition, we also investigate how the incubation effect moderates other important factors driving their innovation performance. The empirical evidence comes from a sample of firms located in Northern Italy belonging to the manufacturing (mechanical engineering firms) and service sectors (knowledge‐intensive business services). The results suggest that the incubation effect is very important in shaping the innovation performance of new ventures (measured as a percentage of sales of new‐to‐market innovations). Moreover, it positively moderates the impact of (1) the internal technical capabilities and (2) the adoption of a limited portfolio of collaborations for innovation.