Reference points for measuring social performance: Case study of a social business venture

We present a longitudinal qualitative case study to elaborate on how a social venture forms reference points for social performance. Although organizations increasingly use various social performance targets to direct their operations, the scholarly knowledge on social performance reference points remains limited. We make use of the prior accounting literature and draw on the idea of compromising accounts to discuss how provisional and performative metrics can have a significant role in how organizations develop new ways to evaluate their social performance. Given that the social performance reference point criteria are ambiguous and the corresponding referents malleable, performative accounts are helpful as they can intervene in the organizational life by making particular things visible, providing space for interpretations, and facilitating discussion, thus creating temporary settlements and enabling opportunities for productive compromises between different organizational groups and evaluative principles. The recursive feedback loops between reference point referents, criteria and accounting artefacts help the organization to make sense of its own social performance and interpret the associated performance feedback, and thereby provide ground for organizational decisions on further action. Moreover, we discuss how imperfect accounts can be useful for social businesses in their pursuit of developing their activities and achieving social impact.     

Optimal investment with vintage capital: Equilibrium distributions

The paper concerns the study of equilibrium points, or steady states, of economic systems arising in modeling optimal investment with vintage capital, namely, systems where all key variables (capitals, investments, prices) are indexed not only by time but also by age. Capital accumulation is hence described as a partial differential equation (briefly, PDE), and equilibrium points are in fact equilibrium distributions in the variable of ages. A general method is developed to compute and study equilibrium points of a wide range of infinite dimensional, infinite horizon, optimal control problems. We apply the method to optimal investment with vintage capital, for a variety of data, deriving existence and uniqueness of equilibrium distribution, as well as analytic formulas for optimal controls and trajectories in the long run. The examples suggest that the same method can be applied to other economic problems displaying heterogeneity. This shows how effective the theoretical machinery of optimal control in infinite dimension is in computing explicitly equilibrium distributions. To this extent, the results of this work constitute a first crucial step towards a thorough understanding of the behavior of optimal paths in the long run.     

论中国加入WTO后会计理论研究的视点选择

中国加入WTO后,必将对现行会计体系产生一定的影响。因此,现阶段我国会计理论研究的视点为:会计规范体系的完善与会计信息效度的提高,会计管理职能的强化与会计监督责任的履行,会计服务市场的开拓与同业竞争实力的提升,知识产权保护观念的增强与无形资产核算范围的扩展,资源环境保护意识的强化与社会责任会计信息的适量运用,网上交易方式的普遍推行与会计信息传递媒介的创新。     

中日韩自由贸易区的贸易流量和福利效应分析:一个局部均衡的校准方法

校准方法作为一种确定数理经济模型中的变量和参数的手段之一,在贸易政策的建模研究中得到广泛的应用.本文以局部均衡为基础,利用中日韩三国自1990～2003年共14年的贸易额及相关数据建立校准模型,并对拟议中的中日韩自由贸易区做出比较静态分析,从产业层面来模拟中日韩自由贸易区建成后所可能带来的福利效应.分析结果表明,中日韩三国建立自由贸易区会增加彼此的国民福利水平,并会对未加入贸易协定的其他东亚国家产生影响.因此,在东亚形成更为广泛的自由贸易安排从区域合作的角度来看是一种更佳的合作方式.     

区域经济学主流化的新格局:迈向新综合的空间一般均衡理论

区域经济学的研究从1990年后，日趋活跃、争论纷呈，在某种意义上讲，发生了很大的转向。即由克鲁格曼发轫的新经济地理把该领域的某些问题带向经济学主流的一般均衡分析框架下来讨论，他们更加宏伟的蓝图是要实现具有新综合特征的空间一般均衡理论，为区域经济学的研究注入了新的活力。该文简述了这些新理论的基本模型、主要特征和模型的扩展及对经济体系空间特性研究的主要贡献，以及由之而引起的各方面的争论和共识。     

Monitoring recessions: A Bayesian sequential quickest detection method

Monitoring business cycles faces two potentially conflicting objectives: accuracy and timeliness. To strike a balance between these dual objectives, we propose a Bayesian sequential quickest detection method to identify turning points in real time with a sequential stopping time as a solution. Using four monthly indexes of real economic activity in the United States, we evaluated the method’s real-time ability to date the past five recessions. The proposed method identified similar turning-point dates as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with no false alarms, but on average, it dated peaks four months faster and troughs 10 months faster relative to the NBER announcement. The timeliness of our method is also notable compared to the dynamic factor Markov-switching model: the average lead time was about five months when dating peaks and two months when dating troughs.     

Evaluating Projects and Assessing Sustainable Development in Imperfect Economies

We are interested in three related questions:(1) How should accounting prices be estimated?(2) How should we evaluate policy change in animperfect economy? (3) How can we check whetherintergenerational well-being will be sustainedalong a projected economic programme? We do notpresume that the economy is convex, nor do weassume that the government optimizes on behalfof its citizens. We show that the same set ofaccounting prices should be used both forpolicy evaluation and for assessing whether ornot intergenerational welfare along a giveneconomic path will be sustained. We also showthat a comprehensive measure of wealth,computed in terms of the accounting prices, canbe used as an index for problems (2) and (3)above. The remainder of the paper is concernedwith rules for estimating the accounting pricesof several specific environmental naturalresources, transacted in a few well knowneconomic institutions.     

Multiple Species Boreal Forests – What Faustmann Missed

Recent research in natural sciences shows that the dynamics in boreal forests are much more complex than what many models traditionally used in forestry economics reflect. This essay analyzes some challenges of accounting for such complexity. It shows that the optimal harvesting strategy for forest owners is history dependent and for some states of the forest, more than one strategy may be optimal.This paper confirms earlier literature on shallow lakes and coral reefs and shows that this kind of phenomena seem much more common than previously thought. They are valid for a wide range of ecosystems that cover large surfaces and they do not depend on the choice of some specific function to model the non-linearity. There are also indications that theses results could be obtained even for resources with concave growth if at least one species with non-linear growth affects their dynamics.     

独立审计质量的经济学透视

本文从需求和供给两方面分析了独立审计市场中的审计质量均衡状况及其成因,研究发现:一方面,由我国公司治理不完善而引发的对独立审计的代理需求不足,以及特定融资制度下对低质量审计的融资需求强劲,使得我国独立审计的自愿性需求严重匮乏,从而审计师缺乏提高审计质量的内在经济动机;另一方面,现有法规对审计师的激励不足、约束不够,因此目前审计师提供的审计服务质量难于达到社会公众的期望-《独立审计准则》的要求.最后,笔者针对出现的问题提出相应的政策建议.     

Playing safe in coordination games:: the roles of risk dominance, payoff dominance, and history of play

This paper presents results from a series of experiments designed to test the impact on subject behavior of changes in the risk dominance and payoff dominance characteristics of two player coordination games. The main finding is that changes in risk dominance significantly affect play of the subjects, whereas changes in the level of payoff dominance do not. Observed history of play also has an important influence on subject behavior, both when subjects are randomly rematched after each game and when they remain matched with the same individual for a sequence of games.