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Purpose – This study examines the meaning of shopping for Taiwanese students visiting England. It asks how this activity takes place, what purposes it serves for the students, and how the resulting purchases make meaning for the students once they return to Taiwan.

Methodology/approach – The study is ethnographic, involving observation and interviews in England as well as visual elicitation and interviews with the students once they returned to Taiwan and also some time later.

Findings – Shopping for souvenirs in England is found to be part of the process by which young Taiwanese tourists come to understand cultural differences. It is also a part of the process by which these students fulfill social obligations to those family members who have largely funded their trips. It is also a way of engaging with locals through the medium and excuse of shopping. Both the items selected and the memories they encode form thesomewhat stereotypical condensations of the experience of going abroad to “The West.”

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – Those studied represent a young group with limited prior travel experience. Their retrospective recollections are subject to some distortion, although this is a part of the normal process of remembering.

Practical implications (if applicable) – For those planning foreign educational exchange programs, the critical role of shopping in this process should not be neglected.

Originality/value of paper – The researcher accompanied the students on their trip to England and also followed up with them once they returned home to Taiwan. This produced a rare insight into the process of tourist meaning-making during and after their trip abroad.

Quantitative easing (QE) is a new instrument of macroeconomic policy which if not born in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, was at least nurtured by this crisis. The paper looks at both the history and the theory of QE. We then examine its impact, both positive and negative on the economy. The use of QE helped governments deal with the immediate aftermath of the crisis and possibly prevented much sharper recessions than we witnessed. But in many ways its impact on the real economy has been limited and there are dangers in both the potential for substantial inflation to occur at some point in the future and the weakening of the financial sector. We argue that much of the literature misses the point that QE is funding government debt and spending, at a time when fiscal policy is in a period of, perhaps temporary, decline. Finally, we discuss whether QE will be a permanent feature of macroeconomic policy in the future, or whether it will be resorted to only occasionally?

Accounting practitioners and educators agree that effective oral and written communication skills are essential to success in the accounting profession. Despite numerous initiatives to improve accounting majors’ communication skills, many students remain deficient in this area. Communication literature suggests that one factor rendering these initiatives ineffective is communication apprehension (CA). There is general agreement that accounting students around the globe have higher levels of CA than other majors. Therefore, accounting educators interested in improving students’ communication skills need to be aware of the dimensions and implications of CA. This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature on CA, with a focus on CA in accounting majors. It also presents intervention techniques for use in the classroom and makes suggestions for future research.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

This chapter examines the increased levels of cross-asset price comovement and its relationship with the recent rounds of “extraordinary intervention” from the US Federal Reserve. The results show that, even after controlling for the preceding financial crisis, asset return volatility, investor risk perceptions, and channels of monetary stimulus, historically unrelated financial asset returns experienced abnormal changes in their conditional correlations. The strength of these cross-asset correlations is directly linked to periods of Federal Reserve interventions yet disappear when the interventions were (in fact or were perceived to be) withdrawn. Despite being studied extensively in the academic literature, no traditional intervention channels can explain the changes in cross-comovement. It is proposed that the Fed’s extraordinary stimulus caused investors to use Fed announcements as a common, low-cost information source on which they used to make common portfolio-allocation decisions. The changes in comovement during the intervention period may have reduced investor welfare for those with longer-horizon allocation strategies, those not prepared for the eventual ending of the stimulus, and for underfunded liability-optimizing portfolio managers (e.g., state pension funds).

American federalism permits the states a good deal of latitude for action, and, at the same time, the federal government can exercise control through both mandates and the use of its financial powers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal relationship was strained not only because of the sheer magnitude of the crisis but also because of political conflicts between the federal government and some of the states. During the Trump administration, the federal government initially denied the importance of the pandemic, and then (except for encouraging the development of vaccines) did little to support the states or citizens in fighting the virus. The Biden administration, on the other hand, was active in distributing the vaccine and in supporting other responses to the pandemic. The pandemic also exposed the underlying weaknesses in the public health system of the United States and the extent to which years of conflict between levels of government have reduced effective cooperation, even in times of crisis.

Given the maturation of the internet and virtual communities, an important emerging issue in the humanities and social sciences is how to accurately analyze the vast quantity of documents on public and social network websites. Therefore, this chapter integrates political blogs and news articles to develop a public mood dynamic prediction model for the stock market, while referencing the behavioral finance perspective and online political community characteristics. The goal of this chapter is to apply a big data and opinion mining approach to a sentiment analysis for the relationship between political status and economic development in Taiwan. The proposed model is verified using experimental datasets collected from ChinaTimes.com, cnYES.com, Yahoo stock market news, and Google stock market news, covering the period from January 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017. The empirical results indicate the accuracy rate with which the proposed model forecasts stock prices.

This chapter conducts an event study of 30 quantitative easing (QE) announcements made by 21 central banks on daily government bond yields and bilateral US dollar exchange rates in March and April 2020, in the midst of the global financial turmoil triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak. The chapter also investigates the transmission of innovations to long-term interest rates in a standard GVAR model estimated with quarterly pre-COVID-19 data. The authors find that QE has not lost effectiveness in advanced economies and that its international transmission is consistent with the working of long-run uncovered interest rate parity and a large dollar shortage shock during the COVID-19 period. In emerging markets, the QE impact on bond yields is much stronger and its transmission to exchange rates is qualitatively different than in advanced economies. The GVAR evidence that the authors report illustrates the Fed’s pivotal role in the global transmission of long-term interest rate shocks, but also the ample scope for country-specific interventions to affect local financial market conditions, even after controlling for common factors and spillovers from other countries. The GVAR evidence also shows that QE interventions can have sizable real effects on output driven by a very persistent impact on long-term interest rates.

Japan is home to a relatively conservative and group-oriented culture in which social expectations can exert powerful pressure to conform to traditional patterns of behaviour. This includes gender norms, which have long been based around the common stereotypes of men as breadwinners and women as housewives. Social liberalisation and economic change in the late 20th century saw these patterns change as more women entered the workforce and, despite Japan's dismal standing in global equality rankings, began to make inroads into some positions of political and corporate leadership. Yet, the way in which women are treated by men is shaped not only by female gender norms but also by the social factors that determine male patterns of behaviour. This chapter considers how Japan's male gender norms, particularly the focus on man as economic labourers rather than active members of the family unit, have damaged many men's ability to connect, on an emotional level, with the women in their lives. It looks at the issue of misogyny; what is known as the Lolita Complex; the growing trend of herbivore men; and the concept of Ikumen, men who are active within the family. While some of these patterns of behaviour can be harmful – for women on the individual level, and for Japan as a whole, on the social level – there are some trends which suggest that gender norms in Japan can be directed in a manner which will allow for much healthier emotional relationships to develop between the genders in a manner that will help build a society that is more cognisant of and attentive to the needs of women.