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In recent years, many corporations have initiated downsizing programs to eliminate jobs, close facilities and withdraw from major lines of business. These initiatives have been justified in the name of creating “lean and efficient” organizations. In many cases, top management is rewarded with large bonus compensation packages. Such rewards are considered to be consistent with the goal of maximizing shareholder value. We compare stakeholder and shareholder value models of management accountability to gain insights into the broader economic and societal consequences of the current financial reporting model. Specifically, we examine downsizing at United Technologies Corporation to demonstrate how current financial reporting practices privilege shareholder/management interests over other stakeholders and favor actions that may result in detrimental effects to corporate stakeholders and society at large. This paper extends extant research by providing a concrete example of how “generally‐accepted” financial reports may be used to analyze economic events (like corporate downsizing) through multiple perspectives.

The accounts of moral reform that nineteenth-century convicts offered the officials in charge were frequently characterized by such uniformity that it caused Dickens to mistrust their sincerity and to brand them scornfully as “pattern penitence.” Unlike Dickens, however, prison officials were more willing to credit the questionable authenticity of “patterned” repentance. The paper argues that rather than an effect of personal gullibility, reformers’ attitudes can be seen as an outcome of specific interpretative strategies which, in turn, constituted a response to several institutional challenges facing the nineteenth-century Penitentiary.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers respond to price promotions in stores and on internet channels during a holiday season. Since holiday shopping has long been considered promotion intensive and multichannel shopping is increasing, it is important to understand whether consumers respond differently to price promotions from these two different channels. The paper aims to examine whether the extent of price promotions that consumers perceive in online and offline channels and their sensitivity to such price promotions influences their holiday spending in each channel.

A public telephone survey was conducted to collect data during the month of December 2006. Using random sampling in Florida, a total of 501 responses were collected.

Overall, the findings support the effectiveness of price promotions during holiday periods. Such awareness of the extensive practice of price promotions at stores can encourage holiday spending offline; additionally, sensitivity to price promotions on the internet can be transferred into increased holiday spending online.

The results of this paper extend knowledge of how holiday price promotions affect consumer spending and provide important insights into how retailers should develop price promotion programs that are well tailored to consumer behaviors in different channels.

This paper addresses an untapped issue on how price promotions are perceived in multichannel holiday shopping contexts.

This paper aims to examine the behaviour, both contemporaneous and causal, of stock and bond markets across four major international countries.

The authors generate volatility and correlations using the realised volatility approach and implement a general vector autoregression approach to examine causality and spillovers.

While results confirm that same asset-cross country return correlations and spillovers increase over time, the same in not true with variance and covariance behaviour. Volatility spillovers across countries exhibit a substantial amount of time variation; however, there is no evidence of trending in any direction. Equally, cross asset – same country correlations exhibit both negative and positive values. Further, the authors report an inverse relation between same asset – cross country return correlations and cross asset – same country return correlations, i.e. the stock return correlation across countries increases at the same time the stock and bond return correlation within each country declines. Moreover, the results show that the stock and bond return correlations exhibit commonality across countries. The results also demonstrate that stock returns lead movement in bond returns, while US stock and bond returns have predictive power other country stock and bond returns. In terms of the markets analysed, Japan exhibits a distinct nature compared with those of Germany, the UK and USA.

The results presented here provide a detailed characterisation of how assets interact both with each other and cross-countries and should be of interest to portfolio managers, policy-makers and those interested in modelling cross-market behaviour. Notably, the authors reveal key differences between the behaviour of stocks and bonds and across different countries.

This paper aims to examine hotel guests’ satisfaction relative to room rates paying attention to the heterogeneity in the scale of satisfaction scores.

This paper studies guests’ post-purchase hotel evaluation using survey data from a sample of 14,879 tourists visiting a Northern Spanish region. This study estimates a Heteroskedastic Ordered Probit model in which both “cognitive” and “emotional” components of satisfaction are modelled. The model allows us to control for heterogeneity in the scale of the latent satisfaction scores.

This paper finds that satisfaction relative to rates (value for money) decreases with expenditure per person and day. Interestingly, this negative relationship mainly holds for those who do not prioritize prices at the time of choosing the hotel. Positive first impressions are positively associated with higher satisfaction. In addition, this study finds that the emotional component of satisfaction increases with hotel quality and hiring a full board, being also greater among women and elderly people.

Instead of using an overall measure of satisfaction, this paper uses one that gathers how the tourist assesses satisfaction in relation to cost (value for money).

Using unpublished time‐series data for three specific age/gender groups, we first determine the percentage of female employment to total employment for nine sectors of the U.S. economy. Second, we estimate the cyclical change in hours of employment for each age/gender group within each sector. Third, we estimate the cyclical behavior of the nominal wage for each sectoral gender group. The paper’s evidence does not support, in general, a more cyclical response of female hours worked in the service‐producing sectors that are dominated by women. We find partial evidence that hours worked by men are more cyclical compared with hours worked by women in the male‐dominated goods‐producing sectors. Given the evidence of no pronounced difference in the cyclical behavior of hours and wages for men and women, the business cycle is gender‐neutral.That is, the elastic female labor supply is washed out over the business cycle across major sectors of the U.S. Economy. Observational evidence suggests supply‐side and structural factors in the economy have attenuated the business cycle, especially in the service‐producing sectors.