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The purpose of this paper is to explore two under‐developed areas of board research: the corporate governance of unlisted companies; and board behaviour, focusing on process factors that contribute to a board performing effectively.

The Board Effectiveness Questionnaire was completed by 67 directors, to gather views on how their board currently operates and how they think it should operate, across various behavioural areas relating to the relationships, decision making, the working climate and predispositions. Analysis of “process losses”, the pattern of sub‐optimal board behaviour, allowed the testing of four hypotheses concerning board effectiveness.

The 18 most important and five least important behaviours were identified, plus 12 showing the greatest “process loss”. Quality of team “relationships” is the main cause of loss whereas evidence for the impact of leadership style is mixed. Size of the board is related to overall performance of the board but number and proportion of non‐executive directors are not.

This is a “purposive, judgmental” sample of all unlisted companies, derived from those who were willing and able to respond. Only one director's view of each board was sought.

The picture of the “ideal” board provides a checklist for a company wishing to assess its board's performance as a working group, highlighting key characteristics that should be reflected on when discussing director/ board performance. The gaps in board behaviour identified could help other boards assess their own performance and researchers to focus on these areas.

The paper explores two under‐researched areas.

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.

Using a unique data set from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), we estimate the gender starting-salary gap for college graduates from 2000 to 2010. Simulation techniques are used to estimate how the salary gap would change if women had selected the same majors or job types as men. We find that about 90% of the starting-salary gap is explainable by gender differences in majors and types of job offers – a higher percentage than found in most other studies. Duncan indexes of dissimilarity also indicate that the gender distributions of job offers by college major and type of first jobs have not become more similar over the past 10 years. Although differences in college major and types of first jobs explain most of the gender gap in starting salaries of college graduates, small but unexplained gender pay differences reveal themselves in the NACE statistics.

We conduct an experiment asking participants to choose to purchase either a traditional or hybrid car to examine how federal-state conformity of tax incentives impacts the decisions of taxpayers. We also examine perceptions of taxpayers surrounding federal-state conformity. Consistent with theory related to the effects of information environment and using an experiment in which taxpayers are asked to evaluate tax incentives related to a purchase decision between a traditional and hybrid car, we find that conformity is a significant factor in increasing the propensity to take advantage of the tax incentive. Specifically, we find that participants with simple and conforming federal-state incentives are more likely to take advantage of the tax incentive than with complex and conforming federal-state incentives. In addition, the effects of conformity between federal and state incentives suggest that participant perceptions of the federal system were heavily influenced by the actions of the state.

Does education still serve as a great equalizer today? Does today’s worldwide expansion of schooling foster a global economic convergence? These questions need fresh answers at this time of growing concern over inequality. Past studies have abundantly documented the effects of schooling on within-country inequality, but we know little about corresponding effects on between-country inequality. We fill this gap by drawing on two innovations. The first is to formulate a theory of global inequality that integrates international differences in both the quantity and quality of education. The second, methodological, innovation is to propose and apply a method for decomposing trends in global inequality in GDP in terms of five social forces that include the quantity and quality of schooling. Analyses focus on the 1990–2010 period. The results confirm the continued salience of education: Trends in education account for as much as 80% of the 1990–2010 decline in between-country GDP inequality. However, we find a declining significance of “quantity” over “quality.” In sum, education remains salient as a global equalizer but its salience increasingly depends on bridging international differences in school quality.

The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015) is the story of a group of teenage friends that, during the screening of a Friday the 13th-like 1980s slasher horror, happen to be sucked into the film. Trapped in the gruesome narrative, they have to survive the deranged killer that haunts the premises of the campsite by applying their knowledge of the rules and cliches of the slasher genre. The film is of interest not only because it mixes horror and comedy and exaggerates the horror genre’s conventions – as Scream and other neo-slashers already did. By employing the device of the screen rupture, the film constructs a complex network of self-reflexive moments and intertextual references. The metalinguistic play involves in particular the notoriously sexophobic and gender-led dynamics of the 1980s slashers – those more emancipated girls who have sex are killed; the most prudish girl is the one that eventually manages to defeat the monster, the ‘Final Girl’. In this sense, the film is almost like a video essay that reprises and illustrates one of the most seminal study of the slasher genre, Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The chapter presents the defining elements of the slasher subgenre as theorized by Clover and then focusses on the analysis of the metalinguistic elements of The Final Girls vis-à-vis Clover’s classic text.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how the socio-economic trends caused by the economic deregulation of the last four decades have led to a high-net-worth strata of individuals and families that conspicuously consumes luxury items and are the main customers in the luxury yacht market.

A selected cross-section review and discussion of relevant publications and theories within the field of tourism, social sciences, business and economic history are synthesised with relevant data to outline the factors leading to socio-economic change and conspicuous consumption.

This paper advocates for the synthesis of scholarly techniques found within the discipline of Business History to illuminate the development of a luxury yachting industry over the past four decades. Using the varieties of capitalism approach this paper demonstrates that the local characteristics of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in combination with the international globalisation and trade deregulation since 1980 has led to a new super wealthy class that engages in conspicuous consumption. Using a schema based on critical juncture theory, light has been shed on the specific factors underpinning the demand for luxury yachts as part of this conspicuous consumption.

This paper adds a new set of methodologies and theoretical tools to the student of luxury tourism that embed the practice within the context of socio-economic changes brought forth by economic globalisation since 1979, opening up new avenues of research.