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Instructors had to adapt to the online teaching environment after the higher education institutions were closed due to the pandemic. The authors surveyed and interviewed instructors to understand how the quality of instructional technologies affected compatibility and psychological availability, which further affected their online teaching satisfaction and online teaching intention. The results showed that both information quality and service quality were positively associated with compatibility, while system quality was positively associated with psychological availability. Also, both compatibility and psychological availability were positively associated with online teaching satisfaction. Compatibility and online teaching satisfaction were associated with online teaching intention. The results from both open-ended questions and in-depth interviews provide support to the quantitative model and present a more complete picture of what instructors experienced during the lockdown.

Board diversity has been an important topic in corporate governance. Extant literature examines the overall diversity in the boardroom and its impact. However, since important decisions are usually taken by the committees, it is important to also examine diversity in committees. We use the Coca-Cola Company as the case study and examine its diversity in both audit and finance committees. Our goal is to raise the awareness of researchers, board nominating committees, and diverse directors themselves, as to whether diverse directors are placed in the right positions to allow them to contribute their diverse views and experiences.

We conducted a case study of the Coca-Cola Company using its proxy statement in both 2016 and 2018.

While Coca-Cola’s self-reported board diversity stood at 27% in 2016, and increased to 31% by 2018, the critical audit and finance committees showed a distinct lack of diversity. Focusing on gender diversity for the purposes of this chapter, we investigated two possibilities: (1) that the lack of committee diversity is due to the lack of finance and leadership skills of those board members who were from underrepresented groups, but this possibility does not seem likely, (2) that the presence of a female CFO removed the urgency to place board members from underrepresented groups on the audit and finance committees.

We provide a cautionary perspective on the implementation of diversity policies at the highest levels of an organization. The pursuit of diversity, like other admirable corporate goals, can degenerate into a check-the-box mentality. When this happens, diversity can become viewed as a substitute for real competency rather than a complement to existing competencies.

It is suggested that boards revise the recruiting and selecting process to include more female candidates, and be sensitive how and where those diverse directors can best contribute their perspectives and experiences.

Geographical relocation of ventures, together with rates of firm formation and closure, determine the entrepreneurial population dynamics of a region. However, venture migration has remained largely unaddressed by prior entrepreneurship scholars. This paper draws from theoretical frameworks and prior findings in the economic demography literature to explore policy and environmental determinants of regional venture migration rates, referred to as entrepreneurial transience. Using county-level data for the state of Ohio, we show that local taxation is an important driver of entrepreneurial transience. In particular, local income tax rates are found to be negatively related to subsequent net transience – i.e., venture migration deficits or surpluses. Local business property taxes also influence net transience, but the direction of their impact depends on the average income level in the locale.

Purpose – This chapter shows that in the presence of tourism, the traditional policy prescription, free trade in goods and the standard Pigouvian tax on pollution, is not optimal for a small open economy.

Methodology/approach – The general-equilibrium analysis is employed to study environmental regulations for a small open economy with tourism.

Findings – Foreign tourists consume mainly local non-traded goods in the tourist-receiving economy. Inbound tourism converts formally non-traded goods into tradables, generating a tourism terms-of-trade effect. Owing to this favourable effect, positive tariffs and stricter pollution taxes can actually improve welfare of domestic residents. The optimal rates of tariffs and pollution taxes are derived and explained for the economy with tourism. These positive rates are confirmed by simulations.

Originality/value of chapter – The presence of tourism can alter the welfare implications of the traditional trade policy.

This chapter investigates the nature of tax preparers’ confidence, as well as how the introduction of a tax decision support system (TDSS) affects tax preparers’ confidence levels. Psychological theories of confidence (e.g., Einhorn & Hogarth, 1978) are drawn upon to develop predictions regarding the role of process (ex ante) and outcome (ex post) confidence in tax return preparation. An experimental methodology is used with 114 inexperienced and experienced participants who prepare an individual income tax return manually or with tax preparation software (a TDSS). Less-experienced tax preparers have lower levels of ex-ante confidence and are more likely to be overconfident in the accuracy of their performance. Furthermore, when examining only the participants who made errors in their tax return preparation task, those that prepare the return with the TDSS are significantly more likely to be overconfident in their performance. These results support the predictions of Noga and Arnold (2002) and suggest that inexperienced users’ over-reliance on a TDSS (Masselli, Ricketts, Arnold, & Sutton, 2002) may be due to individuals’ overconfidence in the accuracy of their performance with the software.

This chapter is devoted to fiscal policy theory and to how its evolution influenced the policy principles implemented from the end of the World War II to the present. It shows how the theoretical foundations evolved, from the Keynesian theory according to which public expenditure was conceived as an instrument to sustain aggregate demand and achieve full employment, to the present theoretical framework in which, following the intertemporal approach, it has been downgraded to an external shock. The public debt issue is examined with the aim of explaining why sound public finance represents a primary policy objective in the Eurozone.

We develop a theoretical model to compare forecast uncertainty estimated from time-series models to those available from survey density forecasts. The sum of the average variance of individual densities and the disagreement is shown to approximate the predictive uncertainty from well-specified time-series models when the variance of the aggregate shocks is relatively small compared to that of the idiosyncratic shocks. Due to grouping error problems and compositional heterogeneity in the panel, individual densities are used to estimate aggregate forecast uncertainty. During periods of regime change and structural break, ARCH estimates tend to diverge from survey measures.

Generational theory research suggests that the arrival of the Millennial generation into adulthood will have significant effects on society because of their differing values and attitudes. We examine whether this generation has differing perceptions of tax fairness as well as their attitudes towards tax compliance as compared to other generations by administering an instrument to a sample of 303 taxpayers, distributed approximately equally across three generational groups: Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. The results suggest that there are significant differences in the viewpoints toward vertical equity and progressive taxation among the three generations. More specifically, the Millennial generation was less likely to recommend progressive taxation than the other two generations. In addition, there were significant differences between the groups on an exchange equity question as well. However, in this situation, it was the Baby Boomers that were significantly different from the other two generations. The results also suggest that the Millennials have attitudes that are more accepting of noncompliance than both the Generation X participants and the Baby Boomer participants. However, a significant difference does not exist between the Baby Boomer participants and Generation X participants on their attitudes towards compliance.