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Gary R. Albrecht, Ph.D., North Carolina is an economist at Albrecht Economics located in Winston-Salem. He specializes in economic forecasting and forensic economics. He has been an Assistant and Adjunct Associate Professor at Wake Forest University, and he was the Director of Econometric Modeling at the University of Kansas. He is a past vice president of the National Association of Forensic Economics. His research has been published in the Journal of Forensic Economics, Journal of Legal Economics, Trial Briefs, and The Earnings Analyst, in addition to his authoring various economic research reports and book chapters. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Indiana University.

This chapter examines the legal and scientific approaches taken in the United States for computing economic damages due to personal injury and wrongful death. The U.S. law of tort damages conforms to a general economic valuation of reduced or lost productivity due to injury under the goal of assigning tort damages optimally so that harm in the society is minimized. Today, “economic damages” are defined in every U.S. jurisdiction, and the field of forensic economics has produced a body of literature concerned with accurately measuring them.

The Pathways Commission on Accounting Higher Education Report (2012) recommends turning the accounting profession into a learned profession through the purposeful integration of accounting research, education and practice. This paper develops an approach to identifying and quantifying the specific dimensions of the gap between the accounting academic and practice communities, thereby contributing to moving the accounting profession to a learned profession. For this we focus on audit research, because the discussion of the perceived gap between audit research and audit practice is extensive; yet no one has actually quantified that gap to date. While researchers have classified and quantified audit research, no one has done likewise for publications issued by the practice community. We choose the 38 distinct recommendations in the Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession (ACAP) Final Report as an initial benchmark. We compare those recommendations to the 16 audit research themes from Lesage and Wechtler (2012) and to the publications spanning 33 years of audit research posted on the American Accounting Association website. Eight Lesage and Wechtler themes, comprising 50% of the themes, were not explicitly included in any ACAP distinct recommendation. Conversely, seven distinct recommendations had zero direct matches in the audit literature. This gap suggests future research opportunities in terms of exploring underrepresented topics and, maybe more importantly, the reasons why some topics are underrepresented.

A forward thrust drives the theoretical narrative of disability-in-society, as told by scholars of recent decades. Consider these titles (with emphases added): From Stigma to Identity Politics: Political Activism among the Physically Disabled and Former Mental Patients by Anspach (1979); From Good Will to Civil Rights by Scotch (1984); Moving Disability Beyond Stigma a collection edited by Asch and Fine (1988); The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation by Fleischer and Zames (2001). Each title is like a revved-up engine. Together, they convey a message of forward movement in the status of people with disabilities. The road they all travel starts from a negative starting point and ends at a clear and a more desirable, if not yet perfect, destination. The starting point is the subordinated and powerless status of persons with disabilities – a status based on stigma wrapped in pity. The destination: empowerment. These analyses focus on the United States; their authors, while not all sociologists, are close enough for our purpose. The road they all cover starts (chronologically speaking) around the 1940s, and extends – in the case of the earliest – up to the late 1970s; two others cover up to the mid- and late 1980s; and the last one, to the current century.

The purpose of this paper is to apply social network analysis (SNA) to study faculty research productivity, to identify key leaders, to study publication keywords and research areas and to visualize international collaboration patterns and analyze collaboration research fields from all Management Information System (MIS) departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015.

The authors first retrieved results encompassing about 1,766 MIS professors and their publication records between 1982 and 2015 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST) website. Next, the authors merged these publication records with the records obtained from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Airiti Library and Springer Link databases. The authors further applied six network centrality equations, leadership index, exponential weighted moving average (EWMA), contribution value and k-means clustering algorithms to analyze the collaboration patterns, research productivity and publication patterns. Finally, the authors applied D3.js to visualize the faculty members' international collaborations from all MIS departments in Taiwan.

The authors have first identified important scholars or leaders in the network. The authors also see that most MIS scholars in Taiwan tend to publish their papers in the journals such as Decision Support Systems and Information and Management. The authors have further figured out the significant scholars who have actively collaborated with academics in other countries. Furthermore, the authors have recognized the universities that have frequent collaboration with other international universities. The United States, China, Canada and the United Kingdom are the countries that have the highest numbers of collaborations with Taiwanese academics. Lastly, the keywords model, system and algorithm were the most common terms used in recent years.

This study applied SNA to visualize international research collaboration patterns and has revealed some salient characteristics of international cooperation trends and patterns, leadership networks and influences and research productivity for faculty in Information Management departments in Taiwan from 1982 to 2015. In addition, the authors have discovered the most common keywords used in recent years.

In recent years there has been a decrease in the proportion of commerce students taking an accounting major in Australia (Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, 2001), resulting in a greater proportion of first year accounting classes comprising non‐accounting majors. At our institution we felt that an approach based on “active learning” strategies as suggested by the Albrecht and Sack Report (2000) was appropriate for non‐accounting majors. This was primarily to instil a greater enthusiasm for and interest in accounting than had been evident from our experience with these students in the past. In the course evaluations the non‐accounting majors were positive about their learning experiences. In reviewing the students’ assessment performance we found that the non‐accounting majors actually performed better than the accounting majors in one of the five assessment components – the final exam. These findings suggest that the active learning approach may be beneficial to all accounting students.

Tax education, a subset of accounting education formed in the early 1900s, was largely ignored as a discipline until the 1970s. Over time, tax became a more prevalent part of accounting practice and the CPA examination. In 1996, the AICPA developed the Model Tax Curriculum (MTC) to give a practitioner’s perspective on how taxation should be taught in higher education. This chapter provides a history of tax education and the responses of tax educators to the MTC Task Force’s recommendations in 1996 and the revisions in 2007 and 2014. The authors surveyed tax educators five times over 23 years to get a sense of the MTC’s adoption, both in the past and future terms. The authors found that tax educators largely ignored the MTC Task Force’s recommendations. This chapter discusses reasons given by respondents for not following the MTC and offers various strategies the MTC Task Force and others might consider when recommending future tax education reforms.