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In June 23, 2016, voters in the United Kingdom have just approved a referendum calling for leaving the European Union. The case describes the motives for European integration, the rise of separatist movements in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and the referendum process itself.

The purpose of this case is to provide a contemporary counterpoint to a discussion of the economic and political motivations for the American Civil War. Dominant themes highlighted here are economic nationalism, political nationalism, cultural centrism and ethnocentrism, and populism.

Collaboration with student leaders is fundamental to the role of higher education in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In 2018, Millennium Campus Network (MCN) and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) partnered to present the Millennium Fellowship. This semester-long leadership development program provides training, connections, and credentials to undergraduates advancing the SDGs. The Fellowship has rapidly expanded to draw over 25,000 applicants annually, with engagement on 136 campuses in 30 nations. This chapter unpacks how this program has grown through unique partnerships – with the United Nation (UN) and with universities. It also emphasizes best practices for how universities can support student leaders committed to the goals. Five best practices for collaboration will be shared:

Break down silos – Invite students to break out of their comfort zones, beyond campus, with discernment.

Prioritize mentorship (1:1 and peer to peer) – powerful faculty/staff–student relationships help students grow – and peer-to-peer mentorship builds robust communities of practice.

Align incentives for collaboration – from academic credit to seed funding, incentives can create an ideal environment for peer-to-peer collaboration.

Build virtual community – leverage technology to build cross-campus opportunities.

Centre-student voice – ensure students can co-create programs and opportunities.

To illuminate these points, we feature examples of Millennium Fellows’ experiences in the program. The prevailing theme that emerges: building processes that centre-students’ commitments and feedback builds trust and creates the foundation for dynamic partnerships to form.

This study aims to investigate the effects of the historical prevalence of infectious diseases on contemporary entrepreneurship. Previous studies reveal numerous proximate causes of entrepreneurship, but little is known about the fundamental determinants of this widespread economic concern.

The central hypothesis is that historical pathogens exert persistent impacts on present-day entrepreneurship. The authors provide support for the underlying hypothesis using ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares with cross-sectional data from 125 countries consisting of the averages between 2006 and 2018.

Past diseases reduce entrepreneurship both directly and indirectly. The strongest indirect effects occur through GDP per capita, property rights, innovation, entrepreneurial attitudes, entrepreneurial abilities, entrepreneurial aspirations and skills. This result is robust to many sensitivity tests. Policymakers may take these findings into account and incorporate disease pathogens into the design of entrepreneurship.

The novelty of this paper lies in the adoption of a historical approach that sheds light on the deep historical roots of cross-country differences in entrepreneurship.

This study aims to investigate the main areas in which researchers are focusing their efforts in terms of sustainability in higher education (curriculum, campus greening, research, governance or outreach), the format in which this research is performed (in terms of individual or combined efforts) and the primary research focus (in terms of local or global issues).

Trends on sustainability research were investigated by means of an online survey – the World Survey on Sustainability Publishing and Research in Higher Education, which was disseminated among members of the European School of Sustainability Science and Research and the Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Programme.

The survey collected responses from 103 researchers across over 40 countries. Three trends emerged: in spite of the intrinsic value of sustainability research in higher education, this area is not as mature as one could expect; the range of themes covered is wide and addresses a variety of areas; and individuals working alone is the most common means of doing research, whereas research at the university, department and faculty level appears to be less common.

The paper outlines some measures via which higher education institutions may be able to take more advantage of the many opportunities sustainability research offers to them.

The purpose of this study is to examine accountants’ application of principles-based accounting standards to a lawsuit contingency recognition scenario and the potential role that accounting work experience plays in mitigating accountants’ aggressive financial reporting.

This study presents a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment with accounting experience (measured as high vs low) and contingency type (asset vs liability) as independent variables and accountants’ lawsuit contingency conservatism likelihood judgments and US$ recognition recommendations as the dependent variables.

Consistent with expectations, findings indicate that more experienced accountants are more likely to recognize liabilities and items that decrease income and less likely to recognize assets and items that increase income than their less experienced counterparts. Accountants also recommended recognizing lower (higher) mean US$ amounts for assets (liabilities), as expected. Supplemental analyses show a significant moderated-mediated effect whereby the interactive effect of contingency type and accounting experience on individuals’ US$ recognition recommendations is partially mediated through the nature of the conservatism judgment.

The finding that less experienced accountants report more aggressively than more experienced accountants when applying a principles-based standard supports the call for using judgment frameworks in imprecise standard settings and suggests that firms may want to ensure that accountants with adequate work experience are on hand as U.S. generally accepted accounting principles become more principles-based over time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the impact of accounting work experience on the application of principles-based accounting standards and the mitigation of aggressive financial reporting. Our supplemental analyses also identify the nature of the conservatism judgment as a mediating mechanism which partially explains more experienced accountants’ US$ asset and liability recognition recommendations.