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This article explores the implementation of infrastructure development projects funded by the Recovery Act’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) in a southeastern state to provide high-quality Internet connectivity in un- or under-served areas to alleviate the conditions contributing to rural areas’ fiscal crises. This context affords a unique opportunity to view fiscal federalism’s operational dynamics in times of economic crisis and explore how various grant administrators in charge of similar federally funded public works projects define fiduciary responsibility. We find that these administrators comprehend “fiduciary responsibility“ narrowly in terms of complying with the accounting and reporting requirements of the federal grant. However, they have a broader and more nuanced understanding of their overall responsibility that includes working on behalf of their respective communities’ interests to meet local and regional needs.

This article focuses on how the film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Columbus, 2001; Rowling, 1998), can be used to teach the concepts related to team leadership. In addition, the article offers a discussion of the student and professor perspectives on using film in the classroom and provides recommendations for implementation.

We applied Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) stages of small group development to frame a vicarious learning experience utilizing the movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This approach is grounded in experiential learning, guiding learners through a shared experience, reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation.

Popular culture artifacts (PCA) can be used to transport learners to a context within which they can vicariously experience leadership concepts that might otherwise be abstract.

Intentional preparation and facilitation can result in engaged, effective leadership learning through film.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role that weather shocks can play in the livestock mortality microinsurance take-up when the insured risk has a prevalent covariant component.

The sample consists of 360 rural Ethiopian households. Data were collected in a panel-structure at the end of three agricultural seasons (2011-2013). In the questionnaire, a specific section on insurance was meant to collect information on the farmer’s willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a set of insurance products, including livestock mortality insurance. Two OLS regression models and a quantile regression model were employed to estimate the impact of weather anomalies on the WTP for the insurance product.

The authors find that weather anomalies contribute to changes in the WTP to a large extent. Negative (positive) changes in precipitation (temperature) anomalies can lead to more than a 30 percent reduction in the WTP. This general finding is complemented with the analysis of the conditional distribution of the WTP, which shows that other elements can prevail for low values of the conditional distribution. In this case, the WTP seems to be represented more by the interviewee’s age and basic knowledge of insurance, and village fixed-effects. Basic knowledge of insurance, in particular, can increase WTP by about 60 percent.

This paper has straightforward implications from a policy perspective. It suggests that farmers would prefer an insurance premium that follows the changes in the systemic component. On the contrary, insurance as well as reinsurance companies are usually reluctant to frequently revise their premiums. Financial education programs, farmer-driven design, trust building, and bundling insurance with other financial and non-financial products can increase the value proposition perceived by the farmers. From a marketing perspective, the overall findings suggest that continuous fine-tuning of the contract, transparency, and targeted information campaigns can contribute to increase and stabilize potential customers’ WTP.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that considers the impact of weather shocks on the WTP for a livestock mortality insurance product. Livestock is one of the most strategic assets of poor rural households in Africa. This study contributes to the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of weather insurance take-up in developing countries and, in particular, the role of spatiotemporal adverse selection and basis risk (e.g. Jensen et al., 2016).

Therapeutic communities (TC’s) are consciously designed, living-learning environments designed to evoke social, psychological and behavioural change. The success of the residential TC model saw these community-led, self-help environments for addicts move into custodial settings and early evidence suggests this transition was effective. The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence relevant to the effectiveness of prison based, drug-free TCs.

In order to establish their true efficiency, particular focus has been placed on studies conducted over the last ten years (2007-2017).

To date, the TC remains superior to other forms of drug treatment in reducing recidivism and drug relapse amongst addicts who offend.

Outcomes of this review highlighted the importance of aftercare in providing transitional support; a fundamental aspect of treatment necessary for success and for maintaining long-term recovery post release.

Film has been used to teach leadership in recent decades, but a review of the literature indicates much of this work is prescriptive rather than empirical. This study sought to understand the effectiveness of film in an undergraduate leadership class by determining learner perceptions of a film analysis assignment and exploring learner ability to identify the stages of group development. A mixed-method approach was undertaken. Learners were surveyed to elicit their perceptions of an essay assignment where they analyzed the stages of group development in the film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. In addition, their essays were subject to a content analysis to determine if learners could successfully identify the stages of group development. The survey indicated that learners enjoyed the assignment and preferred film analysis as an assessment of their understanding of group development. The content analysis indicated that learners could identify the stages of group development throughout the movie. However, there was variation in which scenes were representative of the different stages. Future research should explore the distinction between inductive and deductive approaches to content instruction and learner outcomes. Film familiarity and its impact on learner outcomes should also be investigated.

The recent financial crisis has brought business ethics issues to the forefront. While most colleges have formal training in business ethics, a person’s ethical standards have often developed before college age. This application brief proposes using digital popular media to teach servant-leadership principles to public school adolescents. The purpose is to illustrate the advantage of using secular content from the television series Merlin (Wilkie, 2008) to demonstrate an ethics-based leadership perspective through a medium that is accessible to the virtual/video generation.

Taking into account that debtholders bear most of the risks in the case of failure (Jensen and Meckling, 1976), earnings quality is valuable for debtholder decision makers as a monitoring mechanism and as a signal of credibility that reduces information asymmetries. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze whether banks carry out an earnings quality analysis in their lending decision processes and, in particular, how carefully they do it.

The authors focus on data from pre-bankruptcy companies because both earnings management and the potential costs faced by auditors increase considerably during the process towards failure. To test the hypotheses, the authors run separate multivariate regressions of price (cost of debt) and non-price (credit availability) lending decisions on different proxies for earnings quality. The authors use Big N and modified audit reports as a proxy for audit quality. Additionally, they use discretionary accruals as a proxy of accounting numbers quality.

The results show that banks do consider their borrowers’ quality of earnings, but they do it quite cursorily, that is, without taking advantage of all the possibilities offered by an effective combination of external and internal proxies.

The inferences apply only to financially distressed private firms, so they are not generalizable to other contexts with low ownership concentration or with a less severe risk of failure.

The language used by the auditors in the audit report, particularly in generally accepted accounting principles violations, might not be clear enough for the user to undo the specific distortions in the financial statements.

The authors provide evidence of how banks incorporate earnings quality into their lending decisions, prior research has analyzed them either separately or from an equity market perspective. Moreover, the authors also add to the debt-covenant literature by explicitly showing that manipulation helps managers to achieve better lending conditions.

Systems of care and evidence-based practice possess distinct histories. Though each developed out of attempts to improve services to youth with emotional and behavioral disorders, they did so from perspectives so different as to appear diametrically opposed. Service systems exist at multiple levels, including the practice, program, and system levels (Rosenblatt, 1988, 2005; Rosenblatt & Woodbridge, 2003). Research on health and mental health service systems similarly varies, often by level of the service system, with the research methods, independent and dependent variables, populations of interest, and ultimately the consumers of the research product interacting differentially in the creation and understanding of what constitutes a knowledge base for service delivery. Systems of care and, with limited exceptions, evidence-based practices exist at different levels of the service delivery structure, require and derive from different research approaches, and speak to overlapping but historically different audiences.

A key challenge for cost-effective Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is the ability to create generalizable domain, learner, and pedagogical models so they can be re-used many times over. Investment in this technology will be needed to succeed in developing ITSs for team training. The purpose of this chapter is to propose an instructional framework for guiding team ITS researchers in their development of these models for reuse. We establish a foundation for the framework with three propositions. First, we propose that understanding how teams develop is needed to establish a science-based foundation for modeling. Toward this end, we conduct a detailed exploration of the Kozlowski, Watola, Jensen, Kim, and Botero (2009) theory of team development and leadership, and describe a use case example to demonstrate how team training was developed for a specific stage in their model. Next, we propose that understanding measures of learning and performance will inform learner modeling requirements for each stage of team development. We describe measures developed for the use case and how they were used to understand teamwork skill development. We then discuss effective team training strategies and explain how they were implemented in the use case to understand their implications for pedagogical modeling. From this exploration, we describe a generic instructional framework recommending effective training strategies for each stage of team development. To inform the development of reusable models, we recommend selecting different team task domains and varying team size to begin researching commonalities and differences in the instructional framework.