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As with most professional service occupations, liability claims are a major concern for accounting professionals. Most of the academic research on accountants’ professional liability has focused on audit services. This study extends research on accountants’ professional liability by examining liability claims arising from the provision of tax services. In addition to a descriptive analysis, the current study explores the role of merit in tax malpractice litigation. Hypotheses are developed based on the legal construct of claim merit, which requires the presence of accountant error and damages as a result of that error for a claim to be considered meritorious. The hypotheses are tested using logistic and OLS regression of 89 actual claims filed with an insurer of tax professionals. The results suggest that the components of merit are significant in determining both the presence of compensatory payments to the client and the dollar amount of those payments, although the hypothesized interaction effect is only significant for the dollar amount of compensatory payments.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Federal Trade Commission v. Actavis, Inc. is a challenge to conventional antitrust analysis. Conventional civil antitrust cases are decided by a preponderance of the evidence. This means that conduct challenged under the rule of reason is only condemned if the conduct resulted in more competitive harm in the actual world than a world without the alleged violation. Under conventional analysis, the intent of the parties also plays only a supporting role in determining whether the conduct was anticompetitive. A holder of a valid patent has a right to exclude others practicing the patented technology. And, the patent holder is not assumed to have market power because it expended resources in maintaining exclusionary rights. Actavis creates doubts about these propositions in circumstances beyond the “reverse” payment settlement of a patent suit that may have delayed an alleged infringer market entry. This chapter explores whether applying Actavis logic to antitrust litigation can result in condemnation of practices where there is little chance of an anticompetitive effect, where the patent holder likely has a valid and infringed patent, where there is little reason to believe that the patent holder has market power, and where only one party, or no parties, to an agreement have an anticompetitive intent. This chapter also investigates whether Actavis creates new problems with standing analysis, damages calculations, and the balancing of efficiencies against anticompetitive effects. Nevertheless, the lower courts have begun to extend the logic of Actavis. This is apparent in the condemnation of no-Authorized-generic settlements.

In class action antitrust litigation, the standards for acceptable economic analysis at class certification have continued to evolve. The most recent event in this evolution is the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 133 S. Ct. 1435 (2013). The evolution of pre-Comcast law on this topic is presented, the Comcast decision is thoroughly assessed, as are the standards for developing reliable economic analysis. This article explains how economic evidence of both antitrust liability and damages ought to be developed in light of the teachings of Comcast, and how liability evidence can be used by economists to support a finding of common impact for certification purposes. In addition, the article addresses how statistical techniques such as averaging, price-dispersion analysis, and multiple regressions have and should be employed to establish common proof of damages.

Research on weighting of measures often examines only one incentive at a time (usually bonus) and provide mixed findings regarding the relevance of non-financial performance (NFM) measures to evaluate and reward long-term time horizon employees. Using proprietary data from an auto dealership organization, we show that financial measures (FM) are weighted more for bonus than they are weighted for merit raise and promotion but NFM are weighted more than FM for merit raise and promotion. Thus, the temporal orientations of the measures and incentives seem to be aligned: the short-term (long-term) nature of FM (NFM) parallel’s the time horizon of the incentives. Next, our exploratory research questions find that for bonuses, both FM and NFM exert similar levels of significant and positive influence on junior and senior managers. But for promotions, the influence of FM is insignificant for both groups. In contrast, the influence of NFM on promotions is not only significant for both groups but is significantly greater for junior managers than it is for senior managers. That is, the evaluations of NFM for senior managers are less influential on their promotion than they are for junior managers suggesting that promotions for senior managers are often based on factors other than their formal performances.

This research investigates the impact of nonlinear career trajectories on female staff in the academy. It argues that assessment of “achievement relative to opportunity” is essential to the equitable positioning of women in the academy.

This qualitative study is based on extended structured interviews with 43 staff.

Men and women can experience career interruptions, deviations, and hijacks, but, in general, women experience more interruption, and the cumulative effect on their careers is greater.

The authors point to ways in which the assessment of achievement relative to opportunity can be implemented in universities to improve retention and career outcomes for female academic and professional staff.

Embedding the principles of achievement relative to opportunity in evaluative decision making, supports people (particularly women) who have spent time away from the workforce in becoming more competitive in assessments of suitability for leadership and advancement. Changing traditional methods of evaluating merit has the potential to allow people from diverse backgrounds to be fairly evaluated, and shift the dominance of people who have experienced little or no career interruption.

The originality is the measurement of impact of nonlinear careers within the academy. The contribution is in the applicability of the findings and practical suggestions for implementation.

Faculty unionization is growing, and library faculty members are included in many collective bargaining units. Yet there is a dearth of information on how well collective bargaining contracts address the sometimes unique nature of library faculty work. This article explores contracts in a number of Ohio universities and from selective institutions around the country to see how well they accommodate the professional and work-related needs of librarians. Major contractual issues addressed include governance, academic freedom, workload, salary, and the retention, tenure, and promotion (RTP) of faculty, among others.

In Burma, sacred giving (dana) is a principal obligation for all Buddhist practitioners. This paper evaluates the practical and cultural underpinnings of donation practices. Dana redistributes resources, it operates as a system for the production of status distinctions and patron-client ties, and as a means to fulfilling proximate soteriological goals and sacred relations. Elaborating on distinctions Godelier draws between “ideology” and “mentalite,” I argue that sacred giving – especially as it is articulated in native theories about intention – participate in a “politics of sincerity” that impact the political legitimacy projects of the military junta.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

The literature on women of color (WOC) faculty is replete with accounts of marginalization (Balderrama, Texeira, & Valdez, 2006; Benjamin, 1997; Garcia, 2005; John, 1997; Li & Beckett, 2006; McKay, 1997; Reyes, 2005). For instance, Balderrama et al. (2006) explains, “I come from a family of survivors, but I never realized it would come to that in academia …Little did I know I was entering one of the bastions of conservative ideology and practices – a far cry from a meritocracy working for the public good” (Balderrama et al., 2006, p. 224). Concomitantly, the higher education literature extols the presence of race and gender diversity because they are associated with elevated learning outcomes and intercultural engagement (Chang, 2002; Gurin, 1999; Milem & Hakuta, 2002). Therein lies the quandary. Given the importance of illuminating the challenges that WOC face within the academy, how then can that discourse be broadened to include empirical and theoretical claims about the relationship between WOC agency and structural transformation? In other words, how can WOC move beyond or within structural constraints to contribute to the teaching and learning environment? Equally important, how does the presence of WOC encourage a diversity conversation beyond student learning outcomes to one that emphasizes social equity? This chapter intends to participate in these emergent conversations in two ways. First, drawing from an empirical study of Black female faculty, I discuss how the participants contributed to their institutions and how those contributions embody and expand on the following diversity narratives: structural access and climate, learning outcomes, intercultural competencies, and meritocracy. Second, I theoretically expound upon the Black female faculty findings to discuss implications for similarly situated WOC. In all, this chapter demonstrates that difference – a woman of color difference – dislodges reactionary strongholds within the academic enterprise.