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Today's maturity pattern of interest rates contains an implicit market forecast of future short‐term rates. However, it is well known that these implied rates generally fail to explain actual movements in short‐term rates. From two empirical propositions about movements of yield curves it follows that half of the time short‐term rates will move in the opposite direction from that forecasted implicitly by the market. Data comparing implied forward short‐term yields on US Treasury bills with actual yield movements fail to reject the hypothesis that the market's forecast will err in di‐rection half of the time. It follows that the direction of movement in short‐term rates is independent of the shape of the yield curve. Because implied forward rates lack forecasting content it would not be rational for investors to use them as market forecasts.

Manufacturing companies facing significant pricing competition need customer cost informations systems (CCISs) that reliably measure the resource costs of serving individual customers. Prices are often set by the market and competition, particularly from foreign imports, and severely restricts marketing’s ability to adjust prices to cover costs. It is important that marketing personnel have access to accurate product and customer cost information. With such information, marketing personnel can make better pricing decisions, identify unprofitable customers, analyze lost bids, educate customers on ways to lower costs, and determine the best mix of products and customers. This article reports the results of a field study conducted at a medium‐sized Midwestern electronics manufacturing plant. The field study supports a useful example of a CCIS that can reliably measure the resource costs of serving individual customers and that can help marketing employees carry out their responsibilities more effectively. The CCIS as described herein identifies, measures and assigns three types of resource costs traceable to customer orders: customer variable costs assigned directly, technology costs assigned by the consumption of time in critical constraints, and human resource cost sassigned by activity‐based costing.

In spite of its sub‐title, Heading and Canons is not so much a self‐contained treatise as a new instalment in the author's continuous exposition of his thought about cataloguing. Its main purpose is to examine, in the light of certain general principles, the rules for headings of author and title entries given in Cutter's Rules for a dictionary catalogue, the Prussian Instructions, the Vatican Rules, the ALA cataloging rules, and Ranganathan's own Classified catalogue code. But it incorporates also a fresh statement of the ‘canons of cataloguing’, first enumerated in his Theory of library catalogue (1938); a general discussion of cataloguing terminology; a summary of a pioneer study (undertaken for UNESCO) of Indian and other Asian names; and a demand—which will have the heartfelt sympathy of all cataloguers—for the standardization of the information given on title‐pages. Each section—and particularly the ingenious and suggestive treatment of the problem of Asian names—would justify a separate review. The book will be considered here as a contribution to the current re‐examination of cataloguing rules.

In The Changing Body (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2011), we presented a series of estimates showing the number of calories available for human consumption in England and Wales at various points in time between 1700 and 1909/1913. We now seek to correct an error in our original figures and to compare the corrected figures with those published by a range of other authors. We also include new estimates showing the calorific value of meat and grains imported from Ireland. Disagreements with other authors reflect differences over a number of issues, including the amount of land under cultivation, the extraction and wastage rates for cereals and pulses and the number of animals supplying meat and dairy products. We consider recent attempts to achieve a compromise between these estimates and challenge claims that there was a dramatic reduction in either food availability or the average height of birth cohorts in the late-eighteenth century.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Interest in developing institutional explanations of political and economic behavior has blossomed among social scientists since the early 1980s. Three intellectual perspectives are now prevalent: rational choice theory, historical institutionalism and a new school of organizational analysis. This paper summarizes, compares and contrasts these views and suggests ways in which cross‐fertilization may be achieved. Particular attention is paid to how the insights of organizational analysis and historical institutionalism can be blended to provide fruitful avenues of research and theorizing, especially with regard to the production, adoption, and mobilization of ideas by decision makers.