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Section 529 college savings plans are tax-favored investment vehicles, which saw tremendous growth after the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 expanded 529 plan benefits to include tax-free distributions for qualified higher education expenses. However, regulators, the press, and fund advisors criticized the Section 529 college savings plan industry for inadequate and nonuniform disclosures of investor information, such as historical returns, fees, taxes, and underlying investments. We investigate consumers’ investment choices after a disclosure regime change in 2003 and find that after enhanced disclosures became widely available, investors selected fewer plans offered exclusively through brokers, increasingly chose portfolios based on past investment performance, but remained unresponsive to state tax benefit disclosures. We also analyze the plans’ performance and find evidence that 529 investors are constrained to invest in portfolios with high, return-eroding fees. Nearly 20 percent of the portfolios have a statistically significant negative alpha, the measure of risk-adjusted excess return, while less than 1 percent have a statistically significant positive alpha.

This study addresses the issue of decreasing accounting student interest in the specialized taxation discipline. Using survey responses from accounting students around the United States, the authors find that one of the most important influences on the choice of a taxation specialization over other accounting fields is the fascination and interest created as part of the initial taxation course in the student’s undergraduate education. This finding echoes prior research on how to motivate pre-business students toward accounting as a major area of study. The authors find that the challenging nature of the initial tax course and potential differences in future career options do not deter students from taxation. Other driving forces for pursing taxation include perceptions of entry-level and long-term compensation, long-term career opportunities, and having an interesting and challenging career. This study can be of interest to academic institutions, public accounting recruiters, and the accounting profession in general as it highlights the meaningful role each can play in encouraging accounting students to pursue taxation as a profession.

Climate change is a global threat to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. In an increasingly urbanized world, homeowners play an important role in climate adaptation and environmental sustainability through decisions to landscape and manage their residential properties.

In this chapter, we review the potential impacts of climate change on environmental sustainability in urban ecosystems and highlight the role of urban and suburban residents in conserving biodiversity. We focus extensively on the interactions of homeowners and residential landscapes in urban coastal and desert environments.

Understanding how human-environment interactions are linked with a changing climate is especially relevant for coastal and desert cities in the United States, which are already experiencing visible impacts of climate change. In fact, many homeowners are already making decisions in response to environmental change, and these decisions will ultimately shape the future structure, function and sustainability of these critically important ecosystems.

Considering the close relationship between biodiversity and the health and well-being of human societies, understanding how climate change and other social motivations affect the landscaping decisions of urban residents will be critical for predicting and enhancing sustainability in these social-ecological systems.

A process improvement sampling methodology, known as process variation diagnostic tool (PROVADT), was proposed by Cox et al. (2013). The method was designed to support the objectivity of Six Sigma projects performing the measure-analyse phases of the define-measure-analyse-improve-control cycle. An issue in PROVADT is that it is unable to distinguish between measurement and product variation in the presence of a poor Gage repeatability and reproducibility (R&R) result. The purpose of this paper is to improve and address PROVADT’s sampling structure by enabling a true Gage R&R as part of its design.

This paper derives an enhanced PROVADT method by examining the theoretical sampling constraints required to perform a Gage R&R study. The original PROVADT method is then extended to fulfil these requirements. To test this enhanced approach, it was applied first to a simulated manufacturing process and then in two industry case studies.

The results in this paper demonstrates that enhanced PROVADT was able to achieve a full Gage R&R result. This required 20 additional measurements when compared to the original method, but saved up to ten additional products and 20 additional measurements being taken in future experiments if the original method failed to obtain a valid Gage R&R. These benefits were highlighted in simulation and industry case studies.

The work into the PROVADT method aims to improve the objectivity of early Six Sigma analyses of quality issues, which has documented issues.

The ever‐increasing cost of seeing a graduate training contract through to its successful completion has made the selection decision, and indeed the choice of selection techniques used, increasingly vital. This paper identifies the selection methods currently used by the Scottish accountancy profession to recruit graduate trainees, compares these against best practice and highlights a number of areas where improvements to current practice would be recommended. Analysis of the selection literature revealed the range of selection techniques on offer, and from a consideration of the validity and reliability of each technique, it was possible to identify best practice in graduate selection. Data was collected by sending a questionnaire to 79 firms of Scottish Chartered Accountants. The targeted firms constituted the entire population of Scottish firms seeking to recruit a graduate trainee to commence in Autumn 2002 (as detailed within the annual ICAS Directory of Training Vacancies). Using the results of the primary and secondary data, the skills currently being sought by firms of Chartered Accountants in their graduate trainees were identified. The methods used by firms to identify these skills were then examined with each method being examined in terms of its current use as well as its value and effectiveness in practice. It was found that there have been significant changes to the skill‐set sought by firms in the early 21st Century as compared with a decade ago, with less emphasis on numeracy and more interest in softer skills such as communication and problem‐solving. As regards the techniques currently employed by firms to identify these skills, it was found that there has been some progress made over the last decade. However, the majority of firms are still reluctant to let go of what is now considered to be the more traditional interview‐based approach to selection, favouring this above what might be considered the more innovative techniques on offer. Further, it was found that few firms have designed their selection process specifically to identify the skill‐set that they have delineated. Thus, a consequent lack of consistency throughout the selection decisions was evidenced.

As Bond scholarship has shown, men’s magazines played a crucial role in shaping images of masculinity that circulated around James Bond from the 1960s onwards (Hines, 2018). More generally, critics have charged both the Bond film franchise and men’s magazines with perpetuating sexist imagery that upholds patriarchal values or erodes the gains of feminism. Yet close readings of men’s magazines and Bond films can produce a more complex picture of masculinity and gender relations, especially since the mid-1990s saw not only the return of James Bond to the screen following a six-year production break, but also scholarly and media attention to masculinity and significant growth in the men’s magazine market, including the rise of lad mags. This research will analyse magazine content relating to Bond in British men’s magazines during the Pierce Brosnan era, beginning with the launch of the 1995 film GoldenEye, to examine the interrelationship between James Bond as a longstanding male icon, and contemporary models of masculinity characterised by this publishing phenomenon. It will argue that these men’s magazines become an important site for (re)negotiating James Bond’s culturally loaded masculinity throughout the Brosnan years.