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This chapter estimates a regime switching Taylor Rule for the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to investigate some potential nonlinearities in the forward-looking policy reaction function within a real-time framework. In order to compare observed and predicted policy behavior, the chapter estimates Actual and Perceived regime switching Taylor Rules for the ECB. The former is based on the refi rate set by the Governing Council while the latter relies on the professional point forecasts of the refi rate performed by a large investment bank before the upcoming policy rate decision. The empirical evidence shows that the Central Bank’s main policy rate has switched between two regimes: in the first one the Taylor Principle is satisfied and the ECB stabilizes the economic outlook, while in the second regime the Central Bank cuts rates more aggressively and puts a higher emphasis on stabilizing real output growth expectations. Second, the results point out that the professional forecasters have broadly well predicted the actual policy regimes. The estimation results are also robust to using consensus forecasts of inflation and real output growth. The empirical evidence from the augmented Taylor Rules shows that the Central Bank has most likely not responded to the growth rates of M3 and the nominal effective exchange rate and the estimated regimes are robust to including these additional variables in the regressions. Finally, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers the policy rate has switched to a crisis regime as the ECB has focused on preventing a further decline in economic activity and on securing the stability of the financial system.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of colour on the communication of financial data in management and to encourage future discussion on related topic.

Hypothesis was designed building on relevant literatures. Quantitative discrete data were collected through a mini-test activity in a lecture from students. The results were reviewed and evaluated by relevant statistical tool.

The authors found consistent statistical significance results in the mini-test. The findings support that users prefer to choose the financial data presented in cool colours in business management context.

Gaining the understanding of colour’s influence on decision making and behaviour is subjected to complexity. There are many other contextual factors should be taken into consideration in practice. Although the design of the mini-test in this study is relatively simple, it still provides clues for the issue. With the discussions and findings of this paper, the authors shed some light on the direction of potential uses of colour on the communication of financial data in management context. The findings could also be used by management educators to facilitate related discussions among students regarding the complexity of business communication and the importance of perception in decision making. For example, decision making could be affected by various factors (such as colour) outside verbal and text.

Managers often need to use financial data in communication for various purposes in work place. The authors believe this is the first time that a study like this had been conducted to specifically review and discuss the importance of colour on the communication of financial data in management. Hopefully, the work reported in this paper could be viewed as reference for management educators, researchers and managers in future research or practical applications on related topics.

The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.

Over recent years there has been a move towards more open appraisal, with the individual appraised being shown the written assessment of him, but there is little evidence to indicate what effects this change in practice may have had on the value of the appraisals. The survey of appraisal schemes in private and public sector organizations reported in this paper attempts to gauge the influence of greater openness on the standards of written appraisals and on the amount of reliance organizations place upon them in deciding such matters as promotion.

Within the accounting discipline and its literature, attention to the role of social and non-profit organizations has been growing, particularly with respect to issues of accountability and social accounting. In response, the aim of this introductory article is to present the background for the book by highlighting (i) the relevance and rise of the non-profit sector worldwide, (ii) the limitations of the conventional accounting framework when applied/transposed to NPOs and (iii) the ‘social accounting project’ for NPOs. The article presents analysis and critique based on a literature review of the accountability framework for NPOs. After presenting key worldwide statistics regarding the growing non-profit sector, the article points out the skepticism regarding the adoption of traditional accounting principles and frameworks for NPOs. The article offers both an examination of how to improve the accounting system for NPOs and a discussion of the benefits emerging from the social and environmental accounting and reporting models. ‘The social accounting project’ for NPOs is presented as a pathway towards these innovative practices increasing organizational transparency. This article and the book overall provide new contributions to the research literature, fostering synergies among financial accounting and social accounting scholars engaging with the NPO subject area. Moreover it brings together studies from a range of disciplines, such as financial accounting, social accounting, economics, management, and third-sector studies. This cross-disciplinary approach offers a major contribution to our developing knowledge in this field.

This chapter reviews the literature to contextualize the intervention in the post–cold war era characterized by the momentum of globalization dominated by informal actors beside the legal authority of the state. It indicates how these actors deviate the primary purpose of the humanitarian intervention and create an ungovernable environment of the state particularly when interventions are operated in countries endowed with natural resources. The case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) serves as a model to ascertain such phenomenon in which actors such as states involved in intervention come in collusion with shadow elites, lobbyists and multinational companies to establish clandestine networks of illegal exploitation and smuggling of natural resources. The chapter winds up by suggesting the redefinition of policies of interventions to keep humanitarian intervention in its primary mission while holding actors involved in illegal and smuggling of natural resources accountable.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between inflation, interest rate, and output gap in the US economy in the post Second World War period, without assuming any structure nor imposing any restriction on that relationship.

The authors apply vine copula modeling to investigate asymmetry and tail behavior on both conditional and unconditional dependence among those variables. The dependence parameter is allowed to evolve over time according to a stochastic autoregressive processes. Additionally, a conditional expectation based on vine copula is used to analyze the conditional expectation of interest rate.

The results suggest that the joint distribution, both conditional and unconditional, of the interest rate and inflation is asymmetric to the left, while the pair interest rate and output gap have symmetrical distributions coupled with low persistence and high volatility. Besides the unquestionable evidence that the US monetary policy has been mostly focused on inflation stabilization, there is also indication of nonlinearity in the conditional expected interest rate and asymmetric behavior by the Federal Reserve in the long run.

The vine copula modeling allows for several forms of asymmetries and tail dependence, which is a flexible modeling strategy for multivariate distributions. Moreover, the conditional expectation implied by vine copulas is suitable to account for nonlinearity in the interest rate conditional on inflation and output gap.

Corporate social responsibilities (CSRs) with social, economic, and environmental elements become of high demand in the private, public, as well as third-world sectors or so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These sectors have their own identity in carrying out the CSR projects. However, the CSR initiatives to be implemented by the NGOs promised challenges due to the NGOs' identity in justifying human rights that remains dissimilar with corporation or fund provider's identity to maximize the profit with less concern on the humanitarian issues leading to tension for both parties to have CSR project alliances. NGOs face extreme difficulty to raise funds from the private sector due to their ideology in influencing the social movements that might harm society. Also, the fund raised by the NGOs for CSR projects are somehow misused by this party for its own self-interests and leads to an accountability issue. An NGO is seen as a key player in CSR projects but still there is an issue of legitimacy and mistrust amongst stakeholder groups. Underlying to these issues, this study aims to explore the challenges faced by NGOs in regards to the CSR initiatives that have been announced by the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) to be used widely and harmoniously by all sectors of the world and its future directions to successfully implement CSR in its own style of leadership. Therefore, the involvement of NGOs in CSR initiatives can be effectively employed with government intervention on economics development programmes in alleviating poverty which becomes a central issue highlighted in many countries nowadays. Extensive rules and regulations from the government towards NGOs are embedded within the CSR project developments of NGOs and are necessary in reducing the discrepancies in the roles that NGOs play.

One of the most important effects of the financial and economic crisis is the reduction of commercial activity. Since 2013, the proportion of closed commercial properties in the commercial center of Athens has peaked, reaching the 32.3% of the total number of ground floor properties. This phenomenon varies from one neighborhood to another and, as a result, it is necessary to be further studied carefully across the Athens Metropolitan Area (AMA). Apart from spatial issues related to the special characteristics of the Athenian neighborhoods, another topic has to be examined: the potential relationship among the urban morphology, the use of urban spaces (accessibility, walkability, livability, etc.) and the increased number of closed commercial properties. This research is a combined study between the commercial activity in the pre- and post-crisis period and the morphological characteristics of commercial streets in three Athenian neighborhoods (Kypseli, Nea Ionia and Aghios Demetrios) that have been exploited as case studies. The purpose of the research is to understand the impact of the crisis over time and to highlight critical variations that are related to the geography of an area. Results highlight the hypothesis and thus, sustainable mobility planning may be initially considered as a regeneration policy for commercial activity in the post-crisis era.

Work has historically been an important basis of identity, but the sharp decline in the availability of stable attachments to jobs, organizations, or occupations jeopardizes paid work’s capacity to sustain identity. If available work opportunities are increasingly precarious and short-term, can the same be said for identities? Analysis of the efforts of members of an unusual occupational group – stage actors – to support an identity based on unstable work provides insights into the variability and indeterminacy of responses to structural employment uncertainty. Despite manifold identity threats, actors struggle to maintain identity as actors both in others’ eyes and in their own.