Search results

Purpose: The chapter’s objective is to develop a new model or approach to earnings management for sustainability. The challenges posed by climate change and environmental degradation have stimulated interest in sustainability. However, such interest has not led to the development of new models demonstrating how firms’ earnings management can contribute to sustainability and sustainable development.

Methodology: The chapter develops a model demonstrating how earnings management can contribute to sustainability. The surplus income model uses income targeting as a channel through which the surplus income generated by a firm is allocated to a relevant sustainability activity or project. The author shows that a firm’s total income can be divided into the target and surplus income components. The author then explores the possible activities that firms may allocate surplus income to in the interest of sustainability.

Finding: The surplus income model or approach allows a firm to contribute or donate to a relevant sustainability activity or project out of its surplus income. Under this model, managers are incentivised to generate surplus income from which they can contribute to a relevant sustainability activity or project, thereby making the firm a champion of sustainability.

Originality: Previous studies have not examined how earnings management by firms can contribute to sustainability. This chapter fills this gap in the literature.

This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army, and capital accumulation in his investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954 development model is compared to other models advanced at the time by Harrod, Domar, Swan, Kaldor, Solow, von Neumann, Nurkse, Rosenstein-Rodan, Myint, and others. Lewis applied the notion of economic duality to open and closed economies.

This paper presents new evidence that the error in estimating the economic welfare of a transport scheme can be very large. This is for two reasons. Firstly when cost changes are large the income effect can be significant. This means the change in consumer surplus is no longer a good estimate of the compensating variation — the true measure of welfare benefit. Secondly, in the presence of large cost changes estimating the change in consumer surplus using the Rule of Half can lead to large errors. The paper uses a novel approach based on stated choice and contingent valuation data to estimate the size of this error for the situation of the provision of fixed links to islands in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

We propose a simple model consisting of two separated markets: the market for good y and the market for good x. Purchasing information about consumer behavior in the former market helps the monopolist firm, in the latter market, to price-discriminate. Consumers differ in their income and in their level of myopia. Personal data market regulation could both increase consumers' awareness about the treatment of their data and allow them to have their data erased from the data holder. We find that the former aspect of the policy reduces the number of transactions, and hence tends to reduce total surplus, while the second typically boosts willingness to pay of consumers and has positive effects on surplus, provided that the share of high-income consumers is not too high. The overall effect of regulation on total welfare depends on the share of high-income and myopic consumers.

An interdisciplinary model network consisting of the regional agricultural economic model RAUMIS and the hydro(geo)logical models GROWA/WEKU is used to analyze the effect of different scenarios of maximum agricultural nitrogen balance surplus on water quality. The study area is the federal state of Lower Saxony, Germany, which features heterogeneous natural site conditions as well as agricultural production structures. A focus of the study is the modeling of supra-regional manure transports that, according to the model's results, considerably increase due to a lowering of maximum nitrogen balance surpluses. The assessment of the examined nitrogen reduction measures reveals that adequate indicators have to be applied. In this regard, the model results show that even though the analyzed measure leads to a substantial overall reduction of agricultural nitrogen surpluses, nitrogen discharges into surface and groundwater can regionally increase.

This chapter argues that the Marxian theory of exploitation underlies the concepts of surplus and deficit industries that appear in Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. This is seen from archival research of the unpublished papers of Piero Sraffa housed at the Wren Library, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. There it is shown that the origin of these concepts lies in the Marxian theory of exploitation that Sraffa developed regarding the notion of the ‘pool of profits’ the Italian economist utilized over a 14-year period from 1942 to 1956. The chapter engages in an extensive textual study of the archival evidence and then presents a simple analytical model of these relations.

Norway is a small nation state on the northernmost coastline of Western Europe, integrated in the Western world economy. For centuries Norway's integration in the world economy had been based on exports of raw materials such as fish and timber, as well as shipping services. In the early 20th century, furnace-based metals (made possible by cheap hydropower) were added to this export basket. Just as the world economy entered an increasingly unstable phase in 1970s, another natural resource was discovered in Norway: petroleum – that is, oil and natural gas from the North Sea. This chapter analyses the challenges and possibilities inherent in the Norwegian strategy of developing an oil economy in a world economic situation influenced by new and stronger forms of international integration through the four decades between 1970 and 2010.