The empirical literature examining the performance benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been decidedly equivocal, reporting positive relationships in many cases, while negative or null relationships in others. In this meta-analytic extension, we explored the financial and non-financial benefits that may result from business corporate social responsibility initiatives. Results provide further support for the positive linkage between corporate social responsibility and firm performance....

Jamaica has made advances in development, in terms of education, health and poverty alleviation; however, economic growth (in terms of GDP) has been difficult. What has made Jamaica’s economic growth so sluggish? This paper hypothesizes that the vibrancy of the informal economy is at fault. A large informal economy suggests the underestimation of GDP. To date, no study has been done to show what influences economic growth in both the formal and informal sectors. Therefore, this study aims to fill...

This paper examines the impacts of reform on the farmland management in China on the aggregate economic welfare on the world economy. Propositions derived from a theoretical model include that when the restrictions on farmland exchange are removed, agricultural output may fall but the income loss from a shrinking cropping sector will be more than compensated by a consequential increase in income generated from its alternative use in the dwelling construction sector. The change in the farmland allocation...

FDI is thought to be one of the contemporary most dynamic factors of internationalization in both micro (companies) and macro (economies) scales. The gravitation model is widely applied in social sciences, therefore it is worth verifying whether it is able to cope with FDI development. The cognitive purpose of the paper is to explore a capability for explaining the FDI opportunities within the EU countries by the gravity model, which covers the size of the given economies and the distance between...

Following the 1978 rural reform, a series of agricultural reforms were introduced in China with an aim to create incentives for the farmers to produce more. However, the nineties’ reforms towards liberalization eventually resulted in a huge drop in agricultural production, which apparently motivated the grain self-sufficiency program in 1998. For a dataset that covers wheat production during these reforms, we examine how and to what extent these reforms affected the Total Factor Productivity (TFP)...

The aim of this paper is to examine the trend over time of the rewards to education granted by the Mexican labor market accounting for gender differences. The paper provides robust estimates of the returns to education across the conditional wage distribution using quantile regression methodology. The estimated coefficients reveal a robust declining trend stronger for males than for females. The estimates of the returns to education are larger for females than for males, which may be explained by...

The motivation for undertaking this study was driven by the current practice of activity based costing (ABC), which has identified and allocated costs of environmental factors to overheads. This has resulted in cost accounting information inaccuracies when providing to support environment internal decisions and addressing stakeholders and public concerns. The results of the study indicate that companies are intending to change to new management accounting practices while looking for ways to improve...

This paper reports the results of an experiment conducted post-SOX (2002) involving 107 board directors in Singapore to investigate how directors’ identification and evaluation of diagnostic and non-diagnostic information in a financial statement fraud risk assessment setting affects their risk assessments. The results show that more (less) diluted risk assessments are made when more (fewer) non-diagnostic factors are identified and where more (less) weight is placed on non-diagnostic factors identified...

Family firms are important business enterprises in Taiwan, a regime characterized by weaker investor protection and less developed capital market. Using listed companies from 1996-2011, this study examines whether family firms employ high-quality auditors to mitigate the agency problem arising from concentrated ownership. We find that family firms are more likely to appoint audit partners with industry expertise to alleviate investors’ concern about Type II agency problem, especially when the CEO...

...