Accounting
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Long-term Attachments and Long-Run Firm Rates of Return
Long-term attachments between workers and firms are common. Numerous studies have examined worker returns to tenure, but little is known of firm returns to firm-worker matches. Yet these attachments represent a human capital asset quasi-held by the firm, which is not captured by traditional accounting measures of firm assets. Firms with large quasi-holdings of human capital will have higher measured return on assets, other things equal. Analysis of data on 250 large manufacturing firms supports the view that firms profit from long-term attachments with their workers. Consequently, unmeasured human capital assets contribute to the explanation of persistence in measured long-run excess profits across
Student/Faculty Connections in the Development of Teaching
This project directly involved students in two different models of instructional development. The first model was a Student Consultant program in which faculty selected from a menu of instructional services carried out by students. Typical services included attending class as impartial observers, soliciting feedback from other students on their learning experiences, videotaping class sessions, and evaluating course websites. The second model of instructional development was a program of student-assisted teaching seminars for college faculty. Student Associates helped serve as panelists and facilitators. Assessments of attitudes toward teaching indicated that faculty members viewed both professors and students as collaborators in the classroom as a result of the seminar series.
Ethical Distancing: Rationalizing Violations of Organizational Norms
Recent work on moral reasoning has focused on the psychological relationship between the actor, the action and the outcome. The argument is that a tighter connection between these categories leads to more moral behavior. Using data from students who cheated on an exam, we extend this literature by delineating how people can rationalize non-moral behavior by loosening the above relationships. In particular, we found that students tried to distance themselves from the wrongfulness of cheating using four types of rationalization: separating themselves from the action, blaming a third-party for influencing the decision, re-defining the action as something good, and defining alternate outcomes from the behavior. Supporting these rationales are nine basic arguments based on confusion, character, professor clarity, attractive nuisance, culture, intent, acceptance, comparisons and outcome. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for our understanding of moral reasoning and provide some practical approaches for minimizing this behavior.