Quasi-experimentation - design and analysis issues for field settings - cook,td, campbell,dt

It made it possible to improve people's lives. Now it prevents all forms of discrimination in the world. It helps to improve our world.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 414 pages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.I LOVE THESE GUYS''(Joseph Stiglitz) is an insanely great economist,'' so writes Paul R. Krugman, who should know. These two like to write books for the populace at large on the topic of macroeconomics. Krugman also likes to spout offon Sunday news shows like ''Meet the Press,'' and on all the cable news programs. You can see Krugman arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Meet the Press. From YouTube: ''Don't call me a liar, pal, that's what you do all the time,'' says O'Reilly; ''This is not your show, so you can't cut offmy mic,'' says Krugman. Judging by their expressions, I was glad Tim Russert (6- 3-) was there in the studio at the time to protect Krugman (5- 7-) (O'Reilly stands 6- 4-). Conservative pundits dislike both economists, but pretty much leave Stiglitz alone.Krugman makes it a point to stay out of government affairs. Stiglitz does just the opposite, and he sometimes gets burned. Stiglitz was part of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was Chief Economist for the World Bank. After much criticism of the way the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted lending to developing countries, he was pretty much fired from the World Bank. Comparing the two, you would have to say that Stiglitz is more the bleeding heart, while Krugman says that what he dislikes most is the dishonesty he sees in political-economic discourse. Both are champions of the common man.Since Stiglitz can make the very valid claim for being ''an insanely great economist,'' most everything he says in his books should be taken seriously. There are some real gems in this book. I especially like the perspective he lends to some of the more peculiar things that happened before, during, and after the financial crisis. People hear about these things in the news from some announcer who makes them sound like just more news-bites, but they are, after all, unprecedented (and largely absurd). Take ''robo-signing'' for instance (page 198).WHAT GOES FOR NEWSRobo-signing was part of what happened during the foreclosure process after the massive numbers of defaults of subprime mortgages. Big banks intentionally did not follow mandated law. Apart from ignoring debtors' rights, an ensuing mess followed. Robo-signing was nothing less than a blatant attempt at rewriting property law, and resulted in lying to the courts about the state of each property's title, literally hundreds of times. No bank officer was charged with a crime. By contrast, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to 829 individual convictions and 650 prison sentences. Nowadays the big banks just pay fines as part of settlements where they admit no guilt, and it's just part of doing business.Take algorithmic or ''flash'' trading in the stock exchanges (page 164). These are buys and sales made in nanoseconds on the basis of extracting information from the patterns of prices and trades. Nothing like real information gathered through market research on an industry, or on a firm in a certain industry, backs up these trades. But traders swear that ''price discovery'' is happening this way, and that all this backs up the efficient markets model. So on May 6, 2010 stock prices plummeted to a point where the Dow Jones temporarily lost 10% of its value. There are reasons to believe that these trades ''make markets not just more volatile but also less 'informative' '' (page 166). Still, the talk on the street is all about efficient markets (echoing Alan Greenspan's failures at the Federal Reserve).Take failed privatizations. When electric power in California was liberalized and Enron manipulated prices and public power to its advantage, this was a story about the company's accounting practices, not about privatizing something that had no business being privatized. …

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

This news article reports on the events occurring and the views taken at the 1995 UN Conference on Women held in Beijing China and the Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) Forum. The setting in China for this decennially occurring conference was appropriate for the discussion of womens rights. Despite the selective coverage of the conference by Chinese official reports word would trickle out in whispers to Chinese women about some new ideas. Chinese visa restrictions on participants of the NGO Forum forced many women to devise ingenious ways of gaining entrance to the meetings. The alliance between the Holy See and Islam disciples threatened to undermine basic goals of conference to open up access to contraception and to change property rights. The conference chair diplomatically found justification for praise of unpopular views despite the disputes among a majority of delegates. The aim of the conference was to obtain a common understanding of some basic rights and not 100% agreement. Womens economic contributions have not been recognized in gross domestic product calculations. The World Bank has reported that about $13 billion is unaccounted for income and unwaged income of which about $8.5 billion is due to womens productivity. Women expressed the desire for recognition of their economic contribution. Since the last womens conference held in Nairobi in 1985 there has been an increase in world poverty. Uganda expends more on servicing its debt than on health and education. There was general agreement that gender equity was a goal but there was less consensus on how to achieve it.

Gross domestic product.

Purpose – This research aims to measure compliance in a tax experiment among students. The aim of the study is to investigate relationships between claimed behaviour in a questionnaire and actual behaviour in an experimental environment, together with different behaviours between males and females, and different age cohorts.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 630 undergraduate Commerce students at a New Zealand university completed a questionnaire on attitudes towards the tax system. The students subsequently participated in a simulation experiment requiring responses to hypothetical tax evasion decisions. Individual reward payments were contingent on the outcome of these tax evasion decisions. Questionnaire responses, which captured intended behaviour, were compared with actual behaviour in the experiment.Findings – The study finds more compliant behaviour among older students and students who have been at university longer. It also finds female students demonstrate more ethical responses in their b...

Ethics and experiments in accounting: A contribution to the debate on measuring ethical behaviour

The tax discipline has accepted the practice adopted in the economics and psychology disciplines of using student subjects for experimental research purposes. However, in other social science disciplines (e.g. accounting, management or consumer research), experimental research that uses students as a substitute for another group has been widely criticised as having little external validity. In this research, data are compiled from journal articles over a 20 year period to investigate the extent to which tax experiments use student subjects and the potential implications from this practice. Three research questions are addressed. First, do tax studies using student subjects justify or explain the use of student subjects? Second, are policy recommendations or other extrapolations to the tax-paying population made from the student subject results? Third, is any acknowledgement made of the potential limitations of using student subjects? The findings indicate that approximately half of the tax experiments inv...

Using student subjects in experimental research: a challenge to the practice of using students as a proxy for taxpayers

Power and ideas: The development of retirement savings taxation in Australasia

The thesis makes two primary contributions. The first is in the provision of a comprehensive historical account of the events, personalities and environment that formed the policy for the taxation of retirement savings in New Zealand and Australia. This historical account is analysed through institutional frameworks to explain the antecedents that have resulted in the retirement savings taxation policy outcomes that exist in the two countries at the present time. The second key objective of the research, in using institutional theory to assist with the first objective, is to provide some insights into the utility of institutional theory, and historical institutionalism in particular, in this comparative case study. The different retirement savings policies that were implemented in the mid to late 1980s in New Zealand and Australia have resulted in substantially different levels of retirement savings in each country. New Zealand s retirement savings figures and participation in occupational superannuation are among the lowest in the OECD. Conversely, Australia now has the fourth largest managed fund pool in the world, and the largest in Asia. Australian retirees can expect to have an income of 70 - 80 per cent of their final retirement income, after 40 years of Superannuation Guarantee participation. Retiring New Zealanders, assuming National Superannuation continues unchallenged, will receive a minimum of 60 - 65 per cent of the average wage. The difference in standard of living that these amounts will support is significant. Retiring Australians will be advantaged with some relationship between their pre-retirement and retirement income. This is a benefit many retiring New Zealanders will not receive. The research findings indicate that the key independent variables highlighted in this research (the environment, institutions, power and ideas) contribute a contestable explanation to the policy directions adopted in each country. The thesis argues that the concept of ideas is the key dimension that shaped the retirement savings taxation policy in the 1982 to 1992 period in New Zealand and Australia. The use of a coherent ideology facilitated the communication of a consistent world view in both countries, and provided a set of established ideas to support the direction adopted. This assisted with validation for trade-offs incurred in the policy process. The investigation of institutional factors highlighted the lack of potential for interest groups to make their voices heard. Conversely, the privileging of certain interest groups, those aligned with the prevailing ideas, was also prevalent. The institutions with the strongest influence on the policy process were those that, through historical events or historical opportunity, had preferences that were aligned with the state. This case study indicates that historical institutionalism has less utility for the study of a more detailed component of policy, rather than broader structural policy reform, as typically used in other studies. Thus, it is suggested that the utility of historical institutionalism may be reflected by the level of detail both undertaken in the research and desired from the research output. The indication that historical institutionalism may have greater utility for larger case study analyses may have application for future research.

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The Politics of Retirement Savings Taxation:a Trans-Tasman Comparison

This study undertakes an empirical exploration of attitudes towards tax evasion and welfare fraud in New Zealand. Prior research indicates that society has different attitudes towards these two crimes. However, it is not known why this is the case, particularly as both crimes are conceptually similar. The study has two aims. The first is to measure the extent to which society views tax evasion and welfare fraud differently in New Zealand. The second, and primary, objective of this research is to offer an explanation for why different views exist. The dual-process model, using social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism is used for analytical purposes. Responses from 1500 survey participants show that New Zealanders do have different attitudes towards welfare fraud and tax evasion. In contrast to previous research findings, this study shows that harsher attitudes are held towards tax evasion than welfare fraud. Education and income level provide the greatest level of significance in explai...

Lisa Marriott

Papers

Ethics and experiments in accounting: A contribution to the debate on measuring ethical behaviour

Using student subjects in experimental research: a challenge to the practice of using students as a proxy for taxpayers

Power and ideas: The development of retirement savings taxation in Australasia

The Politics of Retirement Savings Taxation:a Trans-Tasman Comparison

An investigation of attitudes towards tax evasion and welfare fraud in New Zealand