MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS CURRICULA: STATE-OF-THE-ART*

Business and business/management schools were surveyed to determine the characteristics of management information systems (MIS) curricula. All academic degree levels–Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate–were investigated. An encouraging 82% response from 260 academic institutions queried lends credibility to findings reported. These survey results should provide insights for the development of new and/or revised MIS curricula. They also indicate opportunities for expanding enrollments. The MIS field, still in its infancy, has not yet stabilized. This is causing difficulties in planning curricula for this newly-evolving discipline. The MIS area within both the academic and business communities is undergoing constant and rapid change due to environmental and technological advancements. In order to insure curriculum relevance and properly trained personnel in this field, these areas must respond to these changes. Suggestions as to where and how this discipline should proceed must be based upon the currently existing situation.     

Does Radical Partisan Politics Affect National Income Distributions? Congressional Polarization and Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–2008*

Recent research indicates that political polarization in Congress and income inequality share a closely linked positive association. But virtually no studies examine the direction of influence between these variables as it is assumed that income inequality causes political polarization. The major purpose of this investigation is to examine the temporal causal ordering of these variables. Methods. This study constructs a time series national‐level data set with information for the years 1913 to 2008. Vector autoregression and granger causality tests are utilized to explore the temporal causal ordering of congressional polarization and the income share of the top 0.1, 1.0, 5.0, and 10.0 percent of earners in the United States. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity regressions are also employed to assess the strength of the association between congressional polarization and top incomes net of relevant control variables. Results. The findings indicate that the past values of congressional polarization are better predictors of top income shares than vice versa. The results also demonstrate that polarization in the House of Representatives produces a more consistent and robust connection with top incomes than polarization in the Senate. Lastly, congressional polarization only produces robust associations with the income share of the top 0.1 and 1.0 percent of earners but not for the top 5.0 and 10.0 percent. Conclusion. While the Senate possesses more powerful negative agenda control procedures to stifle the legislative processes vis‐à‐vis the House, it is polarization in the latter that returns the more robust associations with income inequality.     

A comparative overview of social enterprise ‘ecosystems’ in Scotland and England: an evolutionary perspective

Social enterprise has been identified as a culturally and socially constructed phenomenon; over recent years there has been increasing focus on how social enterprise ‘ecosystems’ differ across countries. There has been less focus on the differences in social enterprise ecosystems within countries, where regional differences in the cultural, political and social environment can lead to variations in the environment for support. Recent devolution within the United Kingdom has led to all four countries developing fairly diverse political and policy environments. This paper explores these differences through the lens of evolutionary theory which posits that within an ecosystem all organisms are a product of the evolution of that ecosystem and that socio-political and regulatory differences can lead to the rapid divergence of social enterprise ecosystems.     

Distribution asymptotique des autocorrélations ďun processus saisonnier non stationnaire

We examine the behaviour of the sample autocorrelations of a seasonal time series for which the first difference of order s (s ≥ 1) is stationary. The asymptotic distribution of the autocorrelations r'(k) based on uncentered data and of the autocorrelations r(k) based on centered data are derived. In each case, the asymptotic distribution is characterized as a function of the lag k and the parameters of the process. A simulation study was conducted in order to investigate the rate of convergence of the finite sample distributions of r(k) and r'(k) to their asymptotic counterparts and to evaluate the effect of centering or not centering the data on the distribution of autocorrelations.     

Victim Experiences in Hate Crimes Based on Sexual Orientation

Using interview data from a convenience sample of 450 lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults, the varieties of victim experiences in hate crimes based on sexual orientation are described. Most crimes were perpetrated in public settings by one or more strangers, but victimization also occurred in other locales, and perpetrators included neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. In deciding whether a crime was based on their sexual orientation, victims tended to rely primarily on contextual cues and perpetrators' explicit statements. Victims' concerns about police bias and public disclosure of their sexual orientation were important factors in deciding whether to report antigay crimes, as were beliefs about the crime's severity and the likelihood that perpetrators would be punished.     

Tests for noncorrelation of two multivariate ARMA time series

In many situations, we want to verify the existence of a relationship between multivariate time series. In this paper, we generalize the procedure developed by Haugh (1976) for univariate time series in order to test the hypothesis of noncorrelation between two multivariate stationary ARMA series. The test statistics are based on residual cross-correlation matrices. Under the null hypothesis of noncorrelation, we show that an arbitrary vector of residual cross-correlations asymptotically follows the same distribution as the corresponding vector of cross-correlations between the two innovation series. From this result, it follows that the test statistics considered are asymptotically distributed as chi-square random variables. Two test procedures are described. The first one is based on the residual cross-correlation matrix at a particular lag, whilst the second one is based on a portmanteau type statistic that generalizes Haugh's statistic. We also discuss how the procedures for testing noncorrelation can be adapted to determine the directions of causality in the sense of Granger (1969) between the two series. An advantage of the proposed procedures is that their application does not require the estimation of a global model for the two series. The finite-sample properties of the statistics introduced were studied by simulation under the null hypothesis. It led to modified statistics whose upper quantiles are much better approximated by those of the corresponding chi-square distribution. Finally, the procedures developed are applied to two different sets of economic data.     

Undocumented migration to Venezuela

"In 1980 Venezuela took...steps to regularize the undocumented migrant population. While the number responding to the amnesty was small relative to expectations, the majority of illegals appeared to have regularized their status. For the first time it was possible to assess objectively the characteristics of the undocumented population. Moreover, the problem of illegal migrants seems to have been temporarily solved, a result of both the amnesty and the country's declining economic activity." Topics covered in the present article include the nationality, geographic distribution, sex and age distribution, educational status, and occupations of undocumented migrants.