Do Nonprofit Organisations Manage Earnings? An Empirical Study

Earnings management by nonprofit organisations is not very frequently studied in the academic literature. The present paper presents an overview of the existing literature, and derives a number of hypotheses as to nonprofit organisations’ inclination to manipulate earnings. In a sample of 844 financial statements (2007) of Belgian nonprofit organisations accounting manipulations of earnings towards zero are clearly present. Furthermore, the potential presence of agency conflicts between board and management induces these manipulations, as well as the presence of debt. Finally, larger organisations seem to be more inclined to manipulate earnings to reach earnings levels close(r) to zero.     

Characterizing referenda with quorums via strategy-proofness

The paper works with a formal model of referenda, where a finite number of voters can choose between two options and abstention. A referendum will be invalid if too many voters abstain, otherwise the referendum will return one of the two options. We consider quorum rules where an option is chosen if it is preferred by the majority of voters and if at least a certain number of voters (the quorum) votes for the alternative. The paper characterizes these rules as the only referenda which are strategy-proof over certain preferences.     

Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America

R. Po‐chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618? (1984), xiv+306 (Yale University Press, £22.50).

David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (1984), x+250 (Cambridge University Press, £22.50).

William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth‐Century France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (1985), xvii+375 (Cambridge University Press, £30.00).

K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (1985), x+464 (Cambridge University Press, £30.00). Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men. Rural Radicalism in Norfolk 1870–1923 (1985), xiv+225 (Routledge &; Kegan Paul for History Workshop Series, paperback £7.95).

William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture. The French Textile Trade, 1750–1900 (1984), viii+406 (Cambridge University Press, £25.00).

Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working‐Class Reformism in Mid‐Victorian England (1985), xiii+369 (Croom Helm, £22.50).

Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz‐Gerhard Haupt (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth‐Century Europe (1984), xii+283 (Methuen, £17.50).

Marzio Barbagli, Sotto lo Stesso Tetto: Mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo (1984), 5+557 (I1 Mulino, Bologna, n.p.)‐ (Under the Same Roof: Changes in the Family in Italy from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century.)

David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910: S hare cropping, Wage Labor and Coresidence (1984), vii+250 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, n.p.).

Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (1984), xiii+325 (University of California Press, £26.20).

David J. Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography (1984), I and II, 878 and 690 (Butterworths, £65.00 per volume).

John Turner (ed.), Businessmen and Politics: Studies of Business Activity in British Politics, 1900–1945 (1984), 200 (Heinemann, £18.50).     

Using hybrid models to support the development of organizational evaluation capacity: a case narrative

The ongoing need for public sector organizations to enhance their internal evaluation capacity is increasingly resulting in the use of hybrid evaluation project models, where internal evaluators work with external contracted evaluators to complete evaluative work. This paper first seeks to identify what is currently known about internal evaluation through a synthesis of the literature in this area. It then presents a case narrative illustrating how internal and external evaluation approaches may be used together to strengthen an evaluation project and to develop the evaluation capacity of the organization. Lessons learned include the need to integrate internal and external resources throughout the evaluation and to clarify expectations at the outset of the project.     

Minimizing bias in clinical peer review

The chief sources of bias in peer review include the clinical outcome and the reviewer. But there are ways to mitigate any bias.     

“Privacy please!” The public to private decision in Germany

This paper examines the characteristics and motives of German public to private transactions (PTPs) between 1996 and 2004. We empirically test hypotheses regarding free cash flow, leverage potential, ownership concentration, a stock market quotation’s decreasing benefits, limited capital market efficiency, and dividends. The results illustrate that, in the relevant period, the going private companies originated from mature industries and that, in the three financial years preceding the PTP transaction, their sales figures showed slow growth. Furthermore, the capital structure had potential for further leveraging and the companies were marked by low profitability. Trading in the PTPs’ shares was very sluggish, which limited the efficiency of the capital markets. Ultimately, we do not find evidence supporting the free cash flow hypothesis regarding German firms.     

Race, punishment, and the Michael Vick experience

Objective. The relationship between race and crime has been contentious, focusing primarily on offending and incarceration patterns among minorities. There has been some limited work on public perceptions of criminal punishment, and findings show that while minorities believe in the role and rule of law, they simultaneously perceive the justice system as acting in a biased and/or unfair manner. Two limitations have stalled this literature. First, research has focused mainly on criminal punishments to the neglect of noncriminal punishments. Second, most studies have not examined whether race remains salient after considering other demographic variables or discrimination and legitimacy attitudes.Methods. Using data from 400 adults, we examine how race affects perceptions of criminal punishment and subsequent reinstatement into the National Football League in the case of Michael Vick, a star professional quarterback who pled guilty to charges of operating an illegal dog-fighting ring.Results. Findings show that whites are more likely to view Vick's punishment as too soft and that he should not be reinstated, while nonwhites had the opposite views. Race remained significant after controlling for other variables believed to be related to punishment perceptions.Conclusion. Attitudes toward both criminal punishment and NFL reinstatement vary across race such that there exists important divides in how individuals perceive the system meting out punishment and subsequently reintegrating offenders back into society. These results underscore that white and nonwhites perceive the law and its administration differently.     

Profit implications of estimation methods for the allocation of marketing resources

We deal with the question whether estimating heterogeneous multiplicative sales response models without carry over effects by either ordinary least squares or Gibbs sampling makes a difference if resources (like advertising budgets, sales budgets, sales force sizes, sales calls) have to be allocated to sales units (like sales districts, customer groups, individual costumers or prospects) in a profit maximizing way and only short time series are available. To this end we generate artificial series on sales and allocations by stochastic simulation. These series are used to estimate multiplicative models whose coefficients are either specific to individual sales units or follow a hierarchical Bayesian framework. Ordinary least squares and Gibbs sampling serve as appropriate estimation methods. Performance of the two estimation methods is measured by recovery of optimal profits which are computed on the basis of the known true parameter values. We start to determine optimal allocations based on the plug-in method which uses average coefficients to determine expected profits. Gibbs sampling always leads to profits nearer to the true optima. This advantage of Gibbs sampling is especially pronounced for combinations with high average elasticity, high variation of elasticity and high number of sales units. On the other hand, differences between Gibbs sampling and OLS become smaller the more observations are available. Optimization with expected profits taking parameter uncertainty (i.e., the distribution of parameters) into account leads to higher profits than the plug-in method, but relative increases turn out to be rather small.     

Humour in the Ancient World

Since the ending of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, the international concept of racism, first initialised in the 1930s, has been inscribed in an unacknowledged conceptual double bind. Western political culture has inherited a hegemonic concept of racism that foregrounds those meanings associated with the anti‐fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern anti‐colonial critiques centred on Western Imperialism. This can be taken to suggest a divergence within a western tradition of critical thought that in one of its guises occurs between the view that ‘‘race’ thinking’ resembles ideological exceptionality and the contrary view that ‘race relations’ approximates colonial conventions. The present essay explores the extent to which these views are constituted conceptually and dialogically in opposition and divergence. This is defined as racism's conceptual double bind. In other words, the international concept of racism is doubly bound into revealing its imprints in nationalism and concealing its anchorage in liberalism; or recognising extremist ideology while denying routine governmentality. The essay, therefore, asks the following: is it im/plausible to deny that there is an inescapable conceptual double bind between these differing conceptualisations of racism that has been ignored by the dominant social science traditions in the West? The idea of a double bind in the concept of racism, reiterated throughout this essay, is not to be confused with the proposition that there are two concepts of racism. On the contrary, during the twentieth‐century conceptualisation of racism, there have rather been two distinct orientations, the hegemonic Eurocentric and the subaltern De/colonial, based on conflicting yet dialogical paradigmatic experiences of the referent of racism.