Showing a strong front: Corporate social reporting and the business case in Britain, 1914-1919

It is generally asserted that corporate social reporting (CSR) is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. The present paper contests this view by looking at the ways in which British companies reacted to the challenges they faced during the First World War, when they were exposed to charges of profiteering, as well as to industrial unrest and high taxation. The paper considers the use of the speeches made by chairmen at annual general meetings to refute these charges and defend themselves. It considers the relevance of these findings for contemporary social reporting, and suggests that investigation of the history of CSR is likely to show further examples of its use by companies to put forward the business case

Frank must marry money: Men, women, and property in Trollope\u27s novels

There is a continuing debate about the extent to which women in the 19th century were involved in economic life. The paper uses a reading of a number of novels by the English author Anthony Trollope to explore the impact of primogeniture, entail, and the marriage settlement on the relationship between men and women and the extent to which women were involved in the ownership, transmission, and management of property in England in the mid-19th century

Lives in the balance? Gender, age and assets in late-nineteenth-century England and Wales

Studies of wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Britain focus either on establishing aggregate measures or on individual case studies. These do not allow for a comparative analysis of the way that the composition of wealth was influenced by age and gender. This article explores the importance of these factors using both a case-study approach and a more comprehensive analysis of wealth left at death for a sample of 1,444 individuals. By establishing the age at death for 1,274 of these individuals, together with evidence from a series of death duty records, it is possible to determine the composition of assets by age and gender. For both men and women, shares became more important over the life course. Real estate was more important for men of all ages compared to women, for whom safe investments in government securities assumed greater significance with age. These findings confirm that both age and gender influenced the amount and composition of wealth and demonstrate that these factors need to be taken into account in any model that seeks to make generalizations about the pattern of wealth-holding in the population at large. Emphasizing these demand-side factors provides a different perspective on the rise of Britain as a 'nation of investors'

Income Rounding and Loan Performance in the Peer-to-Peer Market

This paper uses a unique dataset from Lending Club (LC), the largest online lender in the U.S, to analyze the consequences of income rounding in terms of loans performance. We find that rounding of income by a borrower may indicate a bad outcome for a loan. Borrowers with a rounding tendency are more likely to default and less likely to prepay than borrowers with more accurate income reporting. Furthermore, investors are not compensated for the extra risk associated with rounding. Borrowers who misreport income by means of rounding obtain lower interest rates and larger loans with longer maturity than those who do not round. These results are consistent across various specifications and sub-samples

'That wide-eyed sceptical curiosity that makes women so formidable': Women's investment behaviour before and after the First World War'

A major ESRC-funded study of women and wealth in England and Wales 1870 to 1930 suggests that over this period the proportion of women in the shareholder population increased from fewer than 10% to just under 50%. There is an emerging literature on women and wealth in the nineteenth century, but little is yet known about women’s investment behaviour in the early twentieth century. This paper concentrates on the period 1900 to 1930, with the intention of trying to identify differences in women’s investment behaviour pre- and post- World War I. It examines differences between women’s investments in the two decades before and the two decades after World War 1. We concentrate in particular on female attitudes to investing in domestic versus colonial or foreign enterprises; large or small, profitable or poorly performing companies; new or older sectors; debentures, preference or ordinary shares. We also consider the relative importance of married women, spinsters and widows as investors, pre- and post-World War I, in the light of demographic changes, male mortality in the war, and increased financial opportunities for women

Second thoughts about ' Cases in Auditing '

This paper considers the uses and limitations of case studies in teaching audit and, in particular, the ways in which cases might be made more relevant to a critical approach to audit. It concludes that case studies based on audit scandals are not always the most appropriate resource, and that what are needed are cases that give students an appreciation of the way in which audit relates to other elements of corporate governance. A role-playing approach may be helpful here to provide an insight into the multiple pressures and influences on the auditor.Audit, Case Studies,