9,644 research outputs found
One way forward: non-traditional accounting disclosures in the 21st century
Recent empirical studies (Deegan and Rankin, 1999; Deegan et al., 2000) have indicated that although
many corporations have begun to respond to perceived demand for environmental disclosures in
published accounts, their perspective of organisational legitimacy is a narrow view, in which information
is targeted towards specific stakeholders and not to the general public.
This paper considers a range of models (variously called guidelines, standards and charters) which
have been put forward by different organisations to aid the development of social and environmental
disclosures. In all cases verification and attestation are part of the proposed regimen.
The question which the papers attempts to answer is whether any one of the models would be capable
of rapid adoption as part of an expanded GAAP, should the professional accounting bodies think that
this is desirable. The outcome of our deliberations is cautious support for the use of EMAS and ISO
14000 as the basis for a modified GAAP plus the further development of the GRI 2000 guidelines into a
set of standards covering both social and environmental reporting
Externalities revisited: the use of an environmental equity account
This exploratory paper attempts to restart a debate about the incorporation of environmental
externalities into the cost structure of the organisation. A number approaches are considered;
regulation together with all that would follow such as audit and policing; pollution permits, which
probably can only be used with a sinking lid application; and other charging mechanisms such as
making the private sector pay for public sector capital funding. The fourth alternative, the use of an
environmental equity account, has not been widely considered in the literature.
The paper proposes the use of an environmental equity account (after Boone and Rubenstein,
1997) with the express intent of generating a charge for environmental impact based on the cost of
control. That is, the cost of implementing state of the art technology compared to that currently in
use within the organisation, is used as a balance which may be either paid as a capital sum or
carried as a balance sheet entry upon which dividend payments would have to be made. It is
envisaged that both capital sums and dividend payments would go to an agency responsible for
environmental remediation activity
Potentially dysfunctional impacts of harmonising accounting standards: the case of intangible assets
Intangible Assets as a category within accounting and reporting disclosures have become far more
noticeable in recent years, including large amounts associated with brands, mastheads, franchises, and
patents. Many of these items are not purchased but internally generated within the organisation, and
may account for much of the difference in magnitude between book value and market capitalisation.
The International Accounting Standards Committee has recently issued IAS 38 to regulate the reporting
of intangible assets, and includes therein the prohibition of those intangible assets, which have been
internally generated. This prohibition would cut across recently developed practices in Australia and
New Zealand. The problem is compounded by an increasingly close relationship between IASs and the
national standards of both Australia and New Zealand, making it very likely that the problem areas
within IAS 38 will be transferred to the national standards.
This paper examines the areas within IAS 38, which are likely to lead to undesirable consequences,
both for internally generated intangible assets but also in terms of the reinforcement of somewhat
conservative aspects of financial accounting including historical cost and the inhibiting effects on new
developments generally. The possible compounding effects of an expectations gap between the
traditional and expected role of financial statements is briefly examined as a possible explanation of the
divergence of opinion between different groups involved in the development of accounting standards
and reports
Vector boson production in association with KK modes of the ADD model to NLO in QCD at LHC
Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the associated production of vector
boson (Z/W) with the the Kaluza-Klein modes of the graviton in large extra
dimensional model at the LHC, are presented. We have obtained various kinematic
distributions using a Monte Carlo code which is based on the two cut off phase
space slicing method that handles soft and collinear singularities appearing at
NLO level. We estimate the impact of the QCD corrections on various observables
and find that they are significant. We also show the reduction in factorization
scale uncertainty when QCD corrections are included.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
Unparticle effects in rare (t -> c g g) decay
Rare (t -> c g g) decay can only appear at loop level in the Standard Model
(SM), and naturally they are strongly suppressed. These flavor changing decays
induced by the mediation of spin-0 and spin-2 unparticles, can appear at tree
level in unparticle physics. In this work the virtual effects of unparticle
physics in the flavor-changing (t -> c g g) decay is studied. Using the SM
result for the branching ratio of the (t -> c g g) decay, the parameter space
of d_U and Lambda_U, where the branching ratio of this decay exceeds the one
predicted by the SM, is obtained. Measurement of the branching ratio larger
than 10^(-9) can give valuable information for establishing unparticle physics.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX formatte
Concept tagging in Moodle
The Moodle learning management system (LMS) is becoming increasingly widespread due to its adoption by education providers at all levels. The system however does not provide educators with the ability to create connections between online course material and domain concepts easily and visibly. We chose concept tagging as the method for allowing teachers to provide these links in a new concept tags plug-in for Moodle. Our concept tagging plug-in allows the creation, management and application of concept tags to course content. Students and teachers will mutually benefit from the use of such a mechanism, as it would aid information location in and retrieval from course content. An initial evaluation of the plug-in showed that teachers find the concept tagging of course modules to be a desirable and usable functionality that Moodle lacks. The work in this paper describes the first prototype of the plug-in, the aim of which is provide the first step in contributing to the addition of basic student modelling functionality to Moodle as part of a wider project. By continually keeping track of a studentās progress on each concept tag, Moodle will be able to suggest appropriate course modules for further study based on this progress
Data-driven misconception discovery in constraint-based intelligent tutoring systems
Students often have misconceptions in the domain they are studying. Misconception identification is a difficult task but allows teachers to create strategies to appropriately address misconceptions held by students. This project investigates a data-driven technique to discover students' misconceptions in interactions with constraint-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems(ITSs). This analysis has not previously been done. EER-Tutor is one such constraint-based ITS, which teaches conceptual database design using Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) data modelling. As with any ITS, a lot of data about each student's interaction within EER-Tutor are available: as individual student models, containing constraint histories, and logs, containing detailed information about each student action. This work can be extended to other ITSs and their relevant domains
Corporate social responsibility in the Russian energy industry
Purpose - The paper looks into the institutional factors that shape CSR adoption in the Russian energy industry.
Underpinned by theoretical foundations, this paper helps to understand which of Scottās (1995) three institutional
pillars dominate the structuring of CSR in the Russian energy industry. CSR understanding depends heavily
upon the institutional context of the countries (Kim et al. 2013). CSR is now employed internationally, facing
various institutional contexts, with different cultures, regulations, norms and behaviours (Hira and Hira, 2000).
Different motivational factors and value systems shape CSR internationally (Kim et al.2013). Institutions are
formal or informal rules, regulations, norms and understandings that constrain and enable behavior (North,
1990). This study employs neo-institutional theory to explore the specific factors that shape CSR in the context of the Russian energy industry. A neo-institutional framework provides an approach for the understanding different attitudes and practices in a specific social context (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Scott, 1995). The study is a detailed qualitative analysis of CSR in Russia, a country with different value and political systems from the U.S where CSR was initially developed (Campbell, 2007). This study employs the three āpillars of institutionsā regulative, normative and cognitive to identify pressures on CSR actions (Scott, 1995; Kostova and Roth,2002).
Design/methodology/approach - Qualitative research is appropriate for this study as it enables to develop a
deep understanding of peopleās hidden interpretation, motivations and understanding (Subhasis and Siva, 2014).
Semi-structured interviews are conducted as it allows the employees to raise and discuss matters of importance
to them (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). Following Miles and Huberman (1994), qualitative content analysis technique is used to analyse the interviews to identify themes in the data.
Preliminary Findings ā The findings reveal so far that CSR practice in Russian is not related to any single
institutional pressure. However, for a post-communist economy such as Russia, a regulation implementation
might be weak and may not play an important role in forming CSR. In fact, the non-regulatory processes such as normative influence may have a greater impact instead. The companies have been under media pressure over the
social and environmental consequences over the past several years. Companies need to meet expectations of
internal stakeholders such as employees, and external such as community where the company wants to perform.
Russia has a strong traditional ideology of collectivism, which places strong obligations on employers for their
employees (Mamontov et al. 2014). Companies are expected to provide various social benefits to employees in
terms of healthcare, education, housing. This is taken-for-granted common social belief, which is embedded in
culture and specific for this particular context (Bashtovaya, 2014). This belief has been inherited from the communist era where companies were considered as āsocial caretakersā, constantly providing social benefits
(Fifka and Pobizhan, 2014). This belief is culturally formed unlike the regulative and the normative pillars
(Scott, 2008).
Practical Implications ā This paper offers an understanding on why Russian energy companies adopt CSR and what institutional factors shape their adoption. This sheds more light on institutional logics that underline CSR practices, and puts forward implications for managers and policy makers to construct more effective CSR
strategies. In particular, this helps multinational companies to construct effective CSR strategies and not just adopt their CSR from home country.
Value -This paper looks into institutional factors in particular, which of three institutional pillars seem more relevant in shaping CSR in the Russian energy industry. The theoretical contribution from this research is to neo-institutional theory and three pillars of institutions, and its application to understand CSR in the Russian context. Based on a wide range of literature review, I integrate literature on CSR, neo-institutional theory, and post-communist economy. Thus theoretically conceptualizing the effects of three institutional dimensions such as regulative, normative and cognitive on CSR at international level. Although prior literature suggests a connection between CSR and institutions, I attempt to extend the theoretical framework by looking at a new contextual environment. Crotty and Rodgers (2012) argue CSR research requires to be more contextualised by
tacking into consideration characteristics of the country. I attempt to broaden the Western interpretation about CSR by considering the post-communist economy of the country. If contextualisation is not in place, than the type and nature of CSR undertaken in non-western contexts might be diminished and misinterpreted
Generation of Curvature Perturbations with Extra Anisotropic Stress
We study the evolution of curvature perturbations and the cosmic microwave
background (CMB) power spectrum in the presence of an hypothesized extra
anisotropic stress which might arise, for example, from the dark radiation term
in brane-world cosmology. We evolve the scalar modes of such perturbations
before and after neutrino decoupling and analyze their effects on the CMB
spectrum. A novel result of this work is that the cancellation of the neutrino
and extra anisotropic stress could lead to a spectrum of residual curvature
perturbations which is similar to the observed CMB power spectrum. This implies
a possible additional consideration in the determination of cosmological
parameters from the CMB analysis.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; improved discussio
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