Tag Archive for: Accounting

Navigating Ethical Systems: How professional accountants can drive ethical behaviour

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Learn about the individual psychology behind ethical behaviour, some of the issues impacting ethical systems and specific considerations for professional accountants and their teams to improve ethical behaviour.

Featured Collaborator for May: Robert Bloomfield

Interview with Robert Bloomfield, Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Management and Professor of Accounting at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management

My research reinforces a maxim long emphasized by accountants: it is most useful to view ethical behavior as a result of institutional choices, rather than as a result of moral character.  It isn’t that a manager’s character has no effect on the ethicality of their decisions, just that it tends to be swamped by institutional forces—and in general, people are far too prone to attribute ethical actions to character when they are actually driven by environment; this bias is so well documented it has been named the Fundamental Attribution Error. Also, we rarely know a person’s character, and even if we do, we don’t know much about how to change it. 

Taking the Pulse of Employee Satisfaction to Predict Future Earnings

Do miserable employees serve as harbingers of a drop in their company’s stock price? What is the true value of an employee’s smile?

Researchers Andy Moniz from the Rotterdam School of Management and Franciska de Jong of Erasmus University addressed these questions at a session based on their recent paper in Advances in Informational Retrieval as part of the Economics of Culture Conference put on by the New York Federal Reserve in November 2015. The authors have taken a new approach to an enduring question within business: What is the best way to evaluate corporate culture?

Featured Collaborator for November: David Hirshleifer

Interview with David Hirshleifer, Professor of Finance and Merage Chair in Business Growth, University of California-Irvine

What are your main areas of research?

I do research in behavioral finance, economics, accounting, and social science more generally. My main focus in recent years has been on how social interactions affect behavior, and on the cultural transmission of beliefs and behavior.