Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate which factors stimulate or hinder the influence management accountants operating at the business unit (BU) level have on the decisions taken by their BU manager(s). Design/methodology/approach: The authors collected data from 119 management...

Purpose: In this paper, we concentrate on the use of research assessment (RA) systems in universities in New Zealand (NZ) and the United Kingdom (UK). Primarily we focus on PBRF and REF, and explore differences between these systems on individual and systemic levels. We ask, these days, in what...

Purpose: During choir rehearsals, a conductor continuously holds choir members accountable for what they do and how they sing. Hence, members are held accountable through action. This allows a conductor to emphasize his/her expertise and underline his/her authority. Choir members typically...

The presence of structural breaks can seriously affect the outcome of standard regression methods like OLS. Although there are many methods available to deal with them, we focus here on a particular linear filtering method, namely the Kalman Filter. Its results vis a vis a regular OLS approach...

R&D based models relating technical change and economic growth have been unsuccessful in explaining the recent productivity paradox: R&D efforts have risen continuously in advanced countries during the postwar period whereas productivity growth has, if anything, declined. Several explanations of...

The cost-minimization part of a specific factors model with perfect capital movements and production externalities for both perfect and imperfect competition is used here to explain the growth rate of wages as a function of technical change, terms of trade or import changes, interest rate...

The cost-minimization part of a specific factors model with perfect capital movements and both perfect and imperfect competition is used here to explain the growth rate of wages as a function of technical change, terms of trade changes, interest rate changes and the growth rate of the labour...

Organizations are often faced with difficult, complex problems in a similarly difficult and complex environment. In order to tackle these problems, several methods have been proposed in the literature. One of them is action learning. Action learning starts from the premise that gained insights...

Action learning programs do not always seem to lead to organizational growth. Two of the reasons why this may happen, differences in perspectives and hold-up situations, are therefore contained in a flexible mathematical model that serves descriptive purposes. Studying this model brings us to...

The sectoral shift hypothesis in the Netherlands cannot be easily tested for the presence of rigorous structural breaks in the data. Therefore, a Kalman Filter approach is adopted. What we find, is that the variables capturing the sectoral shift hypothesis are the most important in explaining...