Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

How Do Consumers In General Evaluate, Judge, And Act Toward Shoplifting? The Moderating Effects Of Personal Characteristics And Motives Shoplifting?, Juehui Shi, Ngoc (Cindy) Pham, Claudio Schapsis, Tofazzal Hossain, Arturo Z. Vasquez-Párraga

WCBT Faculty Publications

Despite the seriousness of shoplifting, consumers’ evaluations, judgements, and intentions toward shoplifting remain underexplored by scholars from business ethics, marketing, retailing, and consumer behavior. We propose a new shoplifting ethics model, which integrates Hunt and Vitell’s theory of ethics with Nadeau, Rochlen, and Tyminski’s typology of shoplifting, by incorporating the moderators of consumers’ personal characteristics (i.e., age, gender, marital status, income) and shoplifting motives (i.e., social, experiential, economic, emotional) onto the relationships among deontological evaluation, teleological evaluation, ethical judgment, and intention. Based on a two-by-two randomized experimental design, two shoplifting cases (i.e., swapping price tags, stealing products) are investigated in …

Global Recognition Of Sustainable Companies And The Search For Meaningful Returns, Jenny Gyurova Hite

Doctoral Dissertations (DBA)

Can an investor realize meaningful returns by choosing sustainability? Global Knights publishes an annual 100 Global Most Sustainable companies list which has been announced each January in Davos, Switzerland since 2005. This paper examines the global recognition of the US sustainable companies which make that list and the presence of cumulative abnormal returns of their portfolio. Event study methodology is used to assess short and long term cumulative abnormal returns of a dynamic portfolio updated annually over 16 years to include those names. Standard Deviations and Sortino Ratios are evaluated to determine the comparative level of risk a potential investor …

Immigrant-Owned Small Businesses’ Participation In Diaspora Philanthropy: A Case Study During The Covid-19 Outbreak, Ximeng Chen

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Purpose – The concept of diaspora philanthropy contains the following two components: diasporas, who are individuals who live outside of their homelands but maintain a sense of identity with their home countries, and charitable giving provided by these diasporas to causes related to their hometowns. Often diaspora philanthropy happens through intermediary organizations such as hometown associations, internet-based philanthropic platforms and faith-based groups. Little research explores immigrant-owned small businesses as intermediary organizations for diaspora philanthropy. In the literature of social entrepreneurship, the theory of opportunity recognition provides insights on how do businesses identify opportunities for fulfilling social missions. However, it is …

Carbon Management Strategy And Carbon Disclosures: An Exploratory Study, Kathy K. Dhanda, Mahfuja Malik

WCBT Faculty Publications

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a concept aimed to ensure that corporations conduct their business in an ethical manner by taking care of their environment and human resources in addition to their economic impact. Often times, CSR refers to the steps undertaken by a corporation to measure its efforts to improve the environment and social well-being. One of the aspects of CSR pertains to the disclosure of emission information and carbon management strategy (CMS). Carbon Management refers to analyzing and focusing on those areas within the corporation where cost reductions can be made via energy reductions, waste management and reduced …

It’S Who You Know That Counts: Board Connectedness And Csr Performance, Abu S. Amin, Lamia Chourou, Syed Kamal, Mahfuja Malik, Yang Zhao

WCBT Faculty Publications

Highlights:

• We examine whether and how board connections affect the firm's corporate social responsibilities (CSR).
• We find that board connectedness is positively associated with CSR performance.
• Our findings suggest firms that operate in a complex business environment or require more advising benefit more from a well-networked board.
• Firms that are poorly governed, have high stock return volatility, low market capitalization, or low institutional ownership tend to benefit more from the well-connected board when the cost of acquiring information is higher.
• In addition, we show that independent directors’ abilities to gather information and resources from their networks can facilitate the transmission …

The Effectiveness And Effects Of Alcohol Regulation: Evidence From India, Dara Lee Luca, Emily Owens, Gunjan Sharma

WCBT Faculty Publications

We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of alcohol regulation on alcohol consumption and associated public health outcomes using detailed individual level and aggregate data from India, where state-level laws regulating the minimum legal drinking age generate substantial variation in the availability of commercially produced alcohol across people of different ages. We find that despite significant law evasion, men who are legally allowed to drink are substantially more likely to consume alcohol. Further, men who are legally allowed to drink are significantly more likely to commit violence against their partners, suggesting a causal channel between alcohol consumption and domestic violence. …

Does The Legal System Affect The Cost Of External Financing? Evidence From Ipo Underpricing Of Foreign Firms Listed In U.S. Stock Markets, Shaokang Wang, Jing Jiang

WCBT Faculty Publications

To study the effect of the legal system on the cost of external financing, we examine the degree of underpricing of the IPOs by foreign companies listed in U.S. We find that firms from highly corrupted countries have larger IPO underpricing. The quality of the home-country public law enforcement reduces the degree of IPO underpricing. In particular, the criminal sanction for violations of securities laws is the most significant factor in reducing underpricing. The evidence shows that even when a non-U.S. firm meets sophisticated U.S. regulations and goes public in a U.S. exchange, the degree of underpricing is still influenced …

Climate Change: A Call To Action, Kathy K. Dhanda

WCBT Faculty Publications

On Dec 15, 2018, in the town of Katowice, Poland, diplomats from 200 countries adopted a detailed set of rules to uphold and implement the Paris Agreement, the international treaty drafted by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This deal will require every country to track its emissions and climate policies by following a uniform set of standards. Furthermore, countries are to cut their emissions ahead of the next round of talks in 2020. Climate change is a complicated problem, one that will not be solved by national governments alone. A lot of …

Water System Unreliability And Diarrhea Incidence Among Children In Guatemala, Jennifer Trudeau, Anna-Maria Aksan, Wiliam F. Vásquez

WCBT Faculty Publications

OBJECTIVES:

This article examines the effect of water system unreliability on diarrhea incidence among children aged 0-5 in Guatemala.

METHODS:

We use secondary data from a nationally representative sample of 7579 children to estimate the effects of uninterrupted and interrupted water services on diarrhea incidence. The national scope of this study imposes some methodological challenges due to unobserved geographical heterogeneity. To address this issue, we estimate mixed-effects logit models that control for unobserved heterogeneity by estimating random effects of selected covariates that can vary across geographical areas (i.e. water system reliability).

RESULTS:

Compared to children without access to piped water, …

Why We Should Have Seen That Coming: Comments On Microsoft’S Tay “Experiment,” And Wider Implications, K. W. Miller, Marty J. Wolf, Frances S. Grodzinsky

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper we examine the case of Tay, the Microsoft AI chatbot that was launched in March, 2016. After less than 24 hours, Microsoft shut down the experiment because the chatbot was generating tweets that were judged to be inappropriate since they included racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic language. We contend that the case of Tay illustrates a problem with the very nature of learning software (LS is a term that describes any software that changes its program in response to its interactions) that interacts directly with the public, and the developer’s role and responsibility associated with it. We make …

Restatement Vs Revision: A Case Study, Benoit Boyer, Danny A. Pannese, Alan L. Delfavero

WCBT Faculty Publications

There had been many recent cases of restatements of financial statements by US Corporations. Recently an article in the Wall Street Journal mentioned restatements by Bank of America, Nike and Alphabet among the 663 companies that filed financial revisions or restatements last year. Interestingly the frequency of these errors has more than doubled since 2002, when the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law was enacted, partly to increase managerial accountability. We will also examine what are the differences between restatements and revisions. We will examine what are the most common mistakes. Over half of last year's corrections involved debt and equity, cash …

An Integrated Model Of Employee Adoption, Nelson Pizarro

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Proactive firms recognize that environmental and social issues are sources of competitive advantages, but whatever the motivation, organizations face challenges when implementing sustainable practices. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), sustainable practices have stemmed from multinational corporations (MNC), but SMEs cannot adopt sustainable practices from the knowledge and experiences of large corporations because the two entities differ critically. This study introduces an integrated model of employee adoption of sustainable practices in SMEs. It is based on five behaviors to select practical areas to which SMEs can make internal changes to achieve sustainable practices and the benefits gained from them. The …

Era Of Big Data: Danger Of Descrimination, Andra Gumbus, Frances Grodzinsky

WCBT Faculty Publications

We live in a world of data collection where organizations and marketers know our income, our credit rating and history, our love life, race, ethnicity, religion, interests, travel history and plans, hobbies, health concerns, spending habits and millions of other data points about our private lives. This data, mined for our behaviors, habits, likes and dislikes, is referred to as the “creep factor” of big data [1]. It is estimated that data generated worldwide will be 1.3 zettabytes (ZB) by 2016. The rise of computational power plus cheaper and faster devices to capture, collect, store and process data, translates into …

Sustainability, Stakeholder Perspective And Corporate Success: A Paradigm Shift, Eunsup Daniel Shim

WCBT Faculty Publications

In this paper, I argue that the corporation can ‘do well by doing good’ in the long run if they take the stakeholder perspective. Corporations narrowly focused on short-term profits, can make business decisions that could be detrimental to long-run sustainability. For example, firms might not be making enough investments in Research and Development, producing potentially harmful products, and might not pay enough attention to their corporate image. The stakeholder perspective promotes ethical business decision-making and focuses on long-run sustainability by emphasizing a stable customer base, employee well-being, a better corporate image, and corporate social responsibility. Ethical decision-making includes a …

Trust, Betrayal, And Whistle-Blowing: Reflections On The Edward Snowden Case, Herman T. Tavani, Frances Grodzinsky

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Is every act of whistle blowing, by definition, a betrayal of trust on the part of the whistle-blower? If so, are employees who blow the whistle, by implication, untrustworthy employees? Assuming that they are, would employees who blow the whistle (presumably on the grounds of moral obligation) also be willing to concede that they are not trustworthy employees, by virtue of carrying out their whistle-blowing act(s)? In answering these questions, we first propose some working definitions of whistle-blowing, trust, and trustworthiness. We then ask whether some instances of whistle-blowing are morally permissible (and perhaps also morally required), even if it …

Teaching The Catholic Intellectual Tradition Through An Experiential Learning Program, Susan T. Dinnocenti, Maria Lizano-Dimare, Khawaja Mamun, Rupendra Paliwal

WCBT Working Papers

A Catholic University has a specific mission of preserving, transmitting and developing the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. This paper proposes an experiential learning program to support this mission of the catholic universities. This program aims to provide integrated and practical learning of fundamental moral values of catholic intellectual tradition and issues related to social justice while developing the critical and analytical thinking through exposure to real world problems, their possible solutions and a personal reflection. In this paper, we use a microfinance program in an underdeveloped country as the premise for the experiential learning program specifically for business students. Moreover, the …

The Alien Tort Statute Of 1789 And International Human Rights Violations: Kiobel V. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Paula Alexander Becker

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. involves an action under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The case was brought in the United States, Southern District of New York, by the widow of Dr. Barinem Kiobel, a Nigerian activist and member of the Ogoni tribe, and others for human rights violations committed in the Niger River Delta. Defendants include Royal Dutch Petroleum, Shell Transport and Trading Co., and Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria. Although the human rights violations including murder and torture were allegedly committed by the Nigerian military government, it is claimed that the Royal Dutch Petroleum defendants aided …

The Interaction Between Learning Styles, Ethics Education, And Ethical Climate, Leanna Lawter, Tuvana Rua, Chun (Grace) Guo

WCBT Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how learning styles and learning spaces interact to stimulate deep learning. Specifically the paper investigated the interaction of learning styles with ethics education and the ethical climate to influence the likelihood of engaging in ethical behavior.

Value-Enhancing Capabilities Of Csr: A Brief Review Of Contemporary Literature, Mahfuja Malik

WCBT Faculty Publications

This study reviews and synthesizes the contemporary business literature that focuses on the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to enhance firm value. The main objective of this review is to proffer a precise understanding of what has already been investigated and the findings of those investigations regarding the value-enhancing capabilities of CSR for public firms. In addition, this review identifies gaps in the existing literature, evaluates inconsistent findings, discusses possible data sources for empirical researchers, and provides direction for exploring other promising avenues in future studies. The thrust of the CSR literature largely acknowledges the value-enhancing capabilities of firms’ …

An Empirical Examination Of The Determinants Of The Us Financial Ceos' Compensation For The Post-Financial Crisis Period, Eunsup Daniel Shim, Jooh Lee

WCBT Faculty Publications

The US financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent Global Financial Crisis were considered by many economists the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a results, Dodd-Frank Act has passed and aims “(1) to promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end "too big to fail", (2) to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, (3) to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices, and for other purposes.”*** The enactment of Dodd-Frank Act, in part, intended to significantly influence accountability on executive compensation especially for …

Is Neuromarketing Ethical? Consumers Say Yes. Consumers Say No, Jason Flores, Arne Baruca, Robert Saldivar

WCBT Faculty Publications

Advancements in the development of neuroscience have created the capacity for neuroscientific methods to be applied to marketing science and ultimately marketing practice. As a relatively nascent subfield in marketing, neuromarketing applies neuroscientific methods to study consumer reactions to specific marketing related stimuli. This study analyzes the use of neuromarketing by for-profit and non-profit organizations from an ethical perspective based on consumers’ point of view. The implications of consumers’ ethical judgments are also explored.

The empirical evidence indicates that consumers perceive the use of neuromarketing-based marketing tactics by for-profit organizations to be unethical, yet the same tactics are considered ethical …

Ethical Implications Of Friendly Takeovers: A Financial Manager’S Story, Barbara Tarasovich

WCBT Faculty Publications

Case study in which Bernadette was heading the corporate acquisitions team. It was important for Bernadette to be certain that there was no unethical behavior on the part of the project and management team responsible for the acquisition and integration of these companies. The pressures to achieve synergies can often result in people problems, cultural value, and ethical differences that impede the smooth integration of companies. For each acquisition, Bernadette needed to ensure that the newly acquired assets were secure. In addition, she had to ensure that the acquired companies were not employing inappropriate accounting practices in order to inflate …

Introducing A Writing Skills Intervention Into An Undergraduate Financial Accounting Course, Barbara M. Tarasovich, Benoit Boyer

WCBT Faculty Publications

This paper describes how integrating a research project into an undergraduate business school core accounting course provides opportunities to develop critical writing skills while reinforcing ethics as part of the business school curriculum. The paper discusses an end-to-end process from the overall goals and details of the assignment to assess student skills. After researching an ethical topic in business, students are challenged to complete a research paper examining the issue and stating and supporting their opinion and views of the issue. While writing courses or assignments are not unusual in business program, the unique approach described in this paper includes …

Sustainability: A Paradigmatic Shift In Entrepreneurship Education, Frances M. Amatucci, Nelson Pizarro, Jay Friedlander

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

This article proposes that sustainability represents a paradigmatic shift from traditional perspectives in entrepreneurship education. This “call to action” argues that it is imperative for entrepreneurship scholars and practitioners to add sustainability to academic curricula and consulting support activities. The evolutionary development of entrepreneurship from the traditional profit-oriented perspective to sustainable entrepreneurship is described. A case study of an academic institution, which has successfully incorporated sustainability principles into its curriculum, is provided.This article is among the first that details the importance of a paradigmatic shift because “business as usual” is no longer effective in the twenty-first century.

Moral Responsibility For Computing Artifacts: "The Rules" And Issues Of Trust, Frances S. Grodzinsky, Keith W. Miller, Marty J. Wolf

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

“The Rules” are found in a collaborative document (started in March 2010) that states principles for responsibility when a computer artifact is designed, developed and deployed into a sociotechnical system. At this writing, over 50 people from nine countries have signed onto The Rules (Ad Hoc Committee, 2010). Unlike codes of ethics, The Rules are not tied to any organization, and computer users as well as computing professionals are invited to sign onto The Rules. The emphasis in The Rules is that both users and professionals have responsibilities in the production and use of computing artifacts. In this paper, we …

A Theory Of Vertical Political Interaction In Cigarette Taxation, Khawaja Mamun

WCBT Faculty Publications

This paper examines the political interdependence of federal and state cigarette tax rates. We develop a lobby group model where a state’s endogenous reaction to a federal cigarette tax hike depends crucially on the political responses of the cigarette producer and anti-smoking lobby groups.

The Dilemma Between Ethics, Contemporary Political-Economy And Society's Common Good: Reengaging The Stewards Of The Common Good, Kwamie Dunbar

Presidential Seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

The paper focuses on the rising gap between ethics and modern day business practices and employs recent Catholic Social Teaching and moral anthropology in order to assess the types of (value) ascriptions that can (normativelv) best define business ethics in an era of positive economics, rising levels of individualism and a shrinking “common good."

The Sarbanes Oxley Act's Contribution To Curtailing Corporate Bribery, Karen Cascini, Alan Delfavero, Mario Mililli

WCBT Faculty Publications

In the wake of corporate scandals occurring in the early 2000s, a need for stricter regulation was deemed necessary by the investors of U.S. public companies. In 2002, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SoX) was created. Accordingly, under the rules of SoX, U.S. corporations were faced with increased oversight and also needed to substantially improve their internal controls. As companies began to scrutinize their internal affairs more closely, some businesses detected other forms of criminal activity occurring internally, such as bribery. Those companies and individuals found to have committed bribery have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA). Throughout this …

Artificial Agents, Cloud Computing, And Quantum Computing: Applying Floridi’S Method Of Levels Of Abstraction, Marty J. Wolf, Frances Grodzinsky, Keith W. Miller

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

In his paper “On the Intrinsic Value of Information Objects and the Infosphere,” Luciano Floridi asserts that the goal of Information Ethics (IE) “is to fill an ‘ethical vacuum’ brought to light by the ICT revolution, to paraphrase Moor” (1985). He claims “IE will prove its value only if its applications bear fruit. This is the work that needs to be done in the near future” (Floridi 2002). Our chapter proposes to do part of that work. Initially we focus on Floridi’s Method of Levels of Abstraction (LoA). We begin by examining his methodology as it was first developed with …

The Never Ending Attraction Of The Ponzi Scheme, Pearl Jacobs, Linda Schain

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In the 1920’s, Charles Ponzi engaged in a notorious money making scheme. This scheme had been tried before but no one prior to Charles Ponzi had managed to swindle millions of dollars out of unsuspecting people. Thus, the scheme bears his name. In December 2008, Bernard Madoff, a major Ponzi schemer, was exposed. He managed to con investors out of over $65 billion over a thirty year period. Madoff was a highly respected financial expert. The investors were mostly well educated and supposedly financially savvy. How did this happen? This paper will examine some theories which may help explain both …