Timothy Schibik

The Outsourcing of Classroom Instruction in Higher Education

Many constituencies external to higher education have begun promoting greater accountability. This view advocates a closer focus on the bottom line and that universities should utilise a more business‐like model. One major outgrowth of this paradigm shift has been the seemingly recent emergence of outsourcing in higher education. Higher education has seemingly been slow to adopt this strategy. Or has it? The truth is that higher education has been outsourcing classroom instruction for many years. Recent statistics in the US suggest that over half of all undergraduate instruction is contracted out to teaching staff outside the universitys regular full‐time academic staff. Is this usage of outsourcing working in higher education? This paper applies an outsourcing assessment method developed in the business world to higher education so as to answer questions concerning the outsourcing of classroom instruction.

Inconsistencies in the business law education of accounting students: A survey of accounting educators

Abstract A general requirement for an accountant to take the CPA examination is the completion of a course in business law. It appears that what constitutes the business law course requirement is rather loosely defined and leaves excessive room for interpretation. What is a business law course? A survey of accounting educators regarding the business law requirement and the law courses taught at their respective schools reveals, inter alia, a divergence of opinion regarding the business law requirement, the perceived objective of teaching business law to accounting students, the importance of the legal topics included on the CPA exam, and the coverage of those topics at their respective institutions. In general, accounting educators are encouraged to both review their current business law requirements and to take a more active role in monitoring the business law curriculum.

Characteristics of the information content in business sentiment surveys

The purpose of this manuscript is to quantify exactly how much information and/or predictive content is contained in business sentiment surveys. This paper uses techniques drawn from information theory econometrics, and more specifically the theory of information entropy, to characterize the predictive content of business sentiment surveys. The authors apply these techniques to publicly available information obtained from various editions of the Federal Reserve Bank of New Yorks Empire State Manufacturing Survey, one of the most popular business sentiment surveys conducted in the USA. Parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses are used to examine differences in the quantity of predictive content across various questions in the survey. The results suggest that business sentiment surveys contain a reasonably high degree of informative content. However, the amount of informative content varies considerably from question to question in the survey. Questions that are more general in nature and ask about current perceptions (as opposed to future expectations) contain more informative content. Business sentiment surveys are a practical, low-cost method to assess the current and expected future state of local and regional economies. However, the value of these surveys is questionable if they do not contain much information. This research finds that such surveys do contain a large amount of information, and are worth administering. However, specific types of survey items convey more information that others, which also suggests that business sentiments surveys can be further revised to maximize the amount of content gained from respondents.

Composite forecasts of inflation: An improvement in forecasting performance

This study investigates the performance of a composite forecast of inflation for the period 1969:I–1992:IV. This composite forecast is generated by combining the forecasts of four methods commonly used to measure expected inflation. Initially, the results of conditional efficiency tests suggest that a composite forecast can improve performance by encompassing a wider information set. The evidence, from the comparison of various forecast series, shows that the composite forecast improves on the performance of the four individual forecasts and an alternative composite forecast in terms of accuracy and rationality criteria.