Bartley Business Information Center

Starting May 29th we will be open in Bartley 2008 from 10a-12p Monday - Friday. We will adjust this schedule as needed (shorter or longer hours) over the summer. Otherwise, call or email the librarians, we are still on campus and working all summer.

We are open by appointment only for the rest of the semester and until Summer session hours are officially posted. Please email or call one of us to set up a meeting time or to discuss your research topic at this time.

To what extent is auditor independence impaired by providing non-audit services? Have perceived or real compromises to auditor independence arising out of non-audit services risen to a level warranting prohibitions? To find out what listed company executives and their auditors in Bahrain think, read Professor Wayne G. Bremser’s article, Non-audit services and auditor independence: Empirical findings from Bahrain published in volume 4, number 1 (2007) of International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation.

Globalization, the conglomeration of banking, brokerage, and insurance into financial services firms, and the regulatory modernization of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act have lead to the rise of large US financial institutions. The extent to which risks and returns are linked, whether the linkages are close enough across industries to result in a contagion and how size effects risk return linkages are questions addressed by a study of data between 1991 and 2001. Villanova’s Michael S. Pagano with co-authors Elyas Elyasiani and Iqbal Mansur published their findings in Concergence and risk-return linkages across financial service firms, Journal of Banking & Finance volume 31, number 4 (2007) p.1167

Wondering what it takes to transition from an accomplished IT professional to a successful CIO? Prof. Stephen J. Andriole’s report on a survey of technology leaders published in the March 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM identifies The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Technology Leaders.

You can’t miss the headlines on the abuses of predatory lending and economic impact of the collapse of subprime lending. Prof. John C. Kozup’s article in the Summer 2007 issue of the Journal of Consumer Affairs on Consumer Experiences with Predatory Lending Practices is a timely one. He and co-author Ronald Paul Hill use interviews to describe the anatomy of predatory lending relationships and discern their implications for state, federal and private initiatives for policy reform

Bartley 2008 will reopen next Tuesday at 9:00am.

Survey of Consumers  -  Free from the University of Michigan

For the next three weeks we are testing 2 databases provided by the EIU: Country Reports / Profiles and the Market Indicators / Forecasts.

While on campus you should be able to access the EIU’s Country Profiles and Country Reports (http://portal.eiu.com/) as well as their market indicators and forecasts (http://www.alacra.com/eiu).

If prompted to login, look for the phrase “Enterprise Client Login”, and again, this will only work on campus.

I have found industry reports in Business Source Premier, Marketline, and Market Insight. MarketResearch.com Academic (via the library page) has some material as well. Also, the US Government offers this link on the Auto Industry.

Euromonitor has some statistical data, as does Mergent, Valueline, and Morningstar. The last 3 are best searched by ticker symbol.

An 1102 student has made the following suggestions for using AliBaba for getting manufacturing costs, I will summarize below:

• AliBaba is probably the most useful tool we as a group have come across as of yet.  There are so many more companies there than on Thomas Register.

• I would suggest not using your cellphone _*number like I have because I have probably received 15-20 phone calls from Vietnam / China / Los Angeles in the past 36 hours.

These were not made by companies I contacted but by others trying to sell their services to me.

• *_TradeManager, AliBaba’s instant messaging service works great_*.  If you leave it open, you will find that as long as you describe what you are looking for in your profile and correctly select an appropriate industry, even people that you have not contacted will message you and try to offer their services.

• It worked best to use the Contact Now option on AliBaba and send an email first,_ then the people working for those companies will promptly respond.  The only downside is that this primarily happens around 8-12 at night because of the time difference since these are primarily Chinese companies.  Try not to be too specific because a lot of things you say get lost in translation, and regardless of whether or not the company can offer you exactly what you are looking for, they will respond.

• Once you get them on TradeManager though, you will be able to find out specifically.

For a challenging and insightful viewpoint weighing the consumers right to make informed choices and government interest in protecting public health, read VSB Prof. Michael L. Capellas’ article on The de-marketing of smokeless tobacco for harm reduction published in the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Marketing.