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I am concerned with insights heterodox economics, and particularly the new institution economics, can offer regarding interactions between health emergencies and the airline industry. Air services not only facilitates the transmissions of diseases among humans, and between animals, but on the positive side, can expedite the movement of medicines and the transfer of those afflicted during pandemics and epidemics. They can serve to limit the outbreak of disease by providing “mercy flights” to regions poorly served by other modes. Significant challenge confronting carriers during a major event, however, often included immediate financial shocks as well as ensuring their operations do not contribute to the spread of disease. These economic challenges for both commercial carriers and public policymakers involve sources of finance for what is, in this context, a semi-public service as well as the extent to which airlines should retain standby capacity extending resilience to the air-service supply chain. Conventional neoclassical economics, while still at the center of analyzing many of these sorts of issues, has increasingly, because of its rigid assumption and poor forecasting record, been supplemented by heterodox economic thinking. This trend has been reinforced by progress in fields such as psychology. What I demonstrate is that heterodox economics, and especially the role of institutions, offers a more complete picture of the interactions between air transportation and the spread of disease.

This paper aims to provide a novel explorative perspective on fund managers’ decisions under uncertainty. The current COVID pandemic is used as a unique reference frame to study how heuristics are used in institutional financial practice.

This study follows a grounded theory approach. A total of 282 diverse publications between October 2019 and October 2020 for 20 German mutual funds are qualitatively analyzed. A theory of adaptive heuristics for fund managers is developed.

Fund managers adapt their heuristics during a crisis and this adaptive process flows through three stages. Increasing complexity in the environment leads to the adaption of simplest heuristics around investment decisions. Three distinct stages of adaption: precrisis, uncertainty and stabilization emerge from the data.

This study’s data is based on publicly available information. There might be a discrepancy between publicly stated and internal reasoning.

Money managers can use the provided framework to assess their decision-making in crises. The developed adaptive processes of heuristics can assist capital allocators who choose and rate fund managers. Policymakers and regulators can learn about the aspects of investor decisions that their actions and communication address. Teaching can use this study to exemplify the nature of financial markets as adaptive systems rather than static structures.

To the best of the author’s/authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically explore the heuristics of professional money managers because they navigate a large-scale exogenous crisis.

This paper aims to unravel the puzzle that the United Kingdom’s high-quality government accounting and fiscal architecture is associated with low-quality outcomes, including poor productivity growth, high public debt, public services which do not meet citizen expectations and historically high levels of taxation. It contributes to public sector accounting research in the fields of fiscal transparency and governance.

This paper uses Miller and Power’s (2013) economization framework and Dunsire’s (1990) concept of collibration to explain why being a global leader in public sector accounting reform and in fiscal and monetary architecture has not protected the UK from weak governance. The intersection of economization’s roles of accounting with modes of government accounting clarifies the puzzle.

Whereas accruals government accounting contributes to fiscal transparency, this is not a sufficient condition for well-judged policy and its effective application. Collibration is the dominant mechanism for mediation in the fiscally centralized UK, but it has failed to deliver stable outcomes, in part because Parliament is limited in its ability to hold back inappropriate behaviour by the Executive. Subjectivization has disrupted adjudication because governments at all levels resist constraints on their behaviour, with unpredictable and often damaging consequences.

This paper provides insights through the combined lens of economization and modes of government accounting, demonstrating the practical value of this conceptualization. Although some causes for unsatisfactory outcomes are specific to the UK, there are cautions for accounting and fiscal reformers in other countries, such as Member States of the European Union.

This paper seeks to identify a rounded understanding of two fuzzy terms in wide but muddled use in guiding corporate leadership: accountability and responsibility. Both have deep resonance discussions of strategy and corporate affairs, but their often-confused meanings both inform actions and impede understanding. Each has normative implications for the practice of corporate governance, and yet each, like an empty vessel,[1] leaves practitioners with an unhappy sense of knowing they have a use but not knowing what to do with them.

This essay examines the varied uses of these terms in academic literature and practitioner discussions, exploring their conflicting meanings through lenses of philosophy, literary writing, and management studies to show how each, in their flux, overlap and diverge.

The article analyses themes obscured by these muddy waters and clarifies them by speculating on how their ambiguity demands reflexive, thoughtful action and interaction between the parties in absence of clear hierarchy of command or greater authority. How meaningful that interaction is questionable, when the words are so full of meanings without an iterative process of understanding.

Given the prevalence of the ambiguities is usage, clarifying terms is not a realistic option. Instead, this essay proposes that insofar as these concepts reflect abilities, they represent our ability to embrace their ambiguity in a philosophically pragmatic way, and in so doing be able to act accountably and responsibly.