浅野 哲人

Many studies find a negative effect of non-native English speaking instructors on students' performance in universities where the language of instruction is English. However, the negative effect observed in the existing literature is not found in the study by Fleisher Hashimoto and Weinberg (2002), which uses the sample of instructors who received training in the Ohio State University's PhD programme. In many economics departments in Australia, mainly because their PhD programmes are not large enough, it is unrealistic to have all the tutors trained in the methods recommended in Fleisher, Hashimoto and Weinberg (2002). This gives rise to a potential negative impact of non-native English speaking tutors on students' performance. Nevertheless, by analysing the panel data drawn from first-year quantitative methods, microeconomics and macroeconomics courses in an Australian university, we find no statistically significant difference in the effectiveness of small class teaching between native and non-native English speaking tutors.

A bureau of hierarchical authority is responsible for overseeing the banking industry. We show that career concerns of officials in the authority generate organisational inertia in the sense that, regardless of changes in the environment, a new junior official prefers to stick to the decision made by the former junior official, which may be suboptimal. This kind of inertia is acute in typical Japanese organisations, which have lifetime employment with internal promotion. We provide anecdotal evidence from the Ministry of Finance's policy making in the early 1990s, which seems to be well explained by our model. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.