Charities that use direct mailings or other activities that combine a public education effort with fundraising appeals must allocate the joint costs related to these activities to programs, fundraising, and administration. This study investigates whether charities use joint-cost allocations to manage the program ratio—a widely used measure of spending efficiency. Using a hand-collected dataset of 708 organization-year observations from 1992 to 2000, we find evidence that charities use joint costs to mitigate changes in the program ratio.
To address agents' moral hazard over effort, incentive contracts impose risk on the agents. As performance measures become noisier, the conventional agency analysis predicts that principals will reduce the incentive weights assigned to such measures. However, prior empirical results (Prendergast 2002) frequently find the opposite, i.e., incentive weights are larger (agents bear more risk) in more uncertain environments. This paper provides new evidence on the association between the extent of uncertainty and the level of risk imposed on agents. In the context of contracts between managed care organizations and physicians, we examine the effect of task characteristics and the legal liability environment on the extent of risk that physicians bear. We derive the optimal weighting of multiple performance measures in a model of a physician's choice of revenue-generating and cost-control efforts. The model predicts that physicians who face less task uncertainty bear more cost risk in their contracts, as predicted by the conventional moral hazard model. Likewise, the model predicts that as the association between task uncertainty and legal liability uncertainty becomes stronger, physicians bear less cost risk in their contracts. Our empirical results generally support these predictions. We offer an explanation for why these results tend to be consistent with the conventional moral hazard analysis, contrary to empirical results in a number of previous studies.
I examine whether earnings generated by changes in effective tax rates (the tax change component) persist and aid in forecasting future earnings. In addition, this study investigates to what extent investors incorporate the forecasting implications of the tax change component of earnings into stock prices. I find that there is a positive, significant association between the tax change component of earnings and future earnings. I use the interim reporting requirements of APB No. 28 (APB 1973) and FASB Interpretation No. 18 (FASB 1977) to further decompose the tax change component into an initial and a revised portion based on the first quarter estimate of the annual effective tax rates (ETR). I find that the initial tax change component is more persistent for future earnings than the revised tax change component. These results are consistent with my hypotheses that the initial and revised tax change components have differential persistence and forecasting implications, and dispute the broad notion advanced by prior literature that ETR-related earnings changes are transitory. Results from market tests indicate that the market underweights the forecasting implications of the tax change component and the mispricing appears to be driven by the transitory nature of the revised tax change component.