Congress pursues externalities one at a time. The resulting legislation embodies the same sequential approach, instructing regulatory agencies to set and enforce standards for a single problem. Rarely, if ever, are agencies instructed or even permitted to account for contradictions with other federal legislation and rulemaking.
American Economic Review2018108(4-5), 1214-1252open access
This paper studies how in utero exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures affects later mental health. We find that prenatal exposure to the death of a maternal relative increases take-up of ADHD medications during childhood and anti-anxiety and depression medications in adulthood. Further, family ruptures during pregnancy depress birth outcomes and raise the risk of perinatal complications necessitating hospitalization. Our results suggest large welfare gains from preventing fetal stress from family ruptures and possibly from economically induced stressors such as unemployment. They further suggest that greater stress exposure among the poor may partially explain the intergenerational persistence of poverty.
Quarterly Journal of Economics2018133(3), 1163-1228open access
We estimate the causal effect of each county in the United States on children's incomes in adulthood. We first estimate a fixed effects model that is identified by analyzing families who move across counties with children of different ages. We then use these fixed effect estimates to (i) quantify how much places matter for intergenerational mobility, (ii) construct forecasts of the causal effect of growing up in each county that can be used to guide families seeking to move to opportunity, and (iii) characterize which types of areas produce better outcomes. For children growing up in low-income families, each year of childhood exposure to a one standard deviation (std. dev.) better county increases income in adulthood by 0.5%. There is substantial variation in counties' causal effects even within metro areas. Counties with less concentrated poverty, less income inequality, better schools, a larger share of two-parent families, and lower crime rates tend to produce better outcomes for children in poor families. Boys' outcomes vary more across areas than girls' outcomes, and boys have especially negative outcomes in highly segregated areas. Areas that generate better outcomes have higher house prices on average, but our approach uncovers many "opportunity bargains"-places that generate good outcomes but are not very expensive.
Accounting, Organizations and Society201864, 17-30open access
Food systems in Europe, North America and Australasia are dominated by a small number of supermarkets supplying over 70% of the food consumers buy, and the model is being translated into other markets such as the Middle East and Asia. Relationships between suppliers and supermarkets are contentious in all such systems. Here, interviews were carried out with representatives of three major grower-packers supplying between them around 50% of the UK's fresh produce. We were interested in three questions, namely: how performance measurement, risk management and communication of accounting information are used by intermediaries in an allegedly unfair commercial environment; the extent to which the accounting and control practices observed support perceptions that suppliers in supermarket-dominated supply networks are treated unfairly; and what accounting and control practices would be indicative of fair commercial relationships? Researchers in the cross-disciplinary literature use John Rawls' theories of ‘justice as fairness’ in this context. Recent developments in business ethics and philosophy apply his theories to questions of relational power and fairness in commercial relationships. We follow these writers to understand where, if at all, the perceived unfairness of these food systems lies. Our empirical work and analysis can make an initial contribution from the discipline to this debate, because it has the potential to show how accounting and control practices are at the centre of the fragilities of the wider system, and of possible remedies.
Accounting, Organizations and Society201867, 20-33open access
This article examines the long-term dynamics among a best-practice risk management framework, risk management technologies and the translation of uncertainties into risks by using a longitudinal case study of a large mega-project. We show that the framework and technologies through the visual power of inscriptions and the purifying work of risk consultants as experts establish the boundaries of the forms of uncertainties that are accepted and included as risks. We term the accepted and included risks ‘pure risks’ and the risks excluded after disagreement ‘impure risks’. We also show that the construction of impure risks challenges the predictions of the framework causing a false sense of security for the project objectives, and that the continuous readjustment of technologies, in particular, is necessary to ensure the long-term realisation of these predictions. Finally, this article contributes to the literature on performativity by showing how technologies serve as buffers to shield failing economic frameworks against criticism.
Accounting, Organizations and Society201866, 45-59open access
Recent work has called for more research to be carried out exploring how professional projects develop in conjunction with wider processes of institutional change. We respond to these calls here by analysing the way in which tax professionals have responded to a major disruption at the field level. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's action plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting has proposed far reaching reforms in an attempt to bring corporate tax practice into line with changing moral boundaries in society. Through a combination of documentary analysis, participant observation and qualitative interviews, this paper shows how tax professionals negotiate changing moral imperatives. In doing so, the paper enhances our understanding of tax practice and contributes to extant literature on professionalization and institutional change in three principal ways. Firstly, we show how exogenous field-level changes afford professional groups opportunities for strategic repositioning. Secondly, we illustrate how different professional factions are differentially affected by processes of institutional change, distinguishing between in-house tax professionals and those working in public practice. Thirdly, we demonstrate how this strategic repositioning is made possible by the skillful deployment of the technical-cognitive resources of professional groups.