The growing popularity of home-sharing platforms such as Airbnb, partly fueled by hosts’ ability to evade local taxes and regulations, has been shown to elevate housing costs by reallocating long-term housing units to the short-term rental market. This study assesses whether enhanced tax enforcement can mitigate this trend. We analyze staggered tax collection agreements between Airbnb and Florida counties, wherein Airbnb collects taxes from the hosts directly. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find these agreements significantly slow the growth of housing costs, highlighting the importance of tax policy in addressing the sharing economy’s influence on housing affordability.

A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. The resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi-experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness. Yet the question of how best to separate the lottery-generated randomization integral to such designs from non-random preferences and priorities remains open. This paper develops easily-implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms, while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another. We use these methods to evaluate charter schools in Denver, one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system. The resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance. Our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods, such as those that focus on schools ranked first, while also identifying a more representative average causal effect. We also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors.

Francois Perroux, J. Tinbergen, Jacques Rueff, Evsey D. Domar, E. F. Lundberg, M. Kalecki, J. Zagorski, K. Dalal, The Practice of Economic Planning and The Optimum Allocation of Resources: Discussion, Econometrica, Vol. 17, Supplement: Report of the Washington Meeting (Jul., 1949), pp. 172-178

This study provides evidence on how auditors' use of decision aids affects jurors' evaluation of auditor legal liability, based on an experiment in which actual jurors responded to a hypothetical audit lawsuit. The results suggest that decision aids can have positive, negative, or neutral effects on auditors' legal liability, depending on how auditors use the decision aid and the reliability of the decision aid. For high-reliability aids, jurors attributed more responsibility for an audit failure to the auditor when the auditor overrode the recommendation of a decision aid than when the auditor did not use the decision aid. However, jurors attributed lower responsibility to an auditor who relied on the recommendation of a highly reliable decision aid, even though the aid turned out to be incorrect. In contrast to the high-reliability conditions, auditors' use of the decision aid had virtually no impact on jurors' liability judgments when the reliability of the decision aid was low.

This article explores the business entity concept of the 1964 Concepts and Standards Research Committee of the American Accounting Association and its significance to accounting. The committee's study of the business entity concept has caused it to depart significantly from the concise statement of the concept contained in the 1957 Revision. The committee believes that in referring to concepts underlying the conventions of accounting the use of the term business is inappropriately restrictive. The committee suggests that, in accounting, the term entity concept be used. In accounting the entity with which one is concerned may be defined as an area of economic interest to a particular individual or group. The boundaries of such an economic entity are identifiable by determining the interested individual or group, and by determining the nature of that individual's or that group's interest. An economic entity encompasses the activities, events, and utilization of resources that affect the interest of the individual or group. Simply stated, the committee advocates a user-oriented approach in defining an entity. That is, accounting reports about entities are developed to meet the needs of particular individuals or groups.

Fundamental income tax concepts should be taught in the elementary accounting course. The important reasons for this contention are: (1) Students are interested in the subject of income tax, and they have a need for tax knowledge. (2) Some accounting topics are taught better through the comparison of income tax and conventional accounting treatment. (3) A benefit may accrue to the teaching of the income tax accounting courses since accounting students will bring a better grounding in tax fundamentals to the course. Greater depth of treatment may be possible than is presently the case in courses in income tax accounting. (4) Students majoring in business education will be better prepared for their teaching duties.

We propose a new method to estimate the marginal value of capital under minimal assumptions. By combining asset prices with fundamentals, our method provides a quasi‐model‐free marginal q together with a simple correction for measurement error in (average) Tobin's Q using linear regressions. Marginal q yields plausible and robust estimates of adjustment costs and investment sensitivities to fundamentals. The widening gap between marginal q and Tobin's Q is driven primarily by market power and intangible capital. Our novel findings strongly support the neoclassical theory of investment and challenge the widespread use of Tobin's Q as proxy for investment opportunities.

Using a comprehensive hedge fund database, we examine the role of managerial incentives and discretion in hedge fund performance. Hedge funds with greater managerial incentives, proxied by the delta of the option‐like incentive fee contracts, higher levels of managerial ownership, and the inclusion of high‐water mark provisions in the incentive contracts, are associated with superior performance. The incentive fee percentage rate by itself does not explain performance. We also find that funds with a higher degree of managerial discretion, proxied by longer lockup, notice, and redemption periods, deliver superior performance. These results are robust to using alternative performance measures and controlling for different data‐related biases.

I. FOUNDATIONS. 1. Introduction and Overview. 2. The Financial Environment: Concepts and Principles. 3. Accounting, Cash Flows, and Taxes. II. VALUE AND CAPITAL BUDGETING. 4. The Time Value of Money. 5. Valuing Bonds and Stocks. 6. Business Investment Rules. 7. Capital Budgeting Cash Flows. 8. Capital Budgeting in Practice. III. RISK AND RETURN. 9. Risk and Return: Stocks. 10. Risk and Return: Asset Pricing Models. 11. Risk, Return, and Capital Budgeting. 12. Risk, Return, and Contingent Outcomes. 13. Risk, Return, and Agency Theory. IV. CAPITAL STRUCTURE AND DIVIDEND POLICY. 14. Capital Market Efficiency: Explanation & Implications. 15. Capital Structure Policy. 16. Managing Capital Structure. 17. Dividend Policy. V. LONG-TERM FINANCING. 18. Issuing Securities and the Role of Investment Banking. 19. Long-Term Debt. 20. Leasing and Other Asset-Based Financing. 21. Derivatives and Hedging. VI. WORKING CAPITAL MANAGEMENT. 22. Cash and Working Capital Management. 23. Accounts Receivable and Inventory. 24. Financial Planning. VII. SPECIAL TOPICS. 25. Mergers and Acquisitions. 26. Financial Distress. 27. International Corporate Finance.