We examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi-community model with mobile and heterogeneous households and with flexible housing supplies. We characterize the first-best allocation and show efficiency can be implemented with decentralization using head taxes. We calibrate the model and compare welfare in property-tax equilibria, both decentralized and centralized, to the efficient allocation. Inefficiencies with decentralization and property taxation are large, dissipating most if not all the potential welfare gains that efficient decentralization could achieve. In property-tax equilibrium, centralization is frequently more efficient! An externality in community choice underlies the failure to achieve efficiency with decentralization and property taxes: poorer households crowd richer communities and free ride by consuming relatively little housing thereby avoiding taxes.

This paper exploits variation in the timing and outcomes of employment discrimination lawsuits against U.S. law enforcement agencies to estimate the cumulative and persistent employment effects of temporary externally imposed affirmative action (AA). We find that AA increased black employment at all ranks by 4.5 to 6.2 percentage points relative to national trends. We also find no erosion of these employment gains in the fifteen years following AA termination, although black employment growth was significantly lower in departments after AA ended than in departments whose plans continued. For women, in contrast, we find only marginal employment gains at lower ranks.

We report on the experimental results of simple auctions with (i) a median-bid pricing rule and (ii) non-binding bids (winning bids can be withdrawn) – the two central pillars of the competitive bidding program designed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Comparisons between the performance of the CMS auction and the performance of the excluded-bid auction reveal the problematic nature of the CMS auction. The CMS auction fails to generate competitive prices of goods and fails to satisfy demand. In all proposed efficiency measures, we find the excluded-bid auction significantly outperforms the CMS auction.

In this paper, we derive and experimentally test a theoretical model of speculation in multi-period asset markets with public information flows. The speculation arises from the traders’ heterogeneous posteriors as they make different inferences from sequences of public information. This leads to overpricing in the sense that price exceeds the most optimistic belief about the real value of the asset. We find evidence of speculative overpricing in both incomplete and complete markets, where the information flow is a gradually revealed sequence of imperfect public signals about the state of the world. We also find evidence of asymmetric price reaction to good news and bad news, another feature of equilibrium price dynamics under our model. Markets with a relaxed short-sale constraint exhibit less overpricing.

We examine financing activities of newly public firms for evidence on capital staging in the public equity market. Staging (sequential financing) can increase issuance costs but can limit costs associated with overinvestment. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that staging is employed to help control the overinvestment problem in public firms. Initial public offering (IPO) proceeds, relative to external financing requirements, are smaller for firms with more intangible assets and more research and development (R&D)-intensive firms. Asset intangibility and R&D intensity are also both negatively related to the length of time from a firm's IPO to its first post-IPO capital infusion.

We examine the performance of liquidity proxies in commodities. The Amihud measure has the largest correlation with liquidity benchmarks. Amivest and Effective Tick measures also perform well. These proxies are useful for studies of commodity liquidity over a long time period and those that lack access to high-frequency data. We use various aspects of transaction costs, such as spread, depth, immediacy, and resiliency, to give insight into the costs of different execution approaches. Transaction costs increase with volatility and exhibit mean reversion. Splitting trades over one hour can reduce trading costs by two-thirds compared to an immediate execution.

We employ a natural experiment from the 1980s, predating the ubiquitous clamor for independence influenced corporate governance structures, to examine which governance mechanisms are associated with firm survival and failure. We find that thrifts were more likely to survive the thrift crisis when their CEO also chaired the firm’s board of directors. On average, chair-holding CEOs undertook less aggressive lending policies than their counterparts who did not chair their boards. Consequently, taxpayer interests were protected by thrifts that bestowed both leadership posts to one person. This is an important policy issue, because taxpayers become the residual claimants for depository institutions that fail as a result of managers adopting risky strategies to exploit underpriced deposit insurance. Our findings corroborate recent evidence that manager-dominated firms resist shareholder pressure to adopt riskier investment strategies to exploit underpriced deposit insurance.

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Search Site Cite View This Citation Add to Citation Manager Citation Donald V. Moser, Patrick R. Martin; A Broader Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility Research in Accounting. The Accounting Review 1 May 2012; 87 (3): 797–806. https://doi.org/10.2308/accr-10257 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Accounting Review Search Advanced Search

This study examines why private equity issues tend to be a repeated source of financing for public firms. We test the recent operational needs theory of public equity issuance within the context of repeated private equity issues. We find that repeated PIPE issuers burn through cash quickly and do not reach the standards of information transparency or profitability needed for a successful public equity offering. This has implications for investor composition and the market response to a PIPE. Initial PIPE offerings are characterized by substantial diversity in investor type. In successive transactions firms increasingly rely upon hedge funds, who extract greater price discounts and more often require cash flow rights as opposed to control rights. As firms select a path of repeated PIPEs to raise funds, successive issues become uninformative to the market. We conclude that, for small public firms, the same motive underlies public equity offerings and repeated private equity offerings—an acute need for cash.