Film is rapidly becoming in the twentieth century what the popular low-priced pamphlet was in the seventeenth century--an important and influential vehicle by which (as Schumpeter called them) bring their case before the public. This article evaluates the economic content of a sample of a large and rapidly growing stock of viewing literature. Each film surveyed here is distributed and maintained in good repair by a highly efficient network of distributors. With the rapid diffusion of easy-to-use playback equipment both at schools and private organizations, I expect film to continue to grow in importance as one instrument by which the public stays informed about social problems and examines a range of possible solutions. In fact, a number of colleges have already included media centers in their libraries, and the day is rapidly approaching when all but the most traditional professors will include assigned viewings on their course reading lists. (1) The films surveyed here are targeted at groups as diverse as elementary school children, church organizations, college students, community groups, and union locals. Many of these films were designed to acquaint the viewer with the facts about a certain issue while promoting a good image of the sponsoring organization. While these special pleaders light our screens with their points of view, it is still our responsibility as professional economists to monitor these developments before the madmen in authority, which Keynes wrote about so perceptively, become the slaves of some defunct filmmaker. With this purpose in mind I have prepared a bibliography of (mostly) 16 mm documentary film that identifies each film by title and then lists the current (American) distributor followed by the producer and the date the film was released. A second listing of the distributors and their addresses permits any interested reader to track down the film for private viewing or classroom teaching. When preparing the bibliography I was disturbed by the lack of any standard of generally accepted citation practice having to do with film. While it is too much to expect at this stage of technological development that scholars indicate a range of frame numbers analogous to a range of page numbers when footnoting film, it would be useful to identify the author-equivalent of a film, especially when it is a documentary and a particular point of view is being expressed. A large number of the films included in this sample announce the name of a Ph.D. consultant, and since this seems to be a prerequisite for films that are marketed among educators for classroom adoption, I have listed the names of consultants, narrators, script writers, and so on. It is not clear, however, what responsibilities are assumed by the outside consultant. Did the consultant write the script? Did the consultant read the script written by others? Did the consultant choose the visuals? To the best of my knowledge there is no established job description for consultants in the documentary film industry. (2) I have organized my discussion according to six general subject areas that seem to be of as much interest to filmmakers as they are to economists. In each one, I shall identify the special pleaders, their overall mission, the audience to whom the film is directed, and the quality of the economic reasoning employed. I The Serf-Interest Axiom As a general rule, Hollywood has portrayed the impact wealth maximization has on human behavior as dehumanizing and corrupting (19, 56, 58, 59, 64, 91, 103, 136, 173). The POW camp entrepreneur King Rat (91) is certainly not credited with improving economic life among the prisoners. Instead his commodity arbitrage operations destroy him and those around him. In Fountainhead (56), however, integrity-maximization turns out to be (unexpectedly?) wealth-maximizing as Ayn Rand's entrepreneur-architect hero eventually triumphs within a malevolent economic environment. …

Can fintech close the gender gap in access to financial services? Using novel survey data for 28 countries, this paper finds a large and ubiquitous ‘fintech gender gap’: while 29% of men use fintech products, only 21% of women do. This difference exceeds the gender gap in bank account ownership at traditional financial institutions. While country characteristics and individual-level controls explain about a third of the fintech gender gap, the residual gap declines by 60% when accounting for gender differences in the willingness to use new financial technology, the suitability of fintech products, and the willingness to use fintech entrants if they offer cheaper products. The paper concludes by discussing drivers of differences in attitudes and implications for policy to foster financial inclusion with new technology.

Speculative language in corporate disclosures can convey valuable information about firms’ fundamentals. We evaluate this idea by developing a measure for speculative statements based on sentences marked with the “weasel tag” on Wikipedia. In the 16-week test period after filing, greater use of speculative statements in 10-Ks predicts higher and nonreverting abnormal returns, more insider and informed buying, and higher news sentiment. These findings imply that managers’ usage of speculative language in 10-Ks reflects voluntary disclosure of their private information about the positive prospects of events when market implications of the events are uncertain and thus have room for (re)interpretation.

This study examines the relation between employee incentives and corporate innovation. We find that firms with a higher defined benefit (DB) pension value secure more patents and patent citations. We further show that pension freezes, which stop the accumulation of pension obligations, negatively affect innovation outcomes. The value of a DB plan enhances innovation by motivating employees to produce higher output and through loyalty. However, pension deficits impede innovation because of the nature of inside debt. Overall, our findings call for a fresh look at pensions by policy makers and practitioners, given the historic shift away from DB plans.

We examine the role private equity (PE) sponsors play in the resolution of financial distress of portfolio companies. PE-backed firms have higher leverage and default at higher rates than other companies borrowing in leveraged loan markets. But, PE-backed firms restructure more quickly, avoid bankruptcy court more often, and liquidate less often compared to other highly leveraged firms experiencing financial distress. PE owners are also more likely to retain control post-restructuring, often by infusing capital as firms approach distress. While default frequencies are higher among PE-backed firms, PE investors appear to manage financial distress at lower cost compared to other owners.

Standard Bayesians’ beliefs converge when they receive the same piece of new information. However, when agents initially disagree and have uncertainty about the precision of a signal, their disagreement might instead increase, despite receiving the same information. We demonstrate that this divergence of beliefs leads to a unimodal effect of the absolute surprise in the signal on trading volume. We show that this prediction is consistent with the empirical evidence using trading volume around earnings announcements of U.S. firms. We find evidence of elevated volume following moderate surprises and depressed volume following more extreme surprises, a pattern that is more pronounced when investors hold more distant prior beliefs and are more uncertain about earnings’ precision. The evidence is consistent with the model where investors disagree about stocks’ expected returns and do not know the precision of earnings as a signal about the firm’s value.

As argued by Jensen (1993), the primary tasks of a firm’s board of directors are to advise, hire, fire and determine the level and form of managerial compensation. Managerial pay can be structured as part cash and in part be tied to a performance index, such as corporate earnings or the firm’s stock price. The latter effectively aligns the interest of managers with those of stockholders, which in turn reduces agency problems related to free cash flow, managerial time horizons and effort levels. At the same time, stock-based compensation increases managerial exposure to non-diversifiable risk, which may cause risk-averse managers to underinvest in risky projects. The trade-off between the benefits of managerial incentive alignment and the cost of underinvestment is largely an empirical issue, and the widespread observation that managerial compensation is primarily paid in cash 1 suggests that managerial risk aversion weighs heavily or that boards generally resort to substitute monitoring mechanisms. The paper by Angbazo and Narayanan (1997) is part of a rapidly growing empirical literature attempting to identify important cross-sectional determinants