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. …

Quarterly earnings, Interim reporting, Time-series, Forecasting content

The solution to the problem of portfolio choice is relevant in a positive financial economics context because it provides models of individual maximizing behavior which when aggregated to the level of the market provide models of equilibrium asset pricing. These models generally assume that the parameters of the probability distribution of security returns are known to individual investors. In practice, however, the individual has to estimate these parameters. To the extent that there is parameter uncertainty or “estimation risk”, what are the observable implications of a market equilibrium derived on the assumption that the information set of all investors is equivalent to a given set of sample data?

In his 1976 Presidential Address to the American Finance Association, Merton Miller provided a compelling argument that there currently exists no viable theory of the optimal capital structure of an individual firm. This argument follows from the critique he presented of existing models of capital structure and from the theory he outlined of the optimal aggregate capital structure of the economy as a whole. That theory depends on the existence of different marginal tax rates for individuals and a tax-free security. Professor Miller pointed out that he was motivated to develop his hypothesis by the apparent inadequacy of a (if not the most) popular explanation for capital structure at both the micro and the aggregate level: the tradeoff between the tax advantages of debt and the cost to the firm's security holders of the bankruptcy process. He observed that neither the tax advantage of debt nor the costs of bankruptcy may be quite what they seem at first glance. When the corporate income tax and the differential taxation of regular income and capital gains are taken into account, then the tax advantage of debt is reduced. Moreover, the limited empirical evidence from actual bankruptcies suggests that the real costs to security holders of bankruptcy may be really rather low. And the recent discussion by Haugen and Senbet [6] suggests that most of the costs attributed to bankruptcy are really costs of liquidation of the firm's assets and not relevant to the capital structure decision.

Journal Article Labour Unions and the Wage Structure: A General Equilibrium Approach Get access John S. Pettengill John S. Pettengill University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 46, Issue 4, October 1979, Pages 675–693, https://doi.org/10.2307/2297035 Published: 01 October 1979 Article history Received: 01 September 1975 Accepted: 01 November 1978 Published: 01 October 1979

Control data, Time-series properties, Cost variance, Time-series properties

David S. Ng, Jan Stoeckenius, Auditing: Incentives and Truthful Reporting, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 17, Studies on Auditing-Selections from the "Research Opportunities in Auditing" Program (1979), pp. 1-24

David S. Ng, Jan Stoeckenius, [Discussion of Auditing: Incentives and Truthful Reporting]: A Reply, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 17, Studies on Auditing-Selections from the "Research Opportunities in Auditing" Program (1979), pp. 33-34

The publication of Lester G. Telser's 1964 paper [52] was the starting point for much of the recent literature on advertising and competition. The major finding of that paper was that there is little empirical support for an inverse association between advertising and competition, despite some plausible theorizing to the contrary This review does not deal with the question of whether advertising is excessive, nor with the related issues of the welfare economics of advertising or product differentiation. Rather, it focuses on those papers which examine the impact of advertising on barriers to entry and on the extent of price competition. Advertising expenditures are designed to influence consumer demand for the firm's products. They may affect both direct and cross-elasticities of demand. Those who argue that advertising may limit competition maintain that the relevant demand curves[1] are more inelastic and that cross-elasticities are lower as a result, while those who dispute this contention suggest that advertising has no such influence or even that it leads to more elastic demands and higher cross-elasticities. Much controversy has therefore turned on the direction of the effects of advertising on demand elasticities. [Авторский текст]