Spillovers from regulating corporate campaign contributions

Populist clamor and recent Supreme Court decisions have renewed calls for increased regulation of corporate money in politics. Few empirical estimates exist, however, on the implications of existing rules on firms’ political spending. Exploiting within firm-cycle cross-candidate variation and across firm-cycle variation, we demonstrate that the regulation of PAC campaign contributions generates large spillovers into other corporate political expenditures such as lobbying. Using both high dimensional fixed effects and regression discontinuity designs, we demonstrate that firms constrained by campaign contribution limits spend between $549,000 and $1.6M more on lobbying per election cycle, an amount that is more than 100 times the campaign contribution limit. These results demonstrate that, similar to regulations in other domains of the economy, constraining specific corporate political activities often yields unintended effects.     

Post-acute rehabilitation outcome: relationship to case-management techniques and strategy

Successful outcome for the traumatically brain-injured (TBI) patient is dependent on both a productive clinical therapy program and an effective case-management strategy by the carrier. This retrospective study focuses on identifying those case-management techniques which contributed to improvement in the disability, living, and occupational status of patients in a post-acute rehabilitation program. Statistical analysis indicated a positive relationship between two case-management factors and improved patient outcome. Additional analysis demonstrated predictive qualities of specific admission data for patient program cost. A review of these case-management techniques and their impact on discharge disability, living, and occupational status will be discussed.     

Does Balance Among Areas of Institutional Quality Matter for Economic Growth?

Countries with better institutions, as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World index, have greater prosperity, growth, and well-being. However, the previous literature has ignored interrelationships among the subareas, instead implicitly assuming substitutability and independence. We hypothesize that when some areas are weak, better scores in other areas are not a simple substitute. We find that including a simple measure of the within-country standard deviation among coexisting area scores results in a meaningfully significant improvement in the empirical growth specifications. Based on our findings, this should become routine practice in future empirical work. We also explore interactions among areas and find ones with legal system and property rights most important to include. These findings suggest a need to reconsider the implicit assumption of independence among area scores, as well as a balanced approach to institutional reform in practice. Improving the worst areas is more beneficial to growth.     

The role of pay secrecy policies and employee secrecy preferences in shaping job attitudes

Although pay secrecy continues to garner attention in human resource management, little research examines how these policies impact employees. Research inconsistently links secretive pay policies to unfavourable outcomes but has yet to consider that employees may have varying attitudes toward these policies. We examine how employee preferences modify the effect that organisational pay secrecy policies have on employee attitudes in a sample of 431 employed adults. To accomplish this goal, we create measures of pay secrecy policies and pay secrecy preferences that each differentiate two facets of pay secrecy: distributive pay non‐disclosure and communication restriction. Polynomial and moderated regression analyses indicated that disparities between employee preferences and organisational pay secrecy policies can reduce job satisfaction and perceptions of informational, interpersonal, and procedural justice under certain circumstances. These results simultaneously highlight the importance of employee attitudes toward pay secrecy policies and the challenges human resource practitioners face in managing employees with diverse preferences.     

Overconfidence,CEO Awards,and Corporate Tax Aggressiveness

Theory and prior research suggest that overconfidence leads managers to overestimate their own ability to generate returns, leading to riskier corporate policies. We use a novel dataset of media awards as an exogenous shock to overconfidence to test whether award‐winning CEOs adopt more aggressive corporate tax policies. Using propensity score matching and a difference‐in‐difference design, we find strong evidence that firms with an award‐winning CEO exhibit significantly greater tax aggressiveness following the award. Overall, our results suggest that CEO overconfidence has a meaningful impact on corporate tax policy.     

Risk dynamics around restatement announcements

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We investigate the dynamic nature and temporal daily changes in systematic (beta), as well as idiosyncratic and total risk around restatement...     

If it has lots of bells and whistles,it must be the best: how maximizers and satisficers evaluate feature-rich versus feature-poor products

Past studies have largely focused on how maximizers versus satisficers choose among multiple products within a given consideration set. By contrast, our research focuses on how and why maximizers evaluate an individual product based on a salient characteristic—the number of features that it has. Across two studies, we find that maximizers evaluate products more favorably than satisficers when they have many features (i.e., they are “feature-rich”), but not when they have few features (i.e., they are “feature-poor”). Further, we outline the process underlying this effect: Maximizers are more likely than satisficers to perceive feature-rich (vs. feature-poor) products as a means of signaling status to others. We additionally identify a boundary condition supporting this proposed theoretical process. Specifically, we demonstrate that when maximizers no longer perceive feature-rich products as status signals, they do not evaluate them more favorably than satisficers.     

Review of Korean workplace gender policy literature from 1989 to 2014

This paper systematically investigates the English literature on the study of the South Korean Government’s gender policies concerning Korean workplaces and has found that the scope and quantity of the relevant published research on this topic has greatly increased over the years. This research reviews 66 articles that were published in the literature of academic journals and non-governmental organizations from 1989 to 2014 and is meant to serve as a reference compilation of specific characteristics on the topic for interested international academics and policy-makers. Findings include a growing interest in the field of knowledge with most articles being published in roughly the last decade and on an increasingly diverse selection of topics. In addition, most articles are quantitative, though they are based on secondary data provided by the Korean Government, extant literature or the Occupational Wage Survey. Furthermore, this paper reviews the literature’s primary limitations and key words as well as outlines the future topics the academics wished to address.     

Spillover effects from unintended trials on attitude and behavior: Promoting new products through access-based services

Access-based services (ABS) provide an opportunity for brands to promote their new products by enabling (unintended) trials. However, the mechanisms and impact of consumer exposure to products in ABS and the subsequent potential spillover effects on both the brand and the product perception are largely unknown. Our hypotheses are derived from the information integration theory (IIT) and subsequently tested. Study 1 is a field study investigating an unintended trial moderated by involvement and positive experience. The results indicate the positive effects of the unintended trial on product and brand attitudes, brand purchase intention, and word of mouth. In line with IIT, these effects are more pronounced for positive trial experience, although in contrast to IIT, they are less pronounced for high-involvement consumers. While the results of Study 2, an online experiment, show substantial effects of both trials compared with nontrials, they also reveal that intended and unintended trials have a similar impact on attitude, but ABS experiences have a stronger positive impact on brand purchase intention. We thus recommend that brand managers promote not only new products but also their brands in unintended trials. This study fills a gap in current discussions about the trial effect(s) of ABS.