Building Entrepreneurship in Subsistence Markets: Microfranchising as an Employment Incubator

Scholars indicate significant interest in business models that support entrepreneurial behavior in developing markets [Wankel C., editor. Alleviating Poverty through Business Strategy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008]—particularly as they relate to job creation. This research introduces microfranchising as a business model adaptation that helps low-income individuals overcome non credit-related barriers to entry in obtaining employment. This study reveals a clear challenge for researchers—to better understand microfranchising and the extent to which the practice creates employment and enables individual business success. Largely unanswered questions concern the profiles of typical microfranchisees as well as the impacts of microfranchising on low-income individuals in subsistence marketplaces. This preliminary research focuses on one type of microfranchise operating in Accra, Ghana. Using data from microfranchises enables the exploration of whether workers in subsistence markets benefit from the microfranchise model. In comparing a microfranchise business with comparably-sized non-franchised businesses, this analysis finds preliminary evidence that the microfranchise creates starter jobs. Baseline results highlight microfranchisee characteristics and indicate that this form of microfranchising positively impacts savings and profits.     

A Special Breed?– A Longitudinal and Cross‐Sectional Study of Norwegian Budgeting and Financial Civil Servants

Abstract: This paper focuses on civil servants in the central Norwegian civil service whose main tasks are budgeting, supervision and accounting. The main research questions are: (a) What is their typical demographic profile? (b) How has their demographic profile changed over time? (c) What are the effects of having budgeting, supervising and accounting as a main task on civil servants’ attitudes and behaviour? The main findings are that they have a specific profile. There are significant differences between ministries and central agencies as well as changes over time and also marked differences with other civil servants regarding their attitudes and behavior.     

U.S. INCOME, SAVING, AND WEALTH, 1929—1969

The objective of this paper is to present income and expenditure accounts, accumulation accounts, and the asset side of the wealth accounts for the U.S. private national economy in current and constant prices. These accounts are integrated with the production and factor outlay accounts for the U.S. private domestic economy in current and constant prices given in our earlier papers. Taken together, these accounts constitute a complete accounting system in current and constant prices for the private sector of the U.S. economy.
Our complete accounting system incorporates a new concept of the standard of living, defined as the ratio of the quantity index of gross private national expenditures to the quantity index of gross private national consumer receipts. Our concept of the standard of living is similar but not identical to our concept of total factor productivity. Changes in the private standard of living reflect both changes in total factor productivity and changes in the proportion of the total product consumed in the public sector.     

Pro forma disclosure and investor sophistication: External validation of experimental evidence using archival data

Insights on how ordinary, less-sophisticated investors interpret and process management-issued pro forma earnings numbers are useful to regulators because of concerns that pro forma disclosures are misleading to ordinary investors. Two recent experimental studies [Frederickson, J. R., & Miller, J. S. (2004). The effects of pro forma earnings disclosures on analysts’ and nonprofessional investors’ equity valuation judgments. The Accounting Review, 79(3), 667–686; Elliott, W. B. (2006). Are investors influenced by pro forma emphasis and reconciliations in earnings announcements? The Accounting Review, 81(1), 113–133] find that the existence of a pro forma number in the earnings press release as well as the relative placement of the pro forma and GAAP earnings figures within the press release affect the judgments of less-sophisticated investors but not those of more-sophisticated investors. Experimental and archival methodologies complement one another and results that persist in both settings are likely to be robust to both internal and external validity concerns. Therefore, we complement experimental evidence using trade-size-based proxies constructed from intraday transactions data to distinguish the trading activities of less-sophisticated investors from more-sophisticated investors. Our results suggest that less-sophisticated investors rely significantly more on quarterly earnings press releases that include a pro forma number than on those that do not, while more-sophisticated investors exhibit the opposite behavior. This result is consistent with Frederickson and Miller’s experimental evidence. Further, consistent with Elliott’s results, we find that less-sophisticated investors rely more on the pro forma figure when it is placed before the GAAP earnings number in the press release, while more-sophisticated investors’ trading behavior is unaffected by the relative placement of the two earnings metrics. We conclude that the existence of a pro forma number as well as its strategic placement in the press release generally affect the judgments of less-sophisticated (but not more-sophisticated) investors and these inferences are robust because they persist in both experimental and archival settings.     

Marketing malpractice: the cause and the cure

Ted Levitt used to tell his Harvard Business School students, "People don't want a quarter-inch drill--they want a quarter-inch hole." But 35 years later, marketers are still thinking in terms of products and ever-finer demographic segments. The structure of a market, as seen from customers' point of view, is very simple. When people need to get a job done, they hire a product or service to do it for them. The marketer's task is to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers' lives for which they might hire products the company could make. One job, the "I-need-to-send-this-from-here-to-there-with-perfect-certainty-as-fast-as-possible"job, has existed practically forever. Federal Express designed a service to do precisely that--and do it wonderfully again and again. The FedEx brand began popping into people's minds whenever they needed to get that job done. Most of today's great brands--Crest, Starbucks, Kleenex, eBay, and Kodak, to name a few-started out as just this kind of purpose brand. When a purpose brand is extended to products that target different jobs, it becomes an endorser brand. But, over time, the power of an endorser brand will surely erode unless the company creates a new purpose brand for each new job, even as it leverages the endorser brand as an overall marker of quality. Different jobs demand different purpose brands. New growth markets are created when an innovating company designs a product and then positions its brand on a job for which no optimal product yet exists. In fact, companies that historically have segmented and measured markets by product categories generally find that when they instead segment by job, their market is much larger (and their current share much smaller) than they had thought. This is great news for smart companies hungry for growth.     

Innovation killers: how financial tools destroy your capacity to do new things

Most companies aren't half as innovative as their senior executives want them to be (or as their marketing claims suggest they are). What's stifling innovation? There are plenty of usual suspects, but the authors finger three financial tools as key accomplices. Discounted cash flow and net present value, as commonly used, underestimate the real returns and benefits of proceeding with an investment. Most executives compare the cash flows from innovation against the default scenario of doing nothing, assuming--incorrectly--that the present health of the company will persist indefinitely if the investment is not made. In most situations, however, competitors' sustaining and disruptive investments over time result in deterioration of financial performance. Fixed- and sunk-cost conventional wisdom confers an unfair advantage on challengers and shackles incumbent firms that attempt to respond to an attack. Executives in established companies, bemoaning the expense of building new brands and developing new sales and distribution channels, seek instead to leverage their existing brands and structures. Entrants, in contrast, simply create new ones. The problem for the incumbent isn't that the challenger can spend more; it's that the challenger is spared the dilemma of having to choose between full-cost and marginal-cost options. The emphasis on short-term earnings per share as the primary driver of share price, and hence shareholder value creation, acts to restrict investments in innovative long-term growth opportunities. These are not bad tools and concepts in and of themselves, but the way they are used to evaluate investments creates a systematic bias against successful innovation. The authors recommend alternative methods that can help managers innovate with a much more astute eye for future value.     

Creating a Bigger Bath Using the Deferred Tax Valuation Allowance

Abstract:  The provisions of SFAS No. 109 allow US companies to make an earnings big bath even bigger through the establishment of a deferred tax valuation allowance. At the time a firm recognizes a non-cash charge, it also recognizes a deferred tax asset to represent the future tax benefits of the charge. Recognition of the deferred tax asset partially mitigates the negative earnings impact of the special charge. However, if the firm does not expect to have sufficient future taxable income to utilize the future tax benefits of the charge, SFAS No. 109 requires the firm to establish a deferred tax valuation allowance, effectively eliminating the recognized deferred tax asset. Thus, the establishment of the valuation allowance amplifies the negative earnings impact of the non-cash charge. We use a valuation allowance prediction model to identify firms that create a larger-than-expected valuation allowance; these firms may be creating a large valuation allowance as a reserve to be used to manage earnings in a subsequent period. We find that the vast majority of these larger-than-expected valuation allowances apparently reflect informed management pessimism about the future in that these firms actually do have poorer operating performance in subsequent periods. We do not find any evidence that subsequent reversals of valuation allowances are used to turn a loss into a profit. However, we do find a very small number of firms that appear to have used a valuation allowance reversal to meet or beat the mean analyst forecast.     

Discussion of “Evidence of differing market responses to beating analysts’ targets through tax expense decreases”

Gleason and Mills (2008, Review of Accounting Studies) extend prior research investigating whether investors detect obvious earnings management. They improve on previous efforts to answer this question by examining firms with a clear motivation to manage earnings and by investigating a specific earnings management tool. They investigate firms that fall short of analysts’ expectations when income tax expense is based on the third quarter effective tax rate but meet expectations by reducing the fourth quarter tax expense below predicted tax expense. Their results suggest that investors are sophisticated enough to identify a transparent earnings management tool and that they discount the fact that firms meet expectations using such an obvious tactic. Specifically, the authors find evidence suggesting that the reward for meeting analysts’ expectations is 86% lower when managers use the tax expense as an earnings management tool to meet expectations. The puzzling feature of their results is that, although it is diminished, investors still reward firms for meeting expectations when they can only do so through an apparently obvious manipulation of tax expense.     

The decision to outsource risk management services

We apply transaction cost economics to identify factors influencing companies’ decision to internally generate or outsource risk management services. A unique sample is used which combines publicly available data with private information supplied by 281 Australian listed companies. We find that expenditure on research and development, greater technological uncertainty, more competitive environments, more overseas sales and transaction frequency are associated with less outsourcing of risk management services. Uncertainty due to environmental diversity is associated with more outsourcing of risk management services. Companies that outsource risk management services also have lower staff turnover and provide more specialised training and longer contracts for risk management suppliers.