Advertising to the masses: the effects of crowding on the attention to place-based advertising

Advertising situated in environments where people congregate or pass through on their way to somewhere else benefit from being placed in such high traffic areas. However, these strategically placed ads also suffer from conditions of human crowding that prevents them from being noticed and processed. We undertake a study of place-based advertising in a shopping mall using facial recognition software to determine the effect of human density on the attention directed to advertising. We find that as human density increases, attention to advertising decreases, but only to a point where it begins to increase again. Our research also finds that human density plays a moderating role on the motivation to process advertising.     

Banks’ deferred tax assets during the financial crisis

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Prior studies have demonstrated that the net deferred tax liabilities of industrial firms are valued by market participants in a manner consistent...     

Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

INSURANCE‐INDUCED MORAL HAZARD: A DYNAMIC MODEL OF WITHIN‐YEAR MEDICAL CARE DECISION MAKING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

This study quantifies the moral hazard effect of health insurance on medical expenditure by estimating a dynamic model of within‐year medical care consumption that allows for insurance selection, endogenous health transitions, and individual uncertainty about medical care prices in an environment where insurance has nonlinear cost‐sharing features. The results suggest that moral hazard accounts for 53.1%, on average, of total annual medical expenditure when insured. This estimate is significantly different, and generally larger, than that produced by an alternative model that is representative of the annual medical care decision‐making models commonly found in the literature.     

The Great Recession,Austerity and Inequality: Lessons from Ireland

The advent of the Great Recession and the widespread adoption of fiscal austerity policies have heightened concern about inequality and its effects. We examine how the distribution of income in Ireland—a country which experienced one of the most severe economic contractions—has evolved over the years 2008 to 2013. Standard cross‐sectional analysis of the income distribution shows broad stability in the Gini coefficient and in decile shares, with one main exception: the share of the bottom decile fell sharply, with the largest fall in average incomes being for that group. Longitudinal analysis shows that the falls in the average income for the bottom decile were not due to decreasing income for those remaining in the bottom decile, but to falls in income from those initially located in higher deciles. The extent of redistribution through taxes and transfers increased strongly, as measured by the Reynolds‐Smolensky index, which rose from 0.20 before the onset of the crisis to 0.27 in 2013. Analysis indicates that about three‐quarters of this increased redistribution is due to automatic stabilisers and one‐quarter to discretionary policy changes.     

Telling their own stories: Māori entrepreneurship in the mainstream screen industry

We examined how factors from Indigenous entrepreneurship research (social capital, cultural capital, self-efficacy) help explain the high level of Māori entrepreneurial performance in the mainstream screen industry. Results, based on ten case studies and a one-year series of structured interviews, extend prior research by showing that these Indigenous entrepreneurs benefit jointly from two forms of capital: cultural and social. We found high levels of both forms to increase the desire for emancipation of cultural and community identity – not just individual identity – through entrepreneurship. Self-efficacy and storytelling helped ameliorate discontinuities across Indigenous and mainstream contexts. Our research sheds new light on how Indigenous ventures can pursue mainstream entrepreneurship while maintaining cultural identity. It also makes several distinct contributions to the Indigenous entrepreneurship literature. First, it provides an integrative theoretic review. Second, it illustrates a culturally appropriate methodology for researching Māori entrepreneurs with implications for other Indigenous communities. Third, it proposes cultural capital and social capital as a two-part framework for explaining Indigenous entrepreneurial action. Fourth, it shows how entrepreneurship can be empowering for Indigenous communities. Finally, our paper demonstrates that entrepreneurship is a promising mechanism for preserving and promoting the cultures of Māori and other Indigenous peoples.     

There and Back Again: The De‐Licensing and Re‐Licensing of Barbers in Alabama

The economic effects of occupational licensing remain an understudied topic, but even less is known about the effects of the removal of licensing legislation. In this article, we take advantage of a natural experiment that occurred in the state of Alabama. Alabama was the last state to begin licensing barbers in 1973 and also the only state to de‐license barbers (in 1983). Relying on data from 1974 to 1994, we find evidence that barber de‐licensing reduced the average annual earnings of barbers as well as the number of cosmetologist employees per million residents in Alabama, although not all our results are statistically significant. We also find evidence that de‐licensing resulted in small increases in the number of barber shops and decreases in the number of cosmetology shops in Alabama. In recent decades, a number of attempts have been made to re‐license the occupation — most recently with a barber licensing bill that became law in September 2013. The result is that barbering in Alabama is once again a licensed occupation. Our limited evidence suggests that the re‐licensing of barbers in Alabama may already have had an effect on pay and on the number of barber shops.     

Costs and potential funding of expanded public pension coverage in Asia

Public pension burdens in most emerging Asian economies are still relatively small. However, there are a number of reasons to believe that they will increase markedly in the coming years. First, many Asian economies will face rapidly ageing populations, which will raise pension and other old‐age‐related spending dramatically. Second, as economies develop, political pressures to expand the coverage of public pensions and raise pension benefits will likely increase. The first objective of this paper is to identify the potential fiscal burden of public pensions in 23 emerging Asian economies, based on econometric models and forecasts of GDP and demographic trends. Using two different methodologies yields estimated increases in the average share of public pension expenditures in GDP of 1.0 percentage point and 3.6 percentage points by 2030 compared with current levels. We believe the latter estimate is more realistic. The second objective is to recommend policies to provide adequate funding for public pension needs, including enhancing the efficiency of social insurance programs, improving the balance of revenues and expenditures, implementing more explicit fiscal rules and frameworks, and establishing stronger fiscal surveillance at the national and regional levels.