Transparency,Information Shocks,and Tax Avoidance

This study helps provide clarity to the prior mixed findings on the association between financial reporting transparency and tax avoidance by studying the effect that transparency has on tax avoidance in a cross‐country sample through aggregate‐ and firm‐level tests. Results using firm‐ and country‐level (aggregate) measures of transparency and tax avoidance show that countries and firms with greater levels of transparency exhibit lower levels of tax avoidance and that the effect of country‐level transparency is incremental to firm‐level transparency. Furthermore, results of difference‐in‐difference tests using the adoption of IFRS and the initial enforcement of insider trading laws around the world as exogenous shocks that increase transparency find that transparency has a statistically and economically significant effect on tax avoidance and address empirical concerns regarding endogeneity and reverse causality not fully addressed in the prior research. The results of these tests as well as tests that address potential correlated but omitted variables suggest that financial transparency is an important tool which regulators can use in battling tax avoidance.     

‘Hike your own hike’: equipment and serious leisure along the Appalachian Trail

We use qualitative methods to extend the understanding of serious leisure among hikers, specifically by examining the processes of acquiring and adapting equipment during an Appalachian Trail (AT) thru-hike. By studying the process of preparing for and embarking on this 2000-mile long, 4–6 month hike, we examine how learning about equipment takes place in close physical and social proximity to other hikers. We find that as experience is gained, hikers use less equipment and adapt equipment they use to more closely meet their needs. Our results suggest that experienced thru-hikers use their knowledge and experience to substitute for equipment in a way that transcends their awareness of equipment.     

The Financial Crisis of 1929 Reexamined: The Role of Soaring Inequality

The financial crisis of 1929 that triggered the Great Depression has been endlessly studied. Still there is little consensus regarding what caused it. This article claims that wage stagnation and exploding inequality fueled three dynamics that set the stage for a financial crisis. First, consumption was constrained by the smaller share of total income accruing to workers, thereby restricting investment opportunities in the real economy. Flush with greater income and wealth, the elite flooded financial markets with credit, helping keep interest rates low and encouraging the creation of new credit instruments, some of which recycled the rich's surplus assets as debt to those less well off. Second, greater inequality pressured households to find ways to consume more in order to maintain their relative social status, resulting in reduced household saving, greater household debt, and possibly longer work hours. Third, as the rich took larger shares of income and wealth, they gained relatively more command over everything, including ideology. Reducing taxes on the rich, favoring business over labor, and failing to regulate newly evolving credit instruments flowed out of this ideology.     

The Impact of Regulatory Governance and Privatization on Electricity Industry Generation Capacity in Developing Economies

This article assesses whether a regulatory law and higher qualityregulatory governance are associated with superior outcomesin the electricity industry. The analysis, for 28 developingeconomies over 1980–2001, draws on theoretical and empiricalwork on the impact of telecommunications regulators in developingeconomies. Controlling for privatization and competition andallowing for country-specific fixed effects, both regulatorylaw and higher quality regulatory governance are positivelyand significantly associated with higher per capita generationcapacity. This positive impact increases for more than 10 years,as experience develops and regulatory reputation grows. Theresults are robust to estimating alternative dynamic specifications(including error correction models), to inclusion of economygovernance political risk indicators, and to controlling forpossible endogeneity biases. The article concludes with a shortdiscussion of causality in panel data modeling of governancemodels and the policy implications for regulatory reform.     

Quantifying the costs of a nationwide public safety wireless network

The existing US public safety wireless infrastructure consists of thousands of disparate systems built by separate local agencies. Problems with interoperability, cost, spectral efficiency, and limited functionality plague these systems but could be significantly reduced through the deployment of a single nationwide network that serves all public safety personnel. Two major efforts towards such a nationwide network are the federal-government-only Integrated Wireless Network (IWN) and an FCC-led effort to create a public-private partnership in the 700 MHz band; the future of both projects is uncertain due in part to concerns surrounding cost. This paper presents a model to estimate cost for two fundamental approaches to a nationwide network: a public-safety-only network and a public–private partnership which serves both public safety and commercial subscribers. We apply this general model to four network scenarios which differ in the amount and band of spectrum allocated as well as the number and type of subscribers (public-safety-only versus commercial and public safety) under three traffic scenarios: voice-only, data-only, and voice and data. We demonstrate that the nation's many small systems could be replaced with a single nationwide network with a small fraction of the tower sites and spectrum. The cost of building this new infrastructure is comparable to what is likely to be spent in just a few years on upgrading and maintaining the existing infrastructure. In addition, we show that these cost estimates are highly dependent on some key system design parameters including the public safety capacity required and signal coverage reliability, which must therefore be well-defined in advance.     

The disabling effects of enabling social policies on organisations’ human capital development practices for women

Paid parental leave and externally provided childcare are social policies designed to enhance parents' labour force participation. These policies influence not only men's and women's decisions regarding their labour market activity but also organisational decision makers' (ODMs) expectations about their employees' availability to work and thus, their willingness to invest in their employees' human capital. Using a sample of over 13,000 individuals from 19 countries, we investigate the interaction between gender and social policies on human capital development practices. In line with statistical discrimination theory, which suggests that ODMs hold different expectations about female and male productivity, we find that paid parental leave and externally provided childcare are negatively associated with the provision of human capital development for women but not for men.