Campaign Finance Levels as Coordinating Signals in Three-way, Experimental Elections

If (often costly) election campaigns are simply advertising, they do not increase social welfare directly. Given this, should we limit campaign expenditures? We propose that costly campaigns can inform voters about the strength of candidates. This may increase welfare indirectly by helping voters avoid coordination failures. In laboratory elections, we study campaign finance levels as coordinating signals and compare them with our earlier work on polls. Both coordinate majority voters effectively, allowing them to stop Condorcet losers from winning. Finance levels were rational in that the total benefits of coordination exceeded the costs. Further, benefits of typical incremental contributions exceeded costs ex-post, while the next typical increment's benefits would not have.     

The socially responsible choice in a duopolistic market: A dynamic model of “ethical product” differentiation

The increasing attention of profit maximizing corporations to corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a new stylized fact of the contemporary economic environment. In our theoretical analysis we model CSR adoption as the optimal response of a profit maximizing firm to the competition of a not for profit corporate pioneer in the presence of a continuum of consumers with heterogeneous preferences towards the social and environmental features of the final good. CSR adoption implies a trade-off since, on the one side, it raises production costs but, on the other side, it leads to accumulation of “ethical capital”. We investigate conditions under which the profit maximizing firm switches from price to price and CSR competition by comparing monopoly and duopoly equilibria and their consequences on aggregate social responsibility and consumer welfare. Our findings provide a theoretical background for competition between profit maximizing incumbents and not for profit entrants in markets such as fair trade, organic food, ethical banking and ethical finance.     

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.     

SIGNALING THROUGH POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS: ELECTIONS AS A REVELATION MECHANISM

Political campaigns are usually seen either as a way of passing information about candidates' intended policies to the voters or as a political liability of the candidates towards the interest groups that finance them. We provide a different interpretation of political campaigns using a political competition model for campaign promises and spending. In a principal–agent framework, elections are shown to be a truth revelation mechanism, in which the principal (voters) induces truthful revelation of ability by the agent (candidates). Campaign promises and spending coexist as an integral part of this mechanism. Political competition is then derived endogenously.     

Campaign finance regulation with competing interest groups

Regulatory caps on contributions to political campaigns are the cornerstones of campaign finance legislation in many established democracies, and their introduction is considered by most emerging ones. Are these regulations desirable? This paper studies contribution caps in a menu auction lobbying model with limited budgets and costly entry. In the absence of entry, contribution caps improve welfare by “leveling the political playing field”. With entry, however, a competition effect and a bargaining effect may arise, resulting in inefficient entry and exit decisions. In particular, a cap may lead to worse policies than the status quo; and even if better policies are chosen, the resulting gain in welfare may be more than offset by the entry costs. Regulation can also lead to the simultaneous entry of competing groups, creating costly rent-seeking on issues previously unaffected by lobbying.     

Political Business Cycles,Elections and Entrepreneurial Finance: A Framework

Political processes affect the real economy. An important channel through which politics affects economics is uncertainty. It has been observed that political uncertainty is high around national elections and negatively affects corporate investments and foreign capital inflows. If national elections affect corporations and foreign investors, we should expect them to also affect entrepreneurial finance provided by investors like venture capitalists (VCs). To add to that, in a complex federal democracy, state level politics is a significant source of political uncertainty. This is the first paper to examine the impact of national and state elections on entrepreneurial finance and provides a framework of VC investment behavior in the face of political uncertainty. We find that VC investments decrease significantly due to political uncertainty around national and state elections. VCs respond strongly to national elections by decreasing the total investment value and the number of deals in election years. However, they give a softer response to regional political uncertainty around state elections by decreasing only the average deal size. The findings have important implications for governments, regulators and policymakers, and open up an opportunity to examine a variety of new questions which can provide a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the impact of elections on VC investments.

     

论烟草行业公益营销策略

烟草企业通过公益营销活动来努力履行自己的企业社会责任.然而,由于烟草行业的特殊性,公益营销的结果总不尽如人意.其原因在于其所应用的公益营销策略缺少可持续性、系统性、公众的认可及参与以及品牌与公益之间的一致性.因此,要想成功,烟草企业就必须真心公益,选取与自身品牌有关联性的公益项目,建立长远关系,并增加公众参与度.从一些例子分析中也印证了这一点.     

董事会社会资本与公司成长性分析

董事会社会资本对公司成长性的影响机制问题日益成为公司治理中广泛关注的焦点和难点.本文从上市公司董事会社会资本角度,把董事会社会资本细分为:董事会社会行业资本、社会连锁资本和社会政治资本,并运用2009年通讯业上市企业的截面数据,通过多元线性回归分析实证检验了上市公司董事会社会资本对公司成长性的影响.研究结果表明,上市公司董事会社会资本对公司成长性具有显著正向影响.具体而言,社会行业资本对公司成长性具有正向显著影响;社会连锁资本对公司成长性具有显著正向影响;社会政治资本对公司成长性没有显著影响.研究结果通过进行稳定性检验,检验结果基本一致.该研究对进一步揭示董事会社会资本功能的优化配置以及企业成长性的促进提供了借鉴与参考.     

公司治理、董事会行为与经营绩效

本对1996年12月31日以前上市的366家A股公司（包括同时发行B股）进行了实证研究,结果表明,在企业绩效下降之后董事会的活动通常会增加。我们还发现在具有董事会非正常活动频率较高的年度及其以后年度,企业的经营绩效会得到微弱的改进,这在一定程度上表明了董事会会议对于公司治理的涵义。但是,这一实证结果却未能有力地证明Nikos(1999)的结论,即董事会的活动（通常董事会的会议频率加以计量）是董事会参与公司治理的一个重要方面,从而间接地说明了我国上市公司董事会行为的低效率。     

Culture and innovation: The moderating effect of cultural values on corporate entrepreneurship

In the few last decades researchers have paid attention to the role of entrepreneurship and innovation in productivity, employment, and economic and social development. In addition, literature has focused on the entrepreneurship that occurs within organizations, such as corporate entrepreneurship. Also, the role of culture is crucial for the development of innovation. Consequently, it is vital to understand why some firms are more innovative and develop more entrepreneurial projects than others, and what determines innovation performance. This research uses Institutional Economics as a conceptual framework with the objective of analyzing the environmental factors that condition innovation within the firms. Specifically, the study determines the moderating effect of cultural values on corporate entrepreneurship. The study uses a logistic regression and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor – GEM – database from the years 2004–2008, with information of 62 different countries (718.758 observations). The main findings highlight the impact of the environmental factors on organizational innovation, specifically on corporate entrepreneurship. Variables such as living in an entrepreneurial culture and media exposure (informal factors), and the number of procedures necessary to create a new business or access to finance (formal factors), appear to be significant for corporate entrepreneurship. Moreover, informal factors behave as moderators between formal factors and corporate entrepreneurship. The article has several implications from both theoretical perspective (advancing in the application of Institutional Economics for the study of innovation within the firms) and from the practical point of view (providing insights for governmental policies interested in fostering innovation and corporate entrepreneurship).     

Information Manipulation in Election Campaigns

We provide a game‐theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a Bayesian voter. The latter is uncertain about how good the candidates are. Candidates take unobservable, costly actions to manipulate voter's opinion about their positions. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and the voter receives the biased campaign messages with some noise, then the cost‐efficient candidate can win the election with higher probability than her opponent even when she is ex‐post an inferior choice for the voter. Our paper offers a novel informational justification for imposing limits on campaign spending and encouraging diversity in the supply of political information.     

金融政治经济学的新视野

各国的公司、信贷和证券市场制度差别很大。而且 ,即使同样的制度在各国的履行程度也不尽相同。经济学家还不能完全理解这种国际差别存在和继续存在的原因。站在金融政治经济学角度对上述问题进行研究 ,则能得出一系列十分具有解释力的经验性规律。金融政治经济学模型中 ,监管及其履行被看作是社会和经济团体之间权力调和的结果。本文分析了金融政治经济学在公司财务、银行业和证券市场三大领域中的应用。     

论驱动市场型企业的社会责任

驱动市场型企业社会责任理论研究尚属空白。驱动市场型企业社会责任既具有和一般企业社会责任的共同特点,又具有自身的独特属性。本文首先介绍了驱动市场型企业社会责任的基本特点,然后提出驱动市场型企业社会责任的两个独特属性：行动的自主性和责任的自觉性,结构的重构性和责任的系统性。在对驱动市场型企业社会责任分析的基础上,进一步分析了社会责任对驱动市场型企业创新的驱动机制,并提出把道德嵌入驱动市场型企业的创新决策。     

前因变量、慈善行为与组织绩效研究

随着人们的社会发展观和价值观的逐渐成熟,要求企业承担社会责任的呼声越来越高。作为承担社会责任的一种有效方式,企业慈善捐赠行为在全球范围内迅速发展,不仅捐赠领域越来越广泛、捐赠资源日趋多样,而且更注重捐赠的效果。与迅速增长的慈善实践相比,相关慈善理论略显薄弱,大多研究仅描述了慈善行为本身,鲜有关于慈善产生动因、行为特征、组织绩效的详细解读,因而使理论工作者难以廓清慈善行为的全貌。本文通过理论演绎,阐释了前因变量、慈善行为和组织绩效三者之间的关系,并以此为基础提出相关研究假设,构建了＂前因变量—慈善行为—组织绩效＂这一概念模型,该模型论述了影响慈善捐赠行为的关键因素,揭示了慈善捐赠行为对企业组织绩效的作用机制,未来的研究可以通过实证数据进一步检验和修正理论分析框架,以为我国企业参与慈善活动提供借鉴。     

Campaign Spending with Office-Seeking Politicians, Rational Voters, and Multiple Lobbies

I introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office-seeking politicians, a continuum of voters, and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies. Lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework. Politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures. Voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures: they are influenced in a way that is consistent with the equilibrium behavior of lobbies and politicians. The model is used to: (i) determine the relation between campaign spending and the deviation from the median voter's preferred policy; (ii) show the informational value of lobbies' contributions; (iii) evaluate the welfare implications of restricting campaign spending; and (iv) interpret the empirical finding that campaign expenditures have a very low effect on election outcome. Although in equilibrium advertising provides voters with useful information, under reasonable parameter values, a ban on campaign contributions makes the median voter better off. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D72, D82, M37.     

Public Funding of Political Parties

This paper studies the typical European system for public funding of parties, where parties receive public funds depending on their vote share. These funds finance electoral campaigns. It is shown that such a funding system increases policy convergence. The effect is larger, the more funding depends on vote shares. If the parties have access to other means of campaign finance given in a lump‐sum way, the effect is moderated.     

Global Production Networks and Activism: Can Activists Change Mining Practices by Targeting Brands?

In this article, I mobilise a global production networks (GPN) approach to study a campaign seeking to impact mining practices by targeting a key consumer market: gold jewellery. In doing so, I make two contributions. The first is empirical: documenting this exploratory campaign and mapping activist strategies and outcomes against the gold production network. The second is theoretical: evaluating whether the GPN toolkit can help explain how the nature of a commodity and its markets impact activist strategies and outcomes. Recasting industries as sites of social struggle, a GPN approach offers a more nuanced understanding of the power permeating markets than more conventional supply chain analyses. The results clarify the challenges activists face when politicising industries by targeting brands, particularly in the extractives sector. But the findings also illuminate opportunities, including the more subtle pathways of activist influence as they: (1) gather and disseminate information, (2) place social and environmental issues on the industry agenda, (3) spur industry to create institutions around these issues, (4) insert themselves and their agenda into the production network, and (5) form alliances with industry actors pushing for change.     

The Rise of Finance and the Decline of Organised Labour in the Advanced Capitalist Countries

The goal of this article is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the impacts of finance and corporate governance reforms on organised labour since 1980. The argument is made that contemporary institutional and ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ as well as ‘Varieties of Unionism’ perspectives on labour market reform have overstated the power of states, institutions and organised interests in deflecting global economic pressures. Drawing on a range of recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics and qualitative studies, it is claimed that current developments in finance and corporate governance mark a fundamental break with post-war developments. Capital has reasserted its power over organised labour and labour markets not only in the US and UK, but throughout Western Europe as well. In assessing how far this reversal has gone, the article focuses on three key political economic changes: i) the rise in finance and adoption of corporate ‘shareholder’ systems; ii) the expansion of mergers and acquisitions and their negative effects on unionisation and manufacturing jobs; and iii) the effects of financial pressures and corporate reform on collective bargaining and wages. This is the first study to report on comparative changes and qualitative reforms to both finance and labour in 13 OECD countries between 1980 and 2005.     

企业社会责任、公司治理和公司业绩

笔者采用上海国家会计学院编制的上市公司社会责任指数对我国上市公司履行社会责任对其业绩的影响进行检验,其结果并不支持履行社会责任可以提升公司业绩。在回归方程中引入董事会规模、独立董事比例等公司治理变量后,公司履行社会责任则能够提高财务业绩和成长性。公司履行社会责任不能提升公司业绩的原因在于公司没有建立起健全的治理结构,没有将履行社会责任融入公司的战略规划。因此,企业只有将社会责任与公司治理和发展战略结合起来,才能在积极履行社会责任的同时兼顾自身发展。     

资产收购与控制权转移对经营业绩的影响

控制权转移对公司经营业绩的影响是金融学界和会计学界关注的一个重要问题。本文在剔除控制权转移之后的收购资产对经营业绩的额外贡献的基础上 ,同时运用变化模型和配对模型来研究控制权转移公司在控制权转移前后的业绩变化 ,得出了两个不同的结论。控制权转移对公司业绩的影响只能采用配对模型 ,而变化模型则可以揭示控制权转移之后股东财富的变化。研究结论表明 ,控制权转移对公司业绩的影响不显著 ,但股东从控制权转移公司所得到的报酬 ,如果剔除控制权转移之后的收购资产对经营业绩的贡献 ,其显著为负 ;如果不剔除控制权转移之后的收购资产对经营业绩的贡献 ,则其与零没有显著差异 ;控制权转移之后的资产收购对公司业绩的变化具有显著的影响 ,在研究控制权转移对公司业绩的影响时 ,需要考虑控制权转移之后的资产收购行为。