Reciprocated community support and small town - small business success

This paper presents an empirical test of the significance of reciprocated community support, in contrast with traditional economic factors and unilateral support, in the success of small businesses in small towns. The central hypothesis is that entrepreneurs who make non-market contributions to their community and whose community supports them, are more likely to consider their businesses to be successful. Logistic regression is used to analyse survey data from over 800 small businesses in 30 small towns of the state of Iowa (USA). The authors found that the interaction effect of an entrepreneur's service to the community, reciprocated by community support of the business, is the single most significant determinant of business success among dozens of indicators and characteristics of the respondent, the business, and the small towns in the sample. In addition, it was found that business people who feel successful expect to expand. These findings are relevant to rural development. The expansion of existing businesses is an important component of regional job growth.     

AN EMPIRICAL NOTE ON CRITICAL COMMENTARY IN AUSTRALIAN ECONOMICS JOURNALS

A substantial empirical literature exists on ranking the published research output of individual academic economists and individual university Economics departments, including Australian work in Economics. However, very little corresponding effort has been directed at examining trends in the nature of published articles, and this embryonic literature is exclusively focused on a handful of top-ranked journals to the exclusion of Australian Economics journals. This note seeks to fill this gap by adopting the methodology developed by Coelho et al. (2005) in their analysis of the decline in critical commentary and applying it to Australian Economics journals for the period 1962 to 2005.     

Real Effects of Accounting Rules: Evidence from Multinational Firms’ Investment Location and Profit Repatriation Decisions

We analyze survey responses from nearly 600 tax executives to better understand corporate decisions about real investment location and profit repatriation. Our evidence indicates that avoiding financial accounting income tax expense is as important as avoiding cash income taxes when corporations decide where to locate operations and whether to repatriate foreign earnings. This result is important in light of the recent research about whether financial accounting affects investment and in light of the decades of research on foreign investment that examines the role of cash income taxes but heretofore has not investigated the importance of financial reporting effects. Our analysis suggests that financial reporting is an important factor to be considered in the policy debates focused on bringing investment to the United States.