Management’s personal ideology and financial reporting quality

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We investigate the relation between managers’ personal ideologies and financial reporting quality. We use Federal Elections Commission data to...     

Then and Now: Examining Older People's Engagement in Outdoor Recreation Across the Life Course

Outdoor recreation provides a range of health and wellbeing benefits and facilitates engagement with natural environments. We explore older people's participation in outdoor recreation throughout their lives to examine how past experiences shape engagement later in life. A qualitative life history approach, consisting of semi-structured interviews and a focus group in three place-specific (urban, rural, and small town coastal) case studies in Scotland, was adopted. Thematic analysis revealed ways in which childhood experiences shaped adult engagement and highlighted life course transitions where behaviour change was most pronounced. Place and gender were considered as factors which may affect responses. Participants identified the points of getting married, becoming a parent, children entering adolescence, retirement, the onset of disabilities or ill health, and the death of others as “moments of change” in the extent and/or form of their outdoor recreation. The findings highlight potential for targeted interventions to promote outdoor recreation throughout life.     

How Busyness Influences SEC Compliance Activities: Evidence from the Filing Review Process and Comment Letters

The SEC reviews firm filings and issues comment letters on those filings. These comment letters play an important role in the assessment of firm value. These activities are seasonally compressed because over 70 percent of registrants have a December fiscal year-end. Research in other settings finds that busyness leads to negative outcomes. We examine how busyness impacts the frequency, scope, and timeliness of comment letters. We find that the SEC issues fewer comment letters when busy, focuses its limited resources on the most severe cases of disclosure noncompliance, and extends the amount of time between receiving a firm's filing and issuing a comment letter. Despite this, we find no evidence that the SEC misses more serious compliance issues when busy. Our results have implications for policymakers responsible for allocating resources to the SEC.     

Marketing via smart speakers: what should Alexa say?

ABSTRACT

A smart speaker is a wireless device with artificial intelligence that can be activated through voice command. The artificial intelligence interacts in the form of a virtual personal assistant, such as Amazon’s “Alexa”. Companies are currently creating voice applications for smart speakers that allow consumers to use the personal assistant to perform tasks, such as acquiring information and ordering products. This is the dawn of a new type of interaction between brands and consumers, a new touchpoint. Brands need to catch the vision and create content for this new technology, content that is useful in the buying process. The purpose of this study is to determine what types of marketing messages people find acceptable on smart speakers. Based on the findings, a cognitive message strategy is effective with smart speakers. The paper presents three types of executional frameworks that are best suited for the design of a cognitive message: authoritative, testimonial, and slice-of-life. The overriding requirement for marketing on smart speakers is that the message must provide value to the listener.     

How and when environmental orientation drives corporate sustainable development in a cross-national buyer–supplier dyad

This study aims at relating the role of environmental orientation to corporate sustainable development within a cross-national buyer–supplier dyad. To this end, it specifically proposes and empirically tests a model delineating how the international buyer's environmental orientation would influence its green supplier development (GSD) activities, then its outsourcing supplier's green product strategies (GPS), and finally total relationship value (TRV) of the entire buyer–supplier dyad. It also examines how supplier overall information technology advancement (SOITA) would further moderate the aforementioned influences. Survey results derived from 202 buyer–supplier dyads have provided empirical support for all the hypothesized relationships of the proposed model. To summarize, the findings show that international buyers' internal and external environmental orientations both serve as a major driver for their GSD, which, in turn, significantly advances outsourcing suppliers' practice of GPS and consequently enhances TRV. Moreover, this study has demonstrated that SOITA exerts a significant and positive moderating effect on the GSD–GPS link. Overall, this study provides important insights into understanding the complex and contingent processes underlying the influence of the international buyer's environmental orientation on the joint performance of the dyad.     

How do leaders' perceptions of organizational health climate shape employee exhaustion and engagement? Toward a cascading-effects model

Although researchers and practitioners increasingly focus on health promotion in organizations, research has been mainly fragmented and fails to integrate different organizational levels in terms of their effects on employee health. Drawing on organizational climate and social identity research, we present a cascading model of organizational health climate and demonstrate how and when leaders' perceptions of organizational health climate are linked to employee well-being. We tested our model in two multisource studies (N_{Study 1} = 65 leaders and 291 employees; N_{Study 2} = 401 leader–employee dyads). Results showed that leaders' perceptions of organizational health climate were positively related to their health mindsets (i.e., their health awareness). These in turn were positively associated with their health-promoting leadership behavior, which ultimately went along with better employee well-being. Additionally, in Study 1, the relationship between perceived organizational health climate and leaders' health mindsets was moderated by their organizational identification. High leader identification strengthened the relationship between perceived organizational health climate and leaders' health mindsets. These findings have important implications for theory and practice as they show how the dynamics of an organizational health climate can unfold in organizations and how it is related to employee well-being via the novel concept of health-promoting leadership.     

The evasion of fiscal and labor regulations: Firm behavior and optimal tax policy

Firms face many fiscal and labor regulations, but they may evade these legal requirements in several different ways. We develop a model that captures these two types of evasion decisions and unlike existing literature assume firms can evade labor regulations independently from income tax responsibilities. We characterize firms’ entry and evasion behavior and find that the design of the tax system can generate both positive and negative correlations between evasion decisions consistent with what is observed empirically. We then characterize optimal government policies given the firms’ decisions. We obtain intuitive optimal tax rules that highlight the trade‐offs the government faces when firms have multiple margins on which to evade.     

An efficiency wage approach to reconciling the wage curve and the Phillips curve

This study develops an efficiency wage model that generates a wage curve at the regional level and a Phillips curve at the national level, under the assumption that workers' efficiency depends on both regional and aggregate labor market conditions. An equation relating wages to unemployment and lagged wages is derived from the profit-maximizing behavior of firms, and it is demonstrated that the coefficient on lagged wages is less than 1 with regional data but equals 1 with aggregate data. In addition, there is an equilibrium relationship between unemployment and wages at the regional level, but not at the aggregate level.     

Social learning with differentiated products

Learning from friends is a key process by which consumers acquire information about available products. This article embeds social learning in a model of firms producing differentiated products. I consider how the structure of social relationships between consumers influences pricing and welfare. In particular, how a variety of characteristics of social networks ‐ distribution of friendships, homophily, clustering, and correlations between an individual's preferences and number of friends ‐ influence these outcomes. I also find conditions under which consumer awareness and the sensitivity of demand to prices are useful measures of the informational efficiency of markets.     

Do Laws Influence the Cost of Real Estate Brokerage Services? A State Fixed Effects Approach

A FTC‐DOJ study argues that state laws and regulations may inhibit the unbundling of real estate brokerage services in response to new technology. Our data show that 18 states have changed laws in ways that promote unbundling since 2000. We model brokerage costs as measured by number of agents in a state‐level annual panel vector autoregressive framework, a novel way of analyzing wasteful competition. Our findings support a positive relationship between brokerage costs and lagged house price and transactions. We find that change in full‐service brokers responds negatively (by well over two percentage points per year) to legal changes facilitating unbundling.