The benefits and costs of the deferral of U.S. Taxes on retained earnings of controlled foreign corporations

This paper develops and applies a model to measure the effects of deferral on world and U.S. incomes. It is assumed that elimination of deferral would be accompanied by a compensating reduction in the U.S. corporate income tax rate which would leave the overall tax burden of corporations unchanged. The results of the model support several conclusions: Deferral has a positive net effect on world income, but has a negative effect on U.S. income; over two-thirds of the income gains of foreign countries due to deferral goes to developed or oil-exporting countries; and the Tax Reform Act of 1976 has roughly doubled the importance of deferral.     

The variable effects of dynamic capability by firm size: the interaction of innovation and marketing capabilities in competitive industries

Although investments in marketing and innovation capabilities theoretically help firms to compete in dynamic markets and enhance performance, company size has a strong influence on whether this is the case. In a test of a proposed conceptual model, this study of 692 small, medium, and large enterprises found that large firms prospered from building dynamic capabilities under conditions of high industry competitiveness, while investments in innovation and marketing individually diminished small firms’ performance. The effect was mixed for medium-size firms. In small enterprises, however, dynamic capability proved to be crucial in order to withstand competition. Therefore, taking into account these firms’ limited resources, managerial efforts should be focused on the integration of marketing and innovation capabilities, because each capability alone does not have a significant positive impact on performance. In medium-sized enterprises, the support of marketing capability is required to raise profitability under conditions of high industry competitiveness; otherwise, innovation would not lead to actual profits. For large enterprises, industry competitiveness was found to be a less serious threat to performance, and instead is a catalyst to the development of capabilities, suggesting that managers of such firms should focus on building long-term strategic advantages.     

Theoretical perspectives on strategic environmental management

Strategic Environmental Management (SEM) incorporates into firms' core strategies the transformation of products and processes that they believe an environmentally concerned society will increasingly demand. Significant threads have to do with the discovery of cost savings and market opportunities from reducing environmental impacts. SEM, like the environmental regulation hypothesis associated with Michael Porter, implies that society's efforts to reduce external environmental costs often lead to identification of hitherto-ignored or undeveloped profit possibilities. This would be surprising from the standpoint of neoclassical economic theory, to the extent that SEM utilizes available information about the potential costs and benefits of projects. Within the framework of evolutionary, capabilities-based theories of the firm, however, this discovery and its exploitation in SEM make perfect sense. Capabilities theory would imply that firms' intrinsic path dependence may previously have obscured such opportunities. This paper examines the theory of SEM, its implications for neoclassical and capabilities theories of the firm, and survey results drawn from the author's work with member companies in a regional pollution prevention roundtable. RID="*" IDI have enjoyed the able and insightful research assistance of Justin Vernon. Cooperation from the companies that participated in the survey, and financial support from Allegheny College and its Center for Economic and Environmental Development, are gratefully acknowledged. Reviewers for this journal provided numerous, valuable suggestions. Responsibility for the material herein remains mine alone.     

Subjective beliefs and economic preferences during the COVID-19 pandemic

Experimental Economics - The COVID-19 pandemic presents a remarkable opportunity to put to work all of the research that has been undertaken in past decades on the elicitation and structural...     

The Role of Behavioral Survey Methodologists in National Statistical

The expertise of behavioral survey methodologists is needed in national statistical agencies because of the necessity of using theory and research from the social sciences to reduce survey error. In this paper various social science based explanations for measurement error and nonresponse error are described in order to illustrate the conceptual foundations of such error reduction efforts. Three roles for behavioral survey methodologists in national statistical agencies are then discussed. They include: 1) bring an error reduction perspective to bear in an influential way for all aspects of designing and implementing agency surveys; 2) bring theoretical efficiency and effectiveness to experimental tests of alternative questionnaire designs and implementation procedures through the use of theories, concepts and pretests and findings of past behavioral science research; and 3) contribute to the expanding science of survey methodology.     

Financial Structure and Corporate Behavior in Japan and the US: insulation versus integration with speculative pressures

This paper examines the impact of speculative financial markets on corporate behavior under the Japanese and US financial systems. While both countries experienced speculative financial booms during the 1980s, real sector corporate decision making was relatively insulated from such activity in Japan by its bifurcated capital markets: high-turnover trading of much equity coexists with another segment in which large blocks of firms equity and debt are held long term, by capital suppliers who are strategic business allies. In the American system, in contrast, fluid and impersonal stock trading leaves firms vulnerable to the impact of short term price movements. This avenue for speculative financial market pressures has militated toward reduced time horizons and financial ratio-based decision criteria in the US corporate sector. The main implication is that mechanisms must be found for insulating American corporate decision making from speculative pressures. Rather than attempting to mimic the undemocratic role played by banks and other buysiness insiders in Japan, US policy makers should achieve a similar insulating effect by vesting more power in corporate constituences other than shareholders—especially employees. An approach built around ‘democratic stakeholder governance’ is proposed.     

Basic Needs,Government Debt and Economic Growth

This paper investigates the relationships between basic needs and economic growth where the interactions between output, health, nutrition and education are explicitly simultaneous. We find a unidirectional relationship that improving basic welfare contributes strongly to labour productivity change, but a clear reverse causation only from growth to nutrition. There are substantial differences in the patterns of simultaneous interactions at different income and welfare levels. There are strong self‐reinforcing effects of literacy and debt service on poverty, making it difficult for poor countries to rectify their situation. Channelling resources towards improving health, education and nutrition could bring dramatic economic returns.     

TIME SERIES ANALYSIS OF ACCOUNTING POLICY CHOICE: REPLY

Taylor (1992) argues that accounting policy choices in any year are not assessed independently of policy choices adopted in previous years. This independence assumption is a maintained hypothesis of Anderson and Zimmer (1992). Although Taylor acknowledges that our results remain robust to his suggested adjustments for non-independence, we argue in this reply that such adjustments are unnecessary because temporal independence of accounting policy choices is consistent with the implications of costly contracting between the firm and its claimholders. We develop the arguments that (1) accounting choices are temporally independent and our research design is therefore, appropriate (2) to the extent that there is an independence problem of the type proposed by Taylor (1992) it also applies to cross-sectional studies of accounting policy choice.     

Discovering India's three levels of luxury consumption: An exploratory research to find a conceptual framework

Luxury marketing research has moved from functional product attributes to a ‘democratized’ view in emerging economies. This seems to be based on the development of interactive and digital communications. Luxury research studies have historically focused on the brand's and marketer's perspectives. Thus, little attention has been given to the consumer's view of what we consider to be the individual drivers, i.e., the ‘inner and outer self’ and how that impacts luxury consumption. This paper presents a framework of luxury and self, using concepts such as interdependent or outer, independent or inner, and a new concept of ‘digital self’. These appear as three levels of luxury consumption, i.e., conspicuous, individual, and interactive. The interdependent self is influenced by the external motives and leads to conspicuous luxury behavior. Individual self is affected by internal motives and thus influences individual luxury consumption. Digital self affects the networks of motive and relationships and thereby impacts interactive luxury consumption and behavior.