Evaluating Constructive Lease Capitalization and Off‐Balance‐Sheet Financing: An Instructional Case with FedEx and UPS

This case illustrates the effects of the proposed new lease standard by the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board on existing outstanding operating leases. Specifically, the case examines the effects of the proposal that all firms report existing operating leases as capital leases upon the initial adoption of the proposed standard. By applying a constructive capitalization model to two firms who rely on operating leases for financing, FedEx and UPS, we found that both companies would have to record billions of dollars of liabilities that had only appeared in the footnotes of their financial statements under the current lease standards. In addition, the firms would experience a decline in retained earnings and key financial ratios, such as the debt‐to‐equity, return‐on‐assets, and interest coverage ratios, by reporting operating leases as capital leases under the new proposed standard. Furthermore, the magnitude of the lease capitalization impact is much smaller for UPS than for FedEx.     

OPEC’s Strategies

This paper investigates rationale explanations of OPEC??s strategies. Accounting for market characteristics in particular the sluggishness of demand and supply allows to explain price jumps as rational OPEC strategies from a narrow economic perspective (up and down) as well as from political objectives (at least up) due to the political payoff from standing up against the ??West??. Although the temptation to accrue this political payoff was and remains high, the narrow economic profit motive coupled with an imperfect cooperation among OPEC members explains past price volatility and high prices much better than the usual reference to political events. A more specific prediction is that OPEC will switch back to setting prices since the current quantity strategy encourages oil importing countries to appropriate rents in particular in connection with the need to mitigate global warming.     

Optimal Stabilization Policy Under Governmental Risk Aversion

Governmental stabilization policies take account of the underlying risk aversion of its voters. A utility function for the government is defined, one which includes variances of national income changes with respect to its policy instruments—here the budget variable, the bond rate of interest, and the currency-exchange rate. The consequence of this for the optimal set of policies is a target level of national income less than what a risk-neutral government aims at. This applies to an open economy when this is a key-currency country, as it need attend to balance-of-payments effects only insofar as they affect national income. The non-key-currency country, by contrast, must take account directly of balance-of-payments effects and their variance, so it reaches a lower level of utility than the key-currency country.     

The effect of a tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of starting entrepreneurs: Evidence from a field experiment

This paper estimates the long-term impact of a short, partly personalized, mandatory tax training program on tax compliance and business outcomes of first-time entrepreneurs. To this end, we combine survey data, audit data and unique register data from the Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration with a three year long randomized experiment. The results show that the training affects specific domains of tax compliant behavior. Moreover, it has no impact on business survival, but treated entrepreneurs have significantly higher profits compared to the control group due to lower business costs. These outcomes are partially supportive of our hypotheses developed from theories on tax compliance and mental accounting.     

Family business goal formation: a literature review and discussion of alternative algorithms

Management Review Quarterly - Goals represent an organization’s desired outcomes, and family businesses are known to pursue multiple goals, which commonly include both financial and...     

Investment guarantees in unit-linked life insurance from the customer perspective

Interest rate guarantees are a typical contract feature in unit-linked-life insurance products. As the financial crisis of 2007/2008 has shown, these guarantees can be of substantial value for policyholders since they ensure that at least a minimum amount will be paid back even if the mutual fund value falls below a specific guaranteed level. However, from the insurance company’s view, these guarantees can be costly—especially in highly volatile markets—due to the required risk management measures which must be undertaken to secure the guarantees promised to the customers. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate whether customers really value these guarantees and if their willingness to pay (WTP) is sufficient to cover the guarantee costs. To elicit customer WTP, we use an online questionnaire and compare these results to the actual guarantee costs calculated with the Black and Scholes option pricing formula. One main finding is that even though most of the participants in the online questionnaire work in the financial industry, subjective prices are difficult to derive and are lower, on average, than the prices obtained using a financial pricing model. However, many participants are still willing to pay a substantially higher price.     

An economy with personal currency: theory and experimental evidence

Is personal currency issued by participants sufficient to operate an economy efficiently, with no outside or government money? Sahi and Yao (in J Math Econ, 1989) and Sorin (in J Econ Theory, 1996) constructed a strategic market game to prove that this is possible. We conduct an experimental game in which each agent issues his/her personal IOUs, and a costless efficient clearinghouse adjusts the exchange rates among them so the markets always clear. The results suggest that if the information system and clearing are so good as to preclude moral hazard, any form of information asymmetry, and need for trust, the economy operates efficiently at any price level without government money. These conditions cannot reasonably be expected to hold in natural settings. In a second set of treatments when agents have the option of not delivering on their promises, a high enough penalty for non-delivery is necessary to ensure an efficient market; a lower penalty leads to inefficient, even collapsing, markets due to moral hazard.