International income shifting by US multinational corporations

This paper provides estimates of the amount of income shifted across national borders within the manufacturing operations of US multinational corporations (MNCs) in 1988. It is assumed that each MNC arranges its investments such that, after accounting for income shifting opportunities, the after-tax rate of return on a marginal investment is the same for all its affiliates, regardless of location. The income shifting is then inferred by comparing shares of after-tax profits, assets and sales of the affiliated members. It is estimated that such shifting amounted to about $8 billion (on net), which is less than 4% of the worldwide taxable income of the manufacturing MNCs.     

Lebesgue measure and social choice trade-offs

Summary An Arrovian social choice rule is a social welfare function satisfying independence of irrelevant alternatives and transitivity of social preference. Assume a measurable outcome spaceX with its (Lebesgue) measure normalized to unity. For any Arrovian rule and any fractiont, either some individual dictates over a subset ofX of measuret or more, or at least a fraction 1–t of the pairs of distinct alternatives have their social ordering fixed independently of individual preferences. Also, for any positive integer (less than the total number of individuals), there is some subsetH of society consisting of all but persons such that the fraction of outcome pairs (x, y) that are social ranked without consulting the preferences of anyone inH, whenever no individual is indifferent betweenx andy, is at least 1–1/4.We are grateful to Roy Mathias and Daniel Waterman for help with some technical matters, and to chairman Jim Follain and the Syracuse University Economics Department for financing the exchange that launched this project. Campbell's research was funded by National Science Foundation grants, SES 9007953 and SES 9209039.     

Reason's shadow: Notes on the psychodynamics of obstruction

The remarks that follow are made with regard to the behavior of leaders whose self-image is threatened by a variety of conditions comprising the world problematique. Of all those conditions, surely those associated with violence and warfare are the most threatening. I would speculate, therefore, that what I've written here is especially pertinent for deliberations on how to encourage peace and disarmament.While these remarks are focused on the behavior of leaders—especially those in government—they can hold, too, for those in the public who identify with those leaders…itself another psychodynamic process. Of course, the public's contexts differ so the degree of threat and response will differ, too. This is a matter for further attention.Moreover, self-images are usually rich in content and while some aspects are threatened, others may not be or, indeed, may be attracted by new rational ideas. The resultant struggle within the psyche complicates the overt expression of these unconscious conflicts.But these dynamics mirror those comprising the problematique, especially its expression around issues of war and peace. Therefore, psychodynamic matters deserve as much attention and utilization as we now give to conventional, indeed, often ritual means, masquerading as rationality, for dealing with violence and armaments.     

The relevance of democracy to organizational management

The relationship between democratic ideals and organizational structuring and functioning receives attention in this article. After a brief historical consideration of liberal democracy in the United States, we analyze social, managerial, ethical, and economic issues defining the relevance of democracy to organizational management. These issues lead to a presentation of specific purposes that particular mechanisms of organizational democracy can serve. Because of other scholarly attention to participative management and employee ownership, hierarchical constraints receive emphasis here.     

Excise taxes,over-shifting,cross-elasticity,and tax revenue

This article examines cross-elasticity effects in excise taxation for markets characterized by monopolistic competition and over-shifting. Extending the constant elasticity demand model to consider cross-elasticity leads to notably different results regarding tax revenue maximization. With nonzero but weak cross-elasticity effects relative to the price elasticity, we derive a higher optimal tax-price ratio compared to prior research. With strong cross-elasticity, revenue can continually be increased by raising the excise tax. Overall, the study offers government greater incentive to use excise taxes to obtain revenue.     

Gender gap in self‐employment: The role of risk attitudes

This paper examines the link between the willingness to take risk and the gender gap in self‐employment in the transition economy, where for decades entrepreneurship was considered a crime. Using rich data on risk preferences and entrepreneurial activities, we show that male–female risk tolerance differential is the main determinant of the gender gap in self‐employment in Ukraine. The decomposition results indicate that up to 38% of the gap can be attributed to this factor. Robustness tests support the validity of the baseline findings by suggesting that the results are not confounded by such factors as being unemployed before starting a current job, having a self‐employed household member, or living in a relatively wealthy household before transitioning to self‐employment.     

Are serial Condorcet rules strategy-proof?

Abstract. This paper explores the extent to which majority rule is invulnerable to manipulation by individuals and coalitions, even when majority rule is used to select more than one alternative. The resulting rule may or may not be strategy-proof, depending on the size of the coalitions that can form, and on the nature of the individual preferences over sets of alternatives. No individual can manipulate with respect to a wide family of preferences over sets. The only restriction on the domain of true and revealed individual preferences is that the selection rule is always well defined. Received: 1 November 1999 / Accepted: 7 May 2001 We thank two anonymous referees for suggestions that have significantly improved the paper. We are also grateful to l'Université de Caen for sponsoring a Workshop on Social Choice Theory, where a first draft of this paper was presented in May, 1999, and to the workshop participants for helpful observations. Work on the final version of the paper was done while one of the authors was a guest of the Project on Intergenerational Equity supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology of Japan. We are grateful to the Ministry and to the project leader, Professor Kotaro Suzumura, for their support.     

Influence factors for operational control and compensation in professional service firms

Professional service firms have distinct operational challenges due to the type of work that is transacted by the employees of these firms, and due to the nature of the employees themselves. In this paper, we develop and present factors that influence professional service operations in firms and compensation structures for professional service providers. We establish professional service influence factors, which we posit will impact agency relationships in professional service firms. That is, we hypothesize that professional service influence factors (PSIFs) will moderate the effect of task programmability and outcome measurability in predicting the use of behavior- or outcome-based compensation schemes (control strategy). Logistic regression is used on data provided by 192 professional service providers in order to examine the impact of the agency variables and moderating factors on control strategies. The results indicate that company- and profession-based factors have moderating effects on task programmability when predicting control strategy. We discuss the implications of our findings.     

The Impact of Transaction Costs and the Expected Length of Stay on Homeownership

Economic theory suggests that an increase in the expected length of stay in a dwelling increases the probability of a household choosing to own a house rather than rent. This hypothesis is derived from recognition that there are substantial transaction costs associated with homeownership and increased expected time in the home reduces the annualized transaction cost. Using a military data set, we confirm that expected length of stay in a dwelling and the transaction costs of selling are very important to the ownership decision. Our best estimate of the transaction costs of selling a home are the sum of 3% of house value and 4% of household earnings.