COUNTERING THE ASSAULT ON CAPITALISM

Capitalism is the most efficient system for solving problems and for advancing human welfare. Yet it faces opposition both from intellectuals and those with vested interests in big government. If business leaders would push for ‘liberate to stimulate policies’, they might succeed in creating a freer tomorrow and solving more of humanity's problems.     

What Plato Knew About Enron

This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron’s actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation’s downfall. We find Plato’s allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron’s executives.     

Firm Heterogeneity and Export Pricing in India

We examine export pricing by Indian manufacturing firms in the early 2000s using a unique data set that matches firm characteristics with product and destination‐level trade data. We find that, in contrast to China and other countries, firm productivity is negatively associated with export prices, and export prices are negatively associated with distance while positively associated with remoteness. Our conjecture is that Indian innovation costs, which are higher than China's, drive down the scope for quality differentiation causing a negative association between productivity and prices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical evidence consistent with heterogenous goods and short quality ladders, a theoretical possibility noted in the study by Antoniades (2012), an outcome that arises here because of domestic Indian economic and regulatory features.     

Valuation and classification of company issued cash and share-puts

This paper examines whether investors’ valuations of cash and share-put warrants are influenced by their potential differential effect on firm solvency. It is motivated by the enactment of SFAS 150, which requires that all contingent put warrant obligations be classified as balance sheet liabilities regardless of put type. Consistent with the critics of SFAS150, we show that market participants differentially value cash and share-puts based on their solvency characteristics beyond the firm’s recorded assets and liabilities. Our results add to existing capital structure literature by suggesting that complex financial instruments (such as cash and share-puts) be reported separately from each other on a firm’s balance sheet.

True burden of drowning: compiling data to meet the new definition

The objective and aim of the study was to compile empirical data to quantify the underestimation of the true burden of drowning and to compare drowning rates using commonly reported codes compared with those revealed by use of the full range of drowning codes in ICD version 10. The authors reviewed mortality data (1999-2002) from Australia and the USA and compiled data to compare the burden of 'unintentional drowning' with that of 'all drowning'. In both Australia and the USA, drowning mortality is more than 35% higher when a full range of codes is examined. A more comprehensive representation of the drowning problem is needed to assist in strengthening prevention activities.     

美国预算和财政管理改革的演进及对中国的启示

一直以来,美国公共预算和财政管理的改革都是务实的、政治的、演进的,有时也不乏创新性。通过对美国公共预算和财政管理改革的历史进行回顾,可以得出一个理解公共预算和财政管理改革的理论框架,这将有助于理解美国现行预算和财政制度体系。这些改革经验对于包括中国在内的世界各国均具有一定的启示和借鉴意义。     

Asset prices in a Huggett economy

This paper explores asset pricing in economies where there is no direct insurance against idiosyncratic risks but other assets can be used for self-insurance, subject to exogenously-imposed borrowing limits. We analyze an endowment economy, based on Huggett (1993) [11], both with and without aggregate risk. Our main innovation is that we obtain full analytical tractability by studying the case with “maximally tight” borrowing constraints. We illustrate by looking at riskless bonds, equity, and the term structure of interest rates, and we show that the model can reproduce many features of observed asset prices when idiosyncratic risks are quantitatively reasonable.