An empirical examination of the impact of the Sarbanes Oxley Act in the reduction of pension expense manipulation

Since the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) attempts to make managers more accountable for the fair presentation of reported earnings in their financial statements, we expect managers to manipulate pension expense less during the three years after the passage of SOX than during the three years preceding the passage of SOX. Our results reveal that for smoothing firms the magnitude of pension expense manipulation during the three years after the passage of SOX on average increases instead of decreases. On the other hand, for benchmark firms the magnitude of pension expense manipulation during the three years after the passage of SOX on average decreases as expected. This research provides mixed evidence concerning the effectiveness of SOX in making financial statement reporting more transparent and representative of actual financial position, in the area of pension expense.     

Does venture capital really foster innovation?

Using panel data of 17 European Union countries, we find robust empirical support for a positive impact of venture capital on innovation. After controlling for the potential endogenous relationship between venture capital and innovation, the results indicate that venture capital fosters innovation but mainly at a later stage.     

Brand frequency and product involvement: The application of a pc-based perceptual learning routine to psychology and marketing

This article describes a set of procedures that were developed for implementing perceptual learning studies on IBM PCs. The routines permit the display of pictorial and alphanumeric graphic images in 320 × 200 graphics mode, using 4 colors from a 16-color palette. One of the perceptual learning routines—a dot clarification routine—is applied in a study of brand frequency and product involvement as a demonstration of the usefulness of the procedure to issues in psychology and marketing. Perceptual identification was significantly faster for studied items than for nonstudied ones, for high-frequency brands than for low-frequency ones, and for high-involvement products than for low-involvement ones. None of the interactions were significant. We also discuss other potential applications of the perceptual learning procedures to issues in psychology and marketing.