Coordinating tariff reduction and domestic tax reform

A key obstacle to fundamental tariff reform in many countries is the revenue loss that it ultimately implies. This paper establishes and explores a simple and practicable strategy for realizing the efficiency gains from tariff reform without reducing public revenue, showing that for a small economy a cut in import duties (respectively, export taxes) combined with a point-for-point increase in domestic consumption taxes (production taxes) increases both welfare and public revenue. Increasingly stringent conditions are required, however, to ensure unambiguously beneficial outcomes from this reform strategy when allowance is made for such important features of reality as non-tradeable final goods and tradeable intermediate inputs.     

The Role of Strategic Conversations with Stakeholders in the Formation of Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy

This paper explores the role of strategic conversations in corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy formation. The authors suggest that explicitly engaging stakeholders in the CSR strategy-making process, through the mechanism of strategic conversations, will minimize future stakeholder concerns and enhance CSR strategy making. In addition, suggestions for future research are offered to enable a better understanding of effective strategic conversation processes in CSR strategy making and the resulting performance outcomes.     

厦门的性格

厦门．是个有个性的城市。她不如北京大气,不如上海时尚,不如广州风情．不如成都休闲．但她确有自己的特色。她妩媚婉约．娇小玲珑。     

Reinventing compensation

Executives of banks have been flayed for drawing huge pay packets without commensurate corporate performance. Robin Buchanan says the scrutiny into compensation will go beyond the financial services industry. He recommends board directors of all businesses have answers to seven critical questions at their fingertips.     

Environmental Policy, Tax Incidence, and the Cost of Public Funds

This paper studies under what conditions a double dividend may occur in the sense that both environmental quality and employment rise. A simple static general equilibrium model is employed in which tax policy faces the dual task of internalising a negative environmental externality and raising revenue to finance public consumption. The model features a clearing labour market with both labour demand and supply and a fixed factor of production (e.g. capital). Hence, we can study tax incidence and its effect on employment, environmental quality, and the marginal cost of public funds. It is shown for the case of an upward sloping labour supply curve and less than full tax shifting by employers that a shift towards greener preferences cannot yield a double dividend, even if the fixed factor is important. However, if labour supply curve bends backwards, more environmental concern confers a double dividend.     

Does common auditor have an impact on corporate tax avoidance? An investigation from the supply chain perspective

We find that, at both the audit firm and partner level, having a common auditor in the supply chain has a significant positive association with the supplier company's degree of tax avoidance. Companies report a higher level of tax avoidance when they are audited by an industry-expert or a tax expert common auditor, when the common audit partner is economically dependent on the supplier company, when the audit client is in a highly competitive industry, and when the company is subject to a high level of information asymmetry. Moreover, we find potential audit quality issues embedded in common audits in the supply chain.     

Exploring the efficacy of healthcare quality practices, employee commitment, and employee control

This exploratory study examines healthcare quality program practices, employee commitment and control initiatives, and perceived results by surveying the directors of hospital quality programs. U.S. hospitals are renowned to be among the highest in quality, but recent studies assert that the majority of error-related deaths per year are preventable. In response, healthcare organizations have adopted quality management programs. Employee commitment and control theories propose that employee initiatives are critical to patient safety. However, little research has focused on the efficacy of employee commitment and control initiatives for quality programs at healthcare organizations. This study examines the responses from Quality and Risk Directors of 372 U.S. hospitals. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) demonstrate that perceived quantitative and qualitative quality program results are more highly related to employee commitment and control initiatives than they are related to quality practices.     

Consumption tax competition among governments: Evidence from the United States

The paper contributes to a small but growing literature that estimates tax reaction functions of governments competing with other governments. We analyze consumption tax competition between US states, employing a panel of state-level data for 1977–2003. More specifically, we study the impact of a state’s spatial characteristics (i.e., its size, geographic position, and border length) on the strategic interaction with its neighbors. For this purpose, we calculate for each state an average effective consumption tax rate, which covers both sales and excise taxes. In addition, we pay attention to dynamics by including lagged dependent variables in the tax reaction function. We find overwhelming evidence for strategic interaction among state governments, but only partial support for the effect of spatial characteristics on tax setting. Tax competition seems to have lessened in the 1990s compared to the early 1980s.     

A non-linear model of the real US/UK exchange rate

This paper provides a framework for building and estimating non-linear real exchange rate models. The approach derives the stationary distribution from a continuous time error correction model and estimates this by MLE methods. The derived distribution exhibits a wide variety of distributional shapes including multimodality. The main result is that swings in the US/UK rate over the period 1973:3 to 1990:5 can be attributed to the distribution becoming bimodal with the rate switching between equilibria. By capturing these changes in the distribution, the non-linear model yields improvements over the random walk, the speculative efficiency model, and Hamilton's stochastic segmented trends model.