A Personal Agenda for the Next Decade

The paper sets a broad agenda touching several areas of policy. It starts from the least likely policy at this point of time, the use of the tax system for redistribution. It discusses prudent macroeconomic coordination without the strings of the Maastricht Treaty in business troughs. Regulation of financial markets, agricultural policies, and health issues are coming up on a desirable agenda of the United States, but are probably important for all countries, as are social security policy and climate change.     

Uncertainty Associated with Future Environmental Costs and the Market's Differential Response to Earnings Information

This study examines whether the uncertainty arising from a firm's exposure to future environmental costs (environmental uncertainty) affects the market's price sensitivity to reported earnings. Specifically, when environmental uncertainty is significantly high, are investors more responsive to reported earnings released by 'high-polluting' firms than reported earnings announced by 'low-polluting' firms within the same industry? The initial impact of Title IV (the acid rain provisions) of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (1990 CAAA) on the US electric utility industry provides the research setting required to isolate the effects of environmental uncertainty while addressing this question. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that the earnings response coefficients (ERCs) of high-polluting electric utilities are significantly greater than those of their low-polluting counterparts during a predicted period of elevated environmental uncertainty. In adjoining sample years associated with lower environmental uncertainty, we observe no statistical difference in the magnitude of the ERCs between these two groups. In addition, the study's findings suggest that the magnitude of the ERC is increasing in the firm's exposure to future environmental costs, after controlling for other factors that potentially affect ERCs.     

post-war economics' dead end (part 1)

In the first of two articles Sir Alfred Sherman, advisor to Conservative leaders in the 1970s and 1980s and a founder of the Centre for Policy Studies, claims that post-war economics has reached a dead-end.     

Value of Multinationality: Internalization, Managerial Self-interest, and Managerial Compensation

In this paper, we examine the impact of managerial self-interest on the value of multinationality. Since agency theory also suggests that a divergence between the interests of managers and shareholders can be aligned by effective managerial incentive, we also examine the effect of managerial compensation on the value of multinationality. Our results show that for high- Q (Tobin's Q > 1 ) firms, investors do not associate the spending of free cash flow on multinationality with the problem of overinvestments. For high- Q firms, it is also found that the value of multinationality can be enhanced by effective managerial incentives. For low- Q firms (Tobin's Q < 1 ), it is found that the concern of managerial self-interest overwhelms the benefits of internalization, making multinationality a value-decreasing event. For low- Q firms, managerial compensation is also ineffective in promoting value-enhancing foreign direct investments.     

Pivotal Buyers and Bargaining Position

Securing sales to a large buyer can be pivotal to a supplier's decision to produce. While conventional wisdom suggests that being pivotal improves a buyer's bargaining position, the opposite is shown in a multilateral bargaining model. If other buyers' payments fall short of costs, a pivotal buyer must cover the shortfall or forfeit consumption. This affords leverage that the supplier lacks when bargaining with non-pivotal buyers. The analysis illuminates contracting in markets with high fixed costs, such as cable television programming, motion pictures, and large-scale project finance, and has implications for the FCC's horizontal ownership limits on cable system operators.     

Managerial Equity Ownership and the Demand for Outside Directors

This paper examines the linkage between the use of outside directors and managerial ownership. We conjecture there are two linkages: the standard incentive‐alignment demand for monitoring when managers own little stock and an entrenchment‐amelioration demand when managerial stock ownership is high. As a consequence, we predict the association between managerial ownership and board composition will be nonlinear (U‐shaped if the entrenchment effect is sufficiently pronounced). Using UK data, we find that both quadratic and logarithmic models outperform the simple linear relationship assumed in prior research and that the substitution between managerial ownership and board composition is stronger than hitherto supposed.