The fleeting nature of permanent reinvestment: Accounting for the undistributed earnings of foreign subsidiaries

Over the last decade, an increasing percentage of the profits reported by U.S. corporations were earned by their foreign subsidiaries and retained outside the United States resulting in the deferral of income taxes. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 provided a temporary federal tax incentive to remit such earnings, which resulted in the repatriation of $140 billion by the 30 firms comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average. An analysis of the financial reporting disclosures made by these firms reveals that a tax expense was not fully recognized on a substantial portion of the earnings until repatriation because of an exception for foreign reinvestments deemed to be essentially permanent in duration. The implications of the currently acceptable accounting for undistributed foreign earnings are discussed as well as recommendations to improve the relevancy and reliability of the disclosures required for this exception to comprehensive recognition of deferred taxes.     

PUBLIC DECISION GUIDES FOR WATER RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT IN WESTERN CANADA1

The concern of the paper is public river basin development in Western Canada. It attempts to set forth public decision guides and objectives in development of water resource policy. Operational formulations that are useful in public natural resource development and management are considered. Cet article traîte du développement des bassins fluviaux publiques au Canada Ouest. Les auteurs tâchenl de formuler les indications ?opinion publique el les objectifs qui peuvent servir de guides pour arriver à une politique pour le développement des ressources ?eau. Les formulations opérationnelles qui sont utiles dans le développemenl et le ménagement des ressources nalurelles publiques sont aussi considérées.     

Transparency on the consumer side and tacit collusion

This paper investigates the effects on tacit collusion of increased market transparency on the consumer side of a market in a differentiated Hotelling duopoly. Increasing market transparency increases the benefits to a firm from undercutting the collusive price. It also decreases the punishment profit. The net effect is that collusion becomes harder to sustain. In the limiting homogeneous market, the effect vanishes. Here market transparency does not affect the possibilities for tacit collusion.     

Fertility and child mortality in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana.

This article summarizes a 1994 World Bank working paper on methodological issues and a study of the determinants of child mortality and fertility in Ghana and the Cote d'Ivoire. Data were obtained from the 1985, 1986, and 1987 Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey and the 1987-88 and 1988-89 Ghana Living Standards Survey. Both surveys entailed two-stage, self-weighted stratified samples. The study sample included women who had at least one birth 5 or more years before the survey. The conceptual framework distinguishes between endogenous and exogenous variables affecting fertility. The statistical approach relies on parallel reduced-form techniques. Model I assumes that all explanatory variables are exogenous. Model II excludes husbands' characteristics and household composition. Model III assumes that excluded model II factors are exogenous and likely to affect child mortality and fertility. Findings indicate that economic resources of households, maternal education, access to markets, and food prices were associated with child mortality in Ghana. Sanitation in both countries affected child survival only for less educated mothers. Urban residence in Ghana particularly benefitted uneducated mothers. In Cote d'Ivoire, household assets were not a significant predictor of child mortality. When child mortality is treated as exogenous in fertility model I, only 4-15 fewer child deaths were associated with a reduction of only one birth. Local health programs and environment explained little of the variation in child mortality in both countries. Women's education was strongly related to fertility declines in both countries. Assets and maternal health were positively related to fertility in Cote d'Ivoire and negatively related in Ghana. Findings suggest that the negative effects of household assets on fertility apply in urban subsamples among older women in each country. The authors conclude that economic growth must occur simultaneously with increased levels of female education and urbanization.     

Discovering India's three levels of luxury consumption: An exploratory research to find a conceptual framework

Luxury marketing research has moved from functional product attributes to a ‘democratized’ view in emerging economies. This seems to be based on the development of interactive and digital communications. Luxury research studies have historically focused on the brand's and marketer's perspectives. Thus, little attention has been given to the consumer's view of what we consider to be the individual drivers, i.e., the ‘inner and outer self’ and how that impacts luxury consumption. This paper presents a framework of luxury and self, using concepts such as interdependent or outer, independent or inner, and a new concept of ‘digital self’. These appear as three levels of luxury consumption, i.e., conspicuous, individual, and interactive. The interdependent self is influenced by the external motives and leads to conspicuous luxury behavior. Individual self is affected by internal motives and thus influences individual luxury consumption. Digital self affects the networks of motive and relationships and thereby impacts interactive luxury consumption and behavior.     

The Future of Advertising or Whatever We're Going to Call It

In this opinion piece, the author speculates on the future of advertising. Arguing that the challenge of predicting the future lies mainly in the lack of an acceptable definition of the field, the author solves that problem by developing a set of postulates to create boundaries for the theory and practice of the discipline. The postulates of the present discipline are used as the base from which the future might evolve. Three scenarios are proposed for the future of advertising: (1) creeping incrementalism, (2) reversal of buyer/seller roles, and (3) reinvention of the field. The author suggests that those scenarios will develop and play out based on the developmental speed and acceptance of the various technologies identified.     

From Greenwashing to Machinewashing: A Model and Future Directions Derived from Reasoning by Analogy

Journal of Business Ethics - This article proposes a conceptual mapping to outline salient properties and relations that allow for a knowledge transfer from the well-established greenwashing...     

The Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility in Network Societies: A Communication View

The paper introduces the communication view on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which regards CSR as communicatively constructed in dynamic interaction processes in today’s networked societies. Building on the idea that communication constitutes organizations we discuss the potentially indeterminate, disintegrative, and conflictual character of CSR. We hereby challenge established mainstream views on CSR such as the instrumental view, which regards CSR as an organizational instrument to reach organizational aims such as improved reputation and financial performance, and the political-normative view on CSR, which highlights the societal conditions and role of corporations in creating norms. We argue that both the established views, by not sufficiently acknowledging communication dynamics in networked societies, remain biased in three ways: control-biased, consistency-biased, and consensus-biased. We discuss implications of these biases and propose a future research agenda for the communication view on CSR.     

Equity and Nonequity Determinants of FHA Single-Family Mortgage Foreclosures in the 1980s

We examine foreclosures on FHA single-family mortgages insured during the 1975–87 period. The importance of the market value of borrower equity and national house price dispersion support much earlier work emphasizing the key role of negative equity in triggering default. The lower is "mean" market-value equity, and the greater is dispersion, the greater is the fraction of borrowers likely to have negative equity. The unemployment rate and the book value of borrower equity are also shown to be significant determinants of default. Unemployment is one of those events that can force borrowers to move. The moving decision increases the likelihood of default because moving costs no longer deter default, and the costs of selling the house reduce the effective equity in the house. The book value of equity is relevant to this decision because it is what the sellers receive if they move without defaulting. Not only are both of these variables significant determinants of default, but the smaller is book equity, the greater is employment impact (with large book equity, unemployment should not matter because selling the house is preferred to default).