ambition versus conscience does corporate social responsibility pay off the application of matching methods in this article we examine the effect of corporate social responsibility csr on firms financial performance csr effect two competing hypotheses social impact hypothesis and shift of focus hypothesis are proposed to investigate this issue where the former suggests that csr has a positive relation with performance and the latter are opposite in order to ensure the csr effect is not contaminated by other factors or samples are randomly drawn we employ four matching methods nearest caliper mahala and mahala caliper to match the samples of csr csr firms and without csr noncsr firms with similar characteristics although four methods yield slightly different results firms engaging in csr activities tend to obtain significantly higher values on pretax income to net sales and profit margin and adopting csr at the very least not deteriorate the performance of firms making our conclusion favors the social impact hypothesis and against shift of focus hypothesis in taiwan thus ambition and conscience are not conflicting with each other

corporate social responsibility and profit volatility theory and empirical evidence corporate social responsibility csr implies extra care for the well being of stakeholders different from shareholders in our theoretical model we show that when this principle implies that more csr oriented companies incorporate stakeholders well being constraints it translates into higher sensitivity of profits to economic shocks our empirical analysis finds support for this hypothesis showing that csr attributes which relate to positive contributions to stakeholders well being significantly and positively affect idiosyncratic profit volatility our findings remain robust when controlled for endogeneity with instrumental variable estimates

preserving religious identity through education economic analysis and evidence from the us abstract this paper models the decision of religious parents to send their children to private religious schools as reflecting their desire to shield their children from external influences and thus preserve their religious identity it follows that when the share of the minority in the local population grows and outside influences become less threatening the demand for separate religious schooling among the members of the religious group decreases this pattern implies concavity in the relationship between enrollment in private and religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the population we present empirical evidence from united states county data on catholic and private school enrollment that strongly supports our theory the paper contributes to a better understanding of the demand for religious education

ownership structure and ceo compensation implications for the choice of foreign market entry modes drawing on agency theory corporate governance and international business literatures we develop arguments relating equity ownership structures and ceo compensation mix to a firm s choice of foreign market entry modes based on a sample of 432 foreign market entries by 118 non diversified firms in the us manufacturing sector between 1991 and 1998 our findings indicate that greater equity ownership by institutional shareholders and inside directors is positively associated with a preference for full control entry modes in addition our results suggest that ceos with a greater proportion of pay tied to firm long term performance are more inclined to choose full control entry modes over shared control modes

agency conflict and corporate strategy the effect of divestment on corporate value among the various stakeholders of a firm senior managers are the most likely targets for private and public political pressures other stakeholder groups are less visible and may be perceived as less influential in corporate strategy formulation and implementation in some situations consequently senior executives may adopt corporate strategies in response to political pressures even if these strategies may be costly to shareholders in this study a special case is examined the effect of divestment of south african business units on firm value using data from 1984 through 1990 we examine the impact that announcements of divestments have upon the stock return behavior of publicly traded firms our results indicate that significant and negative excess returns accrue to shares of companies announcing divestments of south african operations these results are supportive of the premise that noneconomic pressures may influence managerial strategies rather than value enhancement goals 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

three lenses on the multinational enterprise politics corruption and corporate social responsibility scholars who analyze multinational enterprises mnes recognize the complex relationship between international business ib and society however compared with other ib topics research on politics corruption and corporate social responsibility three lenses on the mne remains somewhat embryonic with unresolved issues regarding frameworks measurement methods and theory this presents unique opportunities for integration and extension of disciplinary perspectives which we explore in this article we provide an introduction to potential linkages across these three lenses an agenda for additional theoretical and empirical research and a review of the papers in the jibs focused issue

competition between private and public schools vouchers and peer group effects a theoretical and computational model with tax financed tuition free public schools and competitive tuition financed private schools is developed students differ by ability and income achievement depends on own ability and on peers abilities equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school qualities and two dimensional student sorting with stratification by ability and income in private schools high ability low income students receive tuition discounts while low ability high income students pay tuition premia tuition vouchers increase the relative size of the private sector and the extent of student sorting and benefit high ability students relative to low ability students

a computable general equilibrium model of intergovernmental aid abstract this paper introduces a theoretical and a calibrated computable general equilibrium model of intergovernmental relations in which heterogeneous agents i are endowed with income and houses ii are fully mobile between multiple jurisdictions and iii vote in both local and state elections to determine local property and state income tax rates three different types of intergovernmental programs are analyzed i redistributive revenue sharing ii district power equalization and iii deductibility of local taxes the approach facilitates a heretofore difficult comparative analysis in that it provides for integrated investigation of these programs in a single general equilibrium model

exports and economic growth in bangladesh this study investigates the effect of exports on economic growth in bangladesh based on a two sector growth model using annual data for the period 1961 92 the article estimates an autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic model of economic growth which is found to capture the volatility of the bangladesh economy the results suggest that an increase in the share of investment in gdp significantly increases the growth rate of gdp in normal years but negligibly increases gdp growth in abnormal years abnormalities in the economy arise from war political turmoil and natural disasters the key finding is that export growth has significantly increased economic growth through its positive impact on total factor productivity in the economy the contribution of exports to economic growth was more pronounced during 1982 90 when the government pursued a policy of trade liberalisation and structural reform and political turmoil was not persistent this finding is not sensitive to the choice of the model or t

centralization fiscal federalism and private school attendance a cge model is used to analyze the impact of public school financing on private school attendance the common perception that public school finance centralization will necessarily lead to greater private school attendance is not correct in such a model even when that centralization involves an extreme equalization as in california furthermore if centralization is less dramatic as in most states declines in private school attendance are even more pronounced this weakens the speculation that low exit rates to private schools in centralizing states imply that general public school quality does not drop as a result of such centralization

peer effects in medical school abstract using data on the universe of students who graduated from us medical schools between 1996 and 1998 we examine whether the abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class affect a student s academic achievement in medical school and his choice of specialty we mitigate the selection problem by including school specific fixed effects and show that this method yields an upper bound on peer effects for our data we estimate positive peer effects that disappear when school specific fixed effects are added to control for the endogeneity of a peer group we find no evidence that peer effects are stronger for blacks that peer groups are formed along racial lines or that students with relatively low ability benefit more from their peers than students with relatively high ability however we do find some evidence that peer groups form along gender lines

the creation of value through corporate reputation the relationship between social and financial performance csp fp has been a main objective in the literature on business management as it would provide an economic justification for the social investment insofar as it contributes to the creation of value this relationship has been empirically tested by several authors though without using a theoretical model that sustains this relationship the aim of this article is to propose a theoretical model of the process of the creation of value from the reputation generated by companies integrating the factors that have been shown to be more relevant in this process from previous research in such a way that hypotheses are put forward regarding the existence of this relationship and the factors that determine it finally an empirical test is performed using the 100 most prestigious companies operating in spain during 2004

the religious factor in private education abstract we quantify the religious factor in private education in the united states by calibrating a political economy model of school choice among public private nonsectarian and subsidized religious schools in which parents differ in their incomes and in their preferences for religious education this shows strong latent demand for religious schooling conditioned on current subsidized tuition levels in parochial schools which is suppressed by the need to pay twice for private education applying the results of the calibration to gauge the effect of means tested school voucher programs on religious and nonsectarian private enrollment we find that when the amount of the voucher is relatively small including subsidized religious schools in such programs is necessary for providing low income families effective access to private education

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

erratum to competition incentives and public school productivity abstract when competition increases it is often presumed that public schools will be forced to become more efficient this paper challenges that presumption showing that in well defined circumstances rent seeking public schools find it optimal to reduce productivity when a voucher is introduced this occurs for incentive reasons alone more generally the productivity effects of vouchers are shown to be non uniform varying systematically according to household and community characteristics and the form the voucher takes when the voucher is targeted perverse productivity outcomes do not arise the analysis has relevance to the policy issue of voucher design

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

ability tracking school competition and the distribution of educational benefits abstract to study the effects of ability grouping on school competition we develop a theoretical and computational model of tracking in public and private schools we examine tracking s consequences for the allocation of students of differing abilities and income within and between public and private schools private schools tend to attract the most able and wealthiest students and rarely track in equilibrium public sector schools can maximize attendance by tracking students public schools retain a greater proportion of higher ability students by tracking but lose more wealthy lower ability students to the private sector consequently socioeconomic status is a predictor of track assignment in public schools for the entire population public sector tracking has small aggregate effects on achievement and welfare but results in significant redistribution from lower to higher ability students

mobility targeting and private school vouchers simulations are derived from a three district model of low middle and highincome school districts calibrated to new york data with housing stocks that vary within and across districts in this model it is demonstrated that school district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low income households furthermore strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs jel 122 128 h73 persistent frustration with the perceived low quality of public education exacerbated by concerns over the inherently unequal levels of public school quality across school districts has caused policy makers courts and researchers to investigate modifications and alternatives to the current public school system one idea that has received increasing academic and public attention is that of private school vouchers with proponents arguing that the competitive pressures of voucher programs would cause improvements in the efficiency of the publicschool system while at the same time addressing equity concerns if vouchers can be targeted to low income households or low income school districts but aside from a few limited experiments in some u s cities our experience with vouchers in the united states remains virtually nonexistent this limits the amount of information researchers can derive from standard empirical analysis in that it forces them to rely on only current nonvoucher induced differences in competition despite important suggestive results such work may not anticipate all the impacts from a large scale policy such as the voucher policies currently under discussion at the same time theoretical models of school finance are also limited in that they often either focus on only one particular aspect of the general equilibrium school finance problem or they are too rich and complex to yield crisp predictions

corporate perceptions of the business case for supplier diversity how socially responsible purchasing can pay in exploring corporate perceptions of the business case for supplier diversity sd this paper reports on a cross national study of large purchasing organisations lpos that had introduced or were in the process of introducing purchasing initiatives aimed at ethnic minority businesses embs the research investigates how lpos portray the benefits of this form of socially responsible purchasing and suggests a business case construct based on four component elements it also highlights a number of contextual factors that appear to have shaped business case rationales the paper concludes with a discussion of issues of cost and contingent influences affecting sd programmes and points to possible areas for future research

tiebout choice and universal school vouchers abstract this paper examines who is likely to gain and who is likely to lose under a universal voucher program following epple and romano d epple r e romano competition between private and public schools vouchers and peer group effects american economic review 88 1998 33 62 d epple r e romano neighborhood schools choice and the distribution of educational benefits in c m hoxby ed the economics of school choice the univ of chicago press chicago 2003 pp 227 286 and nechyba t j nechyba mobility targeting and private school vouchers american economic review 90 2000 130 146 t j nechyba introducing school choice into multidistrict public school systems in c m hoxby ed the economics of school choice the univ of chicago press chicago 2003 pp 145 194 we focus on the idea that gains and losses under a universal voucher depend on two effects changes in peer group composition and changes in housing values we show that the direction and magnitude of each of these effects hinge critically on market structure i e the amount of school choice that already exists in the public sector in markets with little or no tiebout choice potential changes in peer group composition create an incentive for high socioeconomic ses households to vote for the voucher and for low ses households to vote against voucher in contrast in markets with significant tiebout choice potential changes in housing values create an incentive for high ses households to vote against the voucher and for low ses households to vote for the voucher using data on vote outcomes from california s 2000 voucher initiative we find evidence consistent with those predictions

do lenders value corporate social responsibility evidence from china drawing on risk mitigation theory this article examines whether the improvement of firms social performance reduces debt financing costs cdfs in china the world s largest emerging market employing both the ordinary least square ols and the two stage instrumental variable regression methods we find that improved corporate social responsibility csr reduces the cdf when firms csr investment is lower than an optimal level however this relationship is reversed after the csr investment exceeds the optimal level firms with extremely low or extremely high csr are subject to a higher cdf the results also suggest that the optimal csr level for small firms is higher than that for large firms this study is the first to document a u shaped relationship between csr and cdf and also the first to investigate this relationship within an emerging market context

private school vouchers and student achievement an evaluation of the milwaukee parental choice program in 1990 wisconsin began providing vouchers to a small number of low income students to attend nonsectarian private schools controlling for individual fixed effects i compare the test scores of students selected to attend a participating private school with those of unsuccessful applicants and other students from the milwaukee public schools i find that students in the milwaukee parental choice program had faster math score gains than but similar reading score gains to the comparison groups the results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results

country level institutions firm value and the role of corporate social responsibility initiatives drawing on transaction cost theories and the resource based view of a firm we posit that the value of corporate social responsibility csr initiatives is greater in countries where an absence of market supporting institutions increases transaction costs and limits access to resources using a large sample of 11 672 firm year observations representing 2445 unique firms from 53 countries during 2003 2010 and controlling for firm level unobservable heterogeneity we find supportive evidence that csr is more positively related to firm value in countries with weaker market institutions we also provide evidence on the channels through which csr initiatives reduce transaction costs we find that csr is associated with improved access to financing in countries with weaker equity and credit markets greater investment and lower default risk in countries with more limited business freedom and longer trade credit period and higher future sales growth in countries with weaker legal institutions our findings provide new insights on non market mechanisms such as csr through which firms can compensate for institutional voids

valuing school quality better transport and lower crime evidence from house prices housing prices within urban areas exhibit highly localized variation that cannot be explained solely by differences in the physical attributes of dwellings we consider the role of local amenities and disamenities in generating price variation within urban areas focusing on three highly policy relevant urban issues transport accessibility school quality and crime our survey of the recent empirical literature highlights what is known and what is not known on these issues and considers the relevance and reliability of this evidence for policy design and evaluation although there are serious empirical challenges we argue that research on housing values based on careful research designs can offer credible estimates of the social value of place specific attributes and amenities

capitalization and the voucher an analysis of precinct returns from california s proposition 174 abstract in 1993 californians voted on a school voucher initiative we hypothesize that homeowners in good school districts understood the voucher to be a threat to their property values and thus voted against it precinct returns from los angeles county confirm this hypothesis we also examine an alternative hypothesis explaining the relationship between school quality and precinct returns according to the alternative voters perceived the initiative to be a referendum on public school quality to distinguish between the two hypotheses we compare the voting patterns of homeowners and renters the comparison does not favor one hypothesis over the other

educational vouchers welfare effects and voting abstract we analyze the welfare effects and voting equilibrium with vouchers for private schools the analysis shows that vouchers like tuition tax credits martinello and west 1988 frey 1983 may improve the welfare of all families including families whose children remain in public schools if public educational quality is unchanged and publicly financed educational expenditures decrease thus voters will approve a voucher only if it reduces taxes when public educational quality is endogenous a voucher may increase quality by reducing the tax cost of quality and will be approved if it reduce taxes at the pre voucher public education level and increases quality

equilibrium and inefficiency in a community model with peer group effects public service output depends on input expenditures on own personal characteristics and on the characteristics of the other residents in the community the peer group effect in a community model with public expenditures set by voting with migration between communities and with land price differentials capitalization it is shown that communities may become heterogeneous in composition and second best inefficient this equilibrium occurs when the peer group effect is neither too strong nor too weak the inefficiency arises because an externality is created by migration the land price differential does not play the part of the price of the better peer group but of a transfer payment

corporate social responsibility a microeconomic review of the literature this paper provides a review of the theoretical and empirical literature on corporate social responsibility csr depending on whether an individual can be considered as selfish or whether she has also social preferences motives for csr can be explained in different ways furthermore we explicitly highlight the influence of different corporate governance system on csr as well as the relationship between firms size and social commitment because it is difficult to distinguish between different theories in empirical studies we argue that an experimental approach might be suitable to test theories of csr

majority choice of tax systems in single and multi jurisdictional economies abstract we examine majority choice of tax instruments in an economy with heterogeneous households in our framework majority voting equilibrium exists despite the multidimensional policy choice set we examine single and multi jurisdictional economies we identify five competing incentives that influence choice of tax instruments equilibria generally entail a mixture of tax types with multiple jurisdictions strong reliance on head taxation in rich communities arises to deter poorer households from immigrating in spite of local incentives to use alternative tax instruments to redistribute wealth if relocation costs preclude inter community mobility the equilibrium tax system is fundamentally affected with redistribution incentives then dominating choice of instruments and tax rates limiting or eliminating head taxation fundamentally alters stratification public good provision levels and tax systems

tiebout sorting and neighborhood stratification tiebout s classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income typically urban areas are less than fully stratified and the question arises how much do departures from standard tiebout assumptions contribute to observed within neighborhood mixing this paper quantifies the separate effects of employment geography via costly commuting and preferences for housing attributes on neighborhood stratification it does so using an equilibrium sorting model estimated with rich census micro data simulations based on the model and credible preference estimates show that counterfactual reductions in commuting costs lead to marked increases in racial and education segregation and to a lesser degree increases in income segregation given that households now find it easier to locate in neighborhoods with like households while turning off preferences for housing characteristics increases racial segregation especially for blacks doing so reduces income segregation indicating that heterogeneity in the housing stock serves to stratify households based on ability to pay further we show that differences in housing help to accentuate differences in the consumption of local amenities

institutional interest ownership type and environmental capital expenditures evidence from the most polluting chinese listed firms this study empirically examines whether firms environmental capital expenditures impact institutional investors investment decisions in the chinese market we particularly examine the impact of ownership type on the relationship of environmental capital expenditures and the behavior of different types of institutional investors by classifying institutional investors into two categories short term and long term investors in addition this study further investigates whether environmental capital expenditures related to ownership type increase firm value we find that long term institutional investors tend to invest in state owned firms soes making environmental capital expenditures results also indicate that with governmental backing and encouragement the market value of soes making more environmental capital expenditures is likely to increase however no similar results are found for non soes

un principles for responsible investment signatories and the anti apartheid sri movement a thought experiment there appears to be a growing disquiet amongst academics surrounding the ascendancy of responsible investment that is egoist or self interested in character business case responsible investment this ascendancy has in no small measure been associated with the uptake of united nations principles for responsible investment pri as a de facto standard for mainstream responsible investment this article contributes to this disquiet it does this by examining how egoist responsible investors as endorsed by the pri might have behaved had they been around in the 1970s 1980s and early 1990s during days of the anti apartheid socially responsible investment sri movement armed with near perfect hindsight grade enhanced analytics it is clear that the signals that such egoist responsible investors would have sent to company management in terms of the apartheid issue would have been highly muddled and therefore ineffective the net conclusion is that there is nothing inherently or inevitably responsible about egoist investment and that the aversion to behaving ethically amongst institutional investors must be challenged and not swept under a carpet of rhetoric

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

a study of management perceptions of the impact of corporate social responsibility on organisational performance in emerging economies the case of dubai although a number of studies have shown that corporate social responsibility csr activities often lead to greater organisational performance in western developed economies researchers are yet to examine the strategic value of csr in emerging economies using survey data from 280 firms operating in dubai this study examines the link between csr activities and organisational performance the results show that csr has a positive relationship with all three measures of organisational performance financial performance employee commitment and corporate reputation these results reinforce the accumulating body of empirical support for the positive impact of csr on performance and challenge the dominant assumption that given the weak institutional framework in emerging economies csr activities drain resources and compromise firms competitiveness

local public goods and private suppliers musical suburbs replayed abstract this paper deals with the existence of private market suppliers in a standard local public goods model the result of this modification can be a cycling process instigated by rich households rather than poor households the theoretical model provides empirical implications for capitalization studies and policy implications for the provision and financing of local public goods including education