discretionary disclosure of proprietary information in a multisegment firm the seminal unraveling result in the disclosure literature posits that discretion inevitably leads to full disclosure even when such disclosure has detrimental consequences in this paper we revisit optimal disclosure of proprietary information when firms compete in multiple markets the analysis demonstrates that in the presence of multiple segments the unraveling result applies at the firmwide level but not necessarily segment by segment instead when the firm has an ex ante desire to withhold information and segments are sufficiently similar the ex post disclosure equilibrium entails aggregation of segment details aggregation arises because any ex post temptation to disaggregate and reveal particularly favorable news in one segment entails revealing unfavorable news in another segment a desire to balance profits across segments then leads a firm to disclose firmwide information a temptation that cannot be avoided but only in the aggregate

preventing competition because of solidarity rhetoric and reality of airport investments in spain from a public interest perspective there could be a justification for constraining market mechanisms with the aim of progressive redistribution however some policies might be based on selfish motivations of government agents in this article we empirically contrast if the infrastructure policy is based only on public interest motivations or if it is also based on the private motivations of policy makers in this way spain infrastructure policy provides a useful policymaking field to test hypothesis about the behaviour of policy makers we find some evidence regarding the strength of political motivations in explaining such behaviour in fact results from our analysis show that political motivations can eventually play a more relevant role than social welfare maximization

infrastructure and development a critical appraisal of the macro level literature this survey reviews the existing macro level empirical literature on the link between infrastructure and development outcomes in a critical light after providing a general framework that casts the relevant terms of the controversy on the real effect of infrastructure on growth in the context of an aggregate production function it signals what are the relevant empirical questions to be addressed this guides the systematic review of a number of empirical studies and the discussion of the main econometric challenges to the identification of the effect of infrastructure on output and productivity finally building on related research in particular in contract theory and political economy the paper spells out several promising research avenues

the decision to work by married immigrant women using 1980 census data the authors analyze the labor force participation of married immigrant asian women in the united states by country of origin compared with that of married immigrant women from europe and canada the results suggest the existence of a family investment strategy evidence from both across groups and within groups indicates that a womans decision to work is affected by whether she has a husband who invests in skills specific to the u s labor market and also by the extent of that investment such a family response may help offset the low earnings of immigrant men who initially lack skills for which there is a demand in the american labor market excerpt

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

on the optimal relation between the properties of managerial and financial reporting systems we develop a theoretical model of the firm that links properties stewardship vs valuation focus of financial reporting regimes with the informational properties of optimal managerial accounting systems we show that contrary to the standard textbook proposition properties of management and financial accounting systems are not independent significantly we provide an explicit connection between exogenous and observable properties of a firm s financial reporting system and the quality of the managerial accounting system on which manager s base real economic decisions as the quality of those economic decisions can also be inferred from publicly available data our theory generates new opportunities for empirical managerial accounting research on large nonproprietary samples further by being able to identify enhanced performance due to improved managerial accounting information our theory provides opportunities to gain a better understanding of the link between particular managerial accounting practices and the quality of the information produced

recursos naturales diversificacion y crecimiento regional en el peru based upon the export product space this paper shows the main features of the export product composition of peru and its regions with respect to export baskets these include a high con centration in few commodities a relatively low degree of similarity between products relatively high levels of productivity at the international level and enormous undiscovered or untapped export potential in addition this paper analyzes the hypothesis that the natural resource curse affects regional growth employment and export diversification subject to the limitations of the data and the heterogeneous panel methods employed estimation results indicate that the share of natural capital out of the total tangible wealth and natural capital per capita seems on average and in a relatively statistically robust way to spur growth primary employment and export concentration in a few products consequently the natural resource curse for the peruvian regions is not about growth but about low regional development since such resources do not have a significant impact on secondary and tertiary employment or on export product diversification

selective disclosures in the presence of uncertainty about information endowment abstract this paper analyzes a setting where firms could have private information from various sources and disclose a selective subset of that information investors have uncertainty about how much information firms have using a stylized model where there are two signals about a firm s future value and the firm may be privately informed of none one or all of those signals this paper establishes an equilibrium link between the cutoff value characterizing the partially informed firm s disclosure strategy and the partition of the signal space characterizing the fully informed firm s disclosure strategy the paper also discusses potential extensions of the model

privatization and economic growth in australia the shorthand of a long process the impact of privatization on economic growth has been little investigated relative to disaggregated approaches a growth accounting framework is used here to investigate the impact of privatization on growth for the australian economy the contribution of public capital to the private sector and whether the growth process is endogenous or solow is evaluated separate measures of public and private capital are computed in order to estimate their impacts with labour on australian gross domestic product gdp growth for the period 1960 to 2003 a simple growth rates version is found preferred by stationarity and other tests labour growth appears to strongly positively influence the growth of gdp in contrast public capital growth has no statistically significant effect on gdp growth or on private capital productivity the data are consistent with the hypothesis that the coefficients of the growth equation are the same before and during privatization

the economic incorporation of immigrants in 18 western societies origin destination and community effects this article examines differences in labor market participation and unemployment between immigrant groups in different countries the authors argue that two macro designs must be combined to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the economic integration of immigrant groups instead of reliance on observations of multiple origin groups in a single destination or a single origin group in multiple destinations multiple origins in multiple destinations are compared suggesting that the economic status of immigrants may be affected by the country from which they come origin effect the country to which they migrate destination effect and the specific relations between origins and destinations community effect from the human capital theory compositional hypotheses are derived which predict that these macro effects can be attributed to the selection of human capital from discrimination theories contextual hypotheses are deduced which maintain that macro effects can be ascribed to in gro

the rise of anti foreigner sentiment in european societies 1988 2000 the study examines change over time in sentiments toward out group populations in european societies for this purpose data were compiled from four waves of the eurobarometer surveys for 12 countries that provided detailed and comparable information on attitudes toward foreigners between 1988 and 2000 a series of multilevel hierarchical linear models were estimated to examine change in the effects of individual and country level sources of threat on anti foreigner sentiment the analysis shows a substantial rise in antiforeigner sentiment between 1988 and 2000 in all 12 countries the rise in anti foreigner sentiment was steep in the early period between 1988 and 1994 then leveled off after that although anti foreigner sentiment tends to be more pronounced in places with a large proportion of foreign populations and where economic conditions are less prosperous the effects of both factors on anti foreigner sentiment have not changed over time the analysis also shows that anti foreigner sentiment i

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

are immigrants favorably self selected one of the standard propositions in the migration literature is that migrants tend to be favorably self selected for labor market success that is economic migrants are described as tending on average to be more able ambitious aggressive entrepreneurial or otherwise more favorably selected than similar individuals who choose to remain in their place of origin in recent years there have been challenges to the general proposition of the favorable selectivity of migrants in addressing this issue this paper considers alternative specifications of the migration model that are relevant for the issue of migrant selectivity excerpt

cross firm real earnings management cross firm real earnings management our analysis is rooted in the notion that stockholders can learn about the fundamental value of any firm from observing the earnings reports of its rivals we argue that such intra industry information transfers which have been broadly documented in the empirical literature may motivate managers to alter stockholders beliefs about the value of their firm not only by manipulating their own earnings report but also by influencing the earnings reports of rival firms managers obviously do not have access to the accounting system of peer firms but they can nevertheless influence the earnings reports of rival firms by distorting real transactions that relate to the product market competition we demonstrate such managerial behavior which we refer to as cross firm real earnings management and explore its potential consequences and interrelation with the practice of accounting based earnings management within an industry setting with imperfect non proprietary accounting information this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

immigrant selectivity and wages the evidence for women in an effort to extend the analysis of selectivity to female immigrants this paper examines the impact of economic conditions at the time of migration on the subsequent wages of foreign born women in the united states in addition the variables chosen to describe the migration decision have been expanded to include the effects of household status and immigration policy these results are compared to previous results for men and provide additional evidence about how the context of the migration decision affects the subsequent success of immigrants in the united states the sample for this project comes from the april 1983 current population survey and consists of married native and foreign born women between the ages of 16 and 64 excerpt

roads out of poverty assessing the links between aid public investment growth and poverty reduction the authors develop a macroeconomic framework that captures links between aid public investment growth and poverty public investment is disaggregated into education infrastructure and health and affects both aggregate supply and demand dutch disease effects are captured by accounting for changes in the relative price of domestic goods the authors assess the impact of policy shocks on poverty by linking the model to a household survey they calibrate the model for ethiopia and simulate the changes in the allocation of aid and public investment the authors also calculate the amount by which foreign aid should increase to reach the poverty targets of the millennium development goals

a signal jamming theory of predation we propose a new theory ofpredation based on signal jamming in our model the predator s characteristics are common knowledge while the entrant is uncertain of his own future profitability the entrant uses his current profit to decide whether to remain in the market and the predator preys to jam or interfere with this inference problem thus our model differs from those based on reputation effects in which the predator preys to signal information about himself

an alternative interpretation of conditional convergence results this paper focuses on the endogeneity of the investment to gdp ratio and the population growth rate two of the most frequently used control variables in cross country growth regressions for the convergence test the summers heston data 1988 show that the former rises and the latter declines with income growth when the indirect yet endogenous effects through these control variables are taken into account and simultaneity bias is corrected relatively high income countries appear to grow faster than low income countries this interpretation sharply contrasts with the conditional convergence interpretation based on the assumption of exogenous control variables copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

determinants of adaptation costs in procurement an empirical estimation on italian public works contracts it is widely agreed that rules governing public procurement should be designed to achieve value for money however in the public works sector the good being procured is usually complex and hard to be exactly specified ex ante and alterations to the original project might be needed after the contract is awarded this may result in considerable discrepancies between the lowest winning bid and the actual costs that are incurred by the buyer bajari et al 2006 there is now a wide body of literature focusing on cost escalation during the execution of contracts and their estimates reveal that it can be often quite large this article is aimed at offering an empirical test of the determinants of adaptation costs in the public works procurement using a detailed data set on italian public works contracts we run an empirical analysis grounded on the main conclusions reached in the literature to test for the main drivers of adaptation costs

house of green cards statistical or preference based inequality in the employment of foreign nationals this study contributes to the labor market inequality and organizations literature by investigating the role that government agents play in shaping the employment of immigrants using unique data o

china s regional balanced development based on the investment in power grid infrastructure abstract due to the stark reality of regional development disparities china has to confront the sustainable development challenges brought about by social inequality to compensate for these regional differences in natural resource endowments effective investment in power grid infrastructure pgi and improvement of power grids might prove helpful in reducing poverty and narrowing the development gap this paper constructs a peripheral degree index pdi of power grid to measure the effective distance between electricity delivering areas and receiving regions moreover we discuss how to efficiently locate the investment in pgi and optimize the allocation of limited financial resources the results show investment in pgi has higher marginal benefit for less developed provinces in energy delivering regions and more importantly improvement of the grid infrastructure in central areas which connect energy receiving and delivering regions particularly to improve the grid facilities in the central areas could reduce electricity transmission cost and help to alleviate the railway strain for coal transportation therefore our findings suggest that it is more advisable to locate the investment of power grid infrastructure in the central provinces that are located at strategic conjunctions of the nationwide power grid including shanxi henan hubei and hebei

the composition of public expenditure and economic growth abstract noting that the literature has focused on the link between the level of public expenditure and growth we derive conditions under which a change in the composition of expenditure leads to a higher steady state growth rate of the economy the conditions depend not just on the physical productivity of the different components of public expenditure but also on the initial shares using data from 43 developing countries over 20 years we show that an increase in the share of current expenditure has positive and statistically significant growth effects by contrast the relationship between the capital component of public expenditure and per capita growth is negative thus seemingly productive expenditures when used in excess could become unproductive these results imply that developing country governments have been misallocating public expenditures in favor of capital expenditures at the expense of current expenditures

public investment and economic growth this article uses an extension of mankiw romer and weil s augmented solow swan growth model to examine whether public investment has a distinct role as a determinant of economic growth it considers both the predictions of the model in steady state and in transition to steady state for the steady state model there is no significant effect from public investment on the level of output per worker using standard ordinary least squares ols methods for the transition model it observes a significant contribution to economic growth from public investment when instrumental variables methods are used however the associated standard errors are much larger and the contribution of public investment is statistically insignificant