an analysis of interfirm cooperation theory and evidence from electric power pools this paper develops and tests a model for analyzing the extent to which an individual utility participates in a power pool it incorporates the benefits and costs of pool membership in a profit maximization model of an individual utility the study finds that coordination reflects the benefits and costs the degree to which other utilities are committed to the pool and the utility s behavior toward other utilities the results show that large firms are reluctant to pool with small firms and the us pools tend to be loosely coordinated policy implications are that regulatory commissions can be instrumental in coordination efforts and that interstate cooperation among regulatory authorities is needed to encourage pooling and obtain regional solutions to regional problems it is also important to reduce the transactional costs of pooling wherever possible 37 references 3 figures 1 table

the efficiency of electric power pools evidence from firing unit data 1986 the efficiency of electric power pools evidence from firing unit data applied economics vol 18 no 12 pp 1323 1334

technology international trade and pollution from us manufacturing pollution emitted by us manufacturers declined markedly over the past several decades even as real manufacturing output increased i first show that most of the decline in us manufacturing pollution has resulted from changing production processes technology rather than changes in the mix of goods produced i then show that increased net imports of polluting goods international trade accounts for only a small portion of the pollution reductions from the changing mix of goods together these two findings demonstrate that shifting polluting industries overseas explains only a minor part less than 10 percent of the cleanup of us manufacturing jel f18 l23 l60 o30 q52 q53

liberalisation and r d in network industries the case of the electricity industry abstract electricity sector liberalisation has coincided with a significant decline in r d spending this paper reviews the industrial organisation literature on r d and innovation to explore the likely causes of the decline in r d spending in the electricity sector meanwhile r d productivity and innovative outputs in utilities and equipment suppliers appear to have improved however a lasting decline in r d expenditure can have a negative long term effect on technological progress and innovation in the sector we conclude that the decline in r d could have been predicted from the literature we also discuss the need to reorient the post liberalisation technology policy

applied general equilibrium models of taxation and international trade an introduction and survey we wish to acknowledge the help of three referees and of john pencavel on several earlier drafts as well as the assistance of the modelers whose work is referred to in the paper they corrected our lack of understanding of their work and provided many other helpful comments excellent research and bibliographical assistance have been provided by debbie fretz radwan shaban and janet stotsky helpful comments have been made by charles ballard michael boskin lans bovenberg sylvester damus harvey galper glenn harrison gordon lenjosek jack mutti serena ng t n srinivasan charles stuart and eric toder the authors also acknowledgefinancial support from the national bureau of economic research the national science foundation international business machines and the social sciences and humanities research council ottawa canada

detecting earnings management a new approach this paper provides a new approach to test for accrual based earnings management our approach exploits the inherent property of accrual accounting that any accrual based earnings management in one period must reverse in another period if the researcher has priors concerning the timing of the reversal incorporating these priors can significantly improve the power and specification of tests for earnings management our results indicate that tests incorporating reversals increase test power by around 40 and provide a robust solution for mitigating model misspecification arising from correlated omitted variables

ethics in finance and accounting editorial introduction in light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice fairness and enhanced understanding and to improving their personal integrity this article written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior misbehaviors in finances and accounting professionalism in accounting ethical investing and corporate reporting we conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity human activity actually and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules but as a mutual and interdependent system of values human goods virtues and principles

technology gap global value chain and carbon intensity evidence from global manufacturing industries abstract the technological progress of a country may mean that its technology gap compared to the frontier has changed which will induce a change in its positioning in the global value chain and affect its carbon intensity using paten data input output database and the global value chain index we employ systematic generalized method of moments quantile regression with panel data and multilevel mediation analysis to measure empirically the impact of the technology gap on carbon intensity and positioning on the global value chain the empirical analysis shows that narrowing the technology gap will reduce significantly a country s carbon intensity further the effect of the technology gap on carbon intensity is more pronounced on industries with higher carbon intensity the mechanism test using the mediation effect model proves that the impact of the technology gap on carbon intensity is achieved by changing in the position of global value chain the findings suggest that a country s carbon intensity performance is not only affected by its own technological progress but also by global frontiers therefore a country should not only pay attention to its own technological progress but also to the development of global frontier technologies and speed of technological progress

truthfulness in accounting how to discriminate accounting manipulators from non manipulators accountants preparing information are in a position to manipulate the view of economic reality presented in such information to interested parties these manipulations can be regarded as morally reprehensible because they are not fair to users they involve in an unjust exercise of power and they tend to weaken the authority of accounting regulators this paper develops a model for detecting earnings manipulators using financial statements ratios in a sample of spanish listed companies our results provide evidence that accounting data can be extremely useful in detecting manipulators this approach can be used by a large category of users of accounting information among which we can cite stock exchange supervisors or investing professionals

the organizational economics of power brokers and centrally dispatched power pools introduction economic and the political or normative components of pool structure power pools are partnerships among corporately unaffiliated electric utility compansubsidy free cost allocation ies formed to realize cost savings through mutual cooperation there are many ways in solutions to the first organizational probwhich cooperation can reduce the collective lem are described as tight or loose fedcosts of the utilities in a region including joint eral energy regulatory commission 1981 system planning and emergency energy excramer and tschirhart 1983 in some rechange but one aspect of cooperation is comgions of the united states particularly in the mon to all power pools within a geographinortheast individual firms have yielded subcal region and at any given time some utilities stantial amounts of authority over their own typically experience higher short run margeneration facilities establishing computerginal costs than others owing to differences of controlled dispatching of the region s plants plant mix or instantaneous loads when the regardless of ownership to realize the greatest firms with low marginal costs increase their reduction in energy costs in other regions production and sell this economy energy to notably florida utilities have chosen to retain the higher cost firms the poolwide cost of their autonomy and institute an information generation is decreased ertclearinghouse or energy broker to facilitate owing to this opportunity for cost savings short run power transactions that reduce the the firms in a region are confronted with an pool s energy costs cohen 1982 no matter organizational problem having two compowhat organizational form is used a pool must nents 1 what should the firms do to realize also agree on a method to allocate the costs of the opportunity for savings and 2 how pooled production and experience has should the savings be allocated among the shown that the matter of determining an pool members the first question is technical equitable allocation of system costs can be solved by accounting for the costs of producone of the principal impediments to the fortion and the costs of transaction under altermation and maintenance of power pooling native organizational arrangements cramer agreements uri 1976 federal energy reguand tschirhart 1983 gegax and tschirhart latory commission 1981 1984 the second is normative and must be recently economists have taken an interanswered in terms of the notions of justice or est in the equity properties of alternative cost fairness held in common by pool members allocation mechanisms the equity concept the solution of the organizational problem employed in most studies is the notion of therefore requires a political economy subsidy freedom faulhaber 1975 taken framework for organizational analysis zald from cooperative game theory an allocation 1970 in which attention is given to both the of a power pool s generation costs is subsidy free if no individual or subgroup of pool mem

vertical economies in electric power evidence on integration and its alternatives abstract the restructuring of the electric power industry raises questions about the possible sacrifice of economies previously secured by integrating generation with downstream transmission and distribution this study utilizes a data set of u s electric utilities that differ widely in their degree of vertical integration in order to model estimate and measure such economies cost savings from vertical integration are found to be quite substantial for all but the smallest utilities and are largest for those that are nearly fully integrated the study goes on to investigate alternatives to sources of and determinants of vertical integration among other findings it appears that some holding companies achieve economies comparable to those from vertical integration

behavioral rationality in finance the case of dividends as the title suggests this paper attempts to get to the specifics of the behavioral rationality theme of this conference by focusing on an area in the main core of finance namely the demand and supply of dividends where by common consent the essentially rationalist paradigm of the field seems to be limping most noticeably important and pervasive behavior patterns on both the paying and the receiving ends have despairingly been written off as puzzles even by theorists as redoubtable as fischer black see esp his much cited 1976 article behaviorists have homed in on precisely these same dividendrelated soft spots in the current body of theory see esp shefrin and statman 1984 we seem to have in sum an ideal place to look for signs of an imminent paradigm shift in the behavioral direction of precisely the kind envisioned by some of the other contributors to this conference the dividend related difficulties and supposed anomalies at issue here are more than just the parochial concern of finance specialists the dividends seem a natural area in finance where the introduction of behavioral cognitive elements might help resolve long standing anomalies particularly the seeming failure of supply to adjust to taxinduced price penalties a closer look at the empirical record however particularly at evidence of responsiveness to major structural changes shows behavior of the aggregates to be less anomalous than conventional handwringing might suggest behavioral cognitive elements whatever they might contribute to the description of particular microdecisions do not appear to be essential adjuncts to the basic finance model in the major comparative static applications for which it was intended helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper have been received from nai fu chen jean marie gagnon gur huberman kose john james poterba and especially melvin reder

the welfare analysis of product innovations with an application to computed tomography scanners the main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric that is equating the magnitude of innovations with the welfare gains they generate this research design is applied to the case of computed tomography scanners a revolutionary innovation in medical technology the econometric procedure centers on the estimation of a discrete choice model the nested multinominal logit which yields the parameters of a utility function defined over the changing quality dimensions of the innovative product the estimated flow of social gains from innovation is used to compute a social rate of return to r d to explore the interrelation between innovation and diffusion and to trace the time profile of benefits and costs the latter suggesting the possible occurrence of technological cycles

risky debt investment incentives and reputation in a sequential equilibrium the agency relationship of corporate insiders and bondholders is modeled as a dynamic game with asymmetric information the incentive effect of risky debt on the investment policy of a levered firm is studied in this context in a sequential equilibrium of the model a concept of reputation arises endogenously resulting in a partial resolution of the classic agency problem of underinvestment the incentive of the firm to underinvest is curtailed by anticipation of favorable rating of its bonds by the market this anticipated pricing of debt is consistent with rational expectations pricing by a competitive bond market and is realized in equilibrium some empirical implications of the model for bond rating debt covenants and bond price response to investment announcements are explored

dynamic incentives and dual purpose accounting abstract ongoing employment relationships often give rise to implicit dynamic incentives we describe the implications of implicit incentives when firms use information about both an employee s past performance and his future productivity in a two period agency model we show that when an accounting system serves these dual objectives an employee s implicit incentives may be beneficial or detrimental to the firm as a consequence firms may prefer an accounting system that reports a single metric that combines information about past performance and future productivity over one that reports two distinct metrics one for each purpose

where should the line be drawn on insider trading ethics finance ethics have drawn increasing attention from both government regulators and academic researchers this paper addresses the issue of insider trading ethics previous studies on insider trading ethics have failed to provide convincing arguments and consistent results in particular the arguments against insider trading are based primarily on moral and philosophical grounds and lack empirical rigor this study intends to establish and examine the relationship between the ethical issue and economic issue of insider trading we argue that the ethics of insider trading is in essence an economic rather than a moral issue it is so far not clear to what extent insider trading may increase or decrease shareholders wealth until then we must take care to avoid over regulating insider trading

scale economies and capacity utilization the importance of relative fuel prices abstract several authors have directed attention to the importance of capacity utilization as an explanation for technical scale economies in the production of electricity we analyse 1981 us firing unit data for electric generating companies to determine the relationship between capacity utilization and scale economies we show that capacity utilization rates are functions of relative fuel prices and the mix of technology available to the company this suggests that the results of capacity utilization studies will be dependent on the relative fuel prices in the year s from which the data come even if the capital stock is exactly the same as a result ex ante companies do not have much flexibility in choosing an expected utilization rate associated with scale

fundamental information analysis fundamental analysis is aimed at determining the value of corporate securities by a careful examination of key value drivers such as earnings risk growth and competitive position in the context of such analysis we identify below a set of financial variables fundamentals claimed by analysts to be useful in security valuation and examine these claims by estimating the incremental value relevance of these variables over earnings our findings support the incremental value relevance of most of the identified fundamentals in fact for the 1980s the fundamentals add approximately 70 on average to the explanatory power of earnings with respect to excess returns we also show that the returns fundamentals relation is considerably strengthened when it is conditioned on macroeconomic variables thereby demonstrating the importance of a contextual capital market analysis for example several fundamentals that appear only weakly value relevant or even irrelevant in the unconditional analysis exhibit strong association with returns under specific economic conditions e g the accounts receivable and the provision for doubtful receivables signals during high inflation from a general examination of the role of fundamentals in security valuation we turn to the related issues of earnings persistence growth and the earnings response coefficient we hypothesize that the funda

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

tracing co2 emissions in global value chains abstract this paper integrates two lines of research into a unified conceptual framework trade in value added and embodied emissions in trade this allows both value added and emissions to be systematically traced at the country sector and bilateral levels through various routes in global value chains by combining value added and emissions accounting in a consistent way the potential environmental cost along global value chains can be estimated from different perspectives like production consumption and trade using this unified accounting framework we trace value added and co 2 emissions in global production and trade networks among 41 economies in 35 sectors from 1995 to 2009 based on the world input output database and show how they improve our understanding of the impacts of cross border production sharing on the environment

the role of ethics in finance the role of ethics in the financial community today seems to be limited to its role in financial economic theory contemporary financial economists view ethics in the context of objective wealth maximization in this context ethics functions primarily as a constraint on behavior this view is both illogical and ambiguous it is illogical because it may actually sanction unethical behavior if such behavior can be shown to lead to material gain it is ambiguous because throughout he 2000 year history of moral philosophy ethics has generally been viewed as a behavioral motivation not as a constraint if a conception of ethics as the fundamental objective in all human endeavor is disseminated in the financial community there is real hope that ethics will be accepted as both logically consistent and desirable

the measurement of vertical economies and the efficient structure of the electric utility industry in this article the concept of multiproduct cost economies is modified to the case of production at vertically related stages to derive an explicit and general measure of economies of vertical integration the utility of this measure is then demonstrated by estimating the vertical cost structure of the electric utility industry and by carrying out the calculations necessary to determine the magnitude of vertical economies in this industry the results provide empirical evidence of the existence of significant economies of vertical integration between the generation and transmission distribution stages of electricity supply copyright 1991 by blackwell publishing ltd

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

earnings quality research advances challenges and future research abstract this discussion makes several observations regarding the earnings quality research reviewed in dechow ge and schrand 2010 dgs i discuss some of the factors that led to the large growth in the earnings quality literature over the past two decades and note a few of the important contributions from this literature i also present what i view as several major challenges the literature faces as well as some avenues for future research in addition i discuss the difficulties in evaluating such a diverse body of literature and comment on dgs s major conclusions

market and political regulatory perspectives on the recent accounting scandals not surprisingly the recent accounting scandals look different when viewed from the perspectives of the political regulatory process and of the market for corporate governance and financial reporting we do not have the opportunity to observe a world in which either market or political regulatory processes operate independently and the events are recent and not well researched so untangling their separate effects is somewhat conjectural this paper offers conjectures on issues such as what caused the scandalous behavior why was there such a rash of accounting scandals at one time who killed arthur andersen the securities and exchange commission or the market did fraudulent accounting kill enron or just keep it alive for too long what is the social cost of financial reporting fraud does the united states in fact operate a principles based or a rules based accounting system was there market failure or was there regulatory failure or both was the sarbanes oxley act a political and regulatory overreaction does the united states follow an ineffective regulatory model

modeling energy demand some emerging issues abstract the proliferation of papers on energy demand modeling has offered different dimensions both in terms of methodology and estimation while this development has strengthened our understanding of the subject it may render the identification of gaps in the literature arduous for future research thus this study sets out to document some emerging issues that seem to have engendered new directions on energy demand modeling ranging from asymmetric price responses time varying demand parameters triangulation analyses to seasonal and climate change effects it is hoped that access to this review complemented with the previous ones will facilitate the comprehension of the extant literature as well as areas of future research in energy demand modeling

debt covenant violation and manipulation of accruals abstract this paper examines the abnormal accruals of a sample of 94 firms that reported debt covenant violations in annual reports we expect debt covenant restrictions to influence accounting choices in the year preceding and the year of violation time series and cross sectional models are used to estimate normal accruals in the year prior to violation both models indicate that abnormal total and working capital accruals are significantly positive in the year of violation there is evidence of positive abnormal working capital accruals after controlling for management changes and auditor going concern qualifications

patents learning by doing and market structure in the chemical processing industries for a sample of 24 chemical products count data models are used to evaluate firms propensity to patent and the link between patented process innovations and output prices the results show that process patenting was largely an outgrowth of learning by doing propensity to patent increased with firm size but decreased with market concentration reductions in output prices were strongly linked to learning by doing and more weakly to the rate of patenting producer firms appear to have been more successful than non producers in appropriating the value of patented process innovations

barter contracts in intertemporal energy exchange abstract we consider intertemporal energy exchange between independent power companies the incentive for the exchange comes from the diversity in the time variation of the marginal production costs so that there are differences in the relative marginal production costs between the companies the exchange is accomplished through a barter contract we present a model for the energy exchange and use a game theoretic approach to solve the bargaining problem between the power companies possible fairness properties of the cost allocation are discussed we present examples of barter contracts that are based on the nash bargaining solution

behavior of the firm under regulatory constraint a recent article by akira takayama discusses an earlier paper by harvey averch and leland l johnson on fair rate of return regulation of public utilities although takayama p 255 agrees with averch and johnson s general conclusions that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint on its rate of return he criticizes the a j argument as being confusing ambiguous and in error takayama then attempts a clarification and presents a new formulation which leads to the a j result quoted above this comment will discuss several of takayama s criticisms in addition to showing that the so called a j effect cannot be derived from the basic assumptions made by both averch and johnson and takayama 1 we will show that the very assumptions used to prove the a j effect by defining the region of x require an assumption that the a j effect exists in the first place

gaap versus the street an empirical assessment of two alternative definitions of earnings managers security analysts investors and the press rely increasingly on modified definitions of gaap net income known by such names as operating and pro forma earnings we document this phenomenon and discuss competing explanations for the recent rise in the use of such modified earnings numbers and implications for the interpretation of related accounting research our results show that over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and magnitude of cases where gaap and street earnings differ further there is a very strong bias toward the reporting of a street earnings number that exceeds the gaap earnings number we also show that the market response to the street earnings number has displaced gaap earnings as a primary determinant of stock prices finally through an analysis of earnings releases we show that management has taken a proactive role in defining and emphasizing the street number when communicating to analysts and investors

does urbanization lead to less energy use and lower co2 emissions a cross country analysis despite the relationship between urbanization energy use and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to differences in development stages or income levels most previous studies have implicitly assumed that the impact of urbanization is homogenous for all countries this assumption can be questionable as there are many characteristic differences among countries of different levels of affluence this paper investigates empirically the effects of urbanization on energy use and co2 emissions with consideration of the different development stages using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model and a balanced panel dataset of 99 countries over the period 1975 2005 the findings suggest that the impact of urbanization on energy use and emissions varies across the stages of development surprisingly urbanization decreases energy use in the low income group while it increases energy use in the middle and high income groups the impact of urbanization on emissions is positive for all the income groups but it is more pronounced in the middle income group than in the other income groups these novel findings not only help advance the existing literature but also can be of special interest to policy makers and urban planners

annual bonus schemes and the manipulation of earnings abstract using confidential data of executive specific short term bonus plans we investigate the extent to which executives manipulate earnings to maximize the present value of bonus plan payments as such this paper extends the work of healy 1985 like healy we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that managers manipulate earnings downwards when their bonuses are at their maximum unlike healy we find no evidence that managers manipulate earnings downwards when earnings are below the minimum necessary to receive any bonus we demonstrate that healy s results at the lower bound are likely to be induced by his methodology

ethics in finance ii the best way to approach professional ethics whether in the finance profession or elsewhere is from the perspective of virtue ethics theory this theory places particular emphasis on the character and motivations of an individual professional and on the organizational community in which the individual acts this article extends and clarifies the central argument of an earlier article on financial ethics several real world examples illustrate the role of virtue ethics in professionalism

what affects innovation more policy or policy uncertainty motivated by a theoretical model we examine for 43 countries whether it is policy or policy uncertainty that affects technological innovation more innovation activities measured by patent based proxies are not on average affected by which policy is in place innovation activities however drop significantly during times of policy uncertainty measured by national elections the drop is greater for more influential innovations citations in the right tail exploratory rather than exploitative innovations and for innovation intensive industries we use close presidential elections and ethnic fractionalization to address endogeneity concerns we uncover the mechanism underlying the main result by showing that the number of patenting inventors decreases with policy uncertainty political compromise we conclude encourages innovation

a note on purchased power adjustment clauses a recent series of papers has examined some of the economic effects of automatic fuel adjustment clauses on the behavior of the regulated firm see baron and debondt 1979 gallop and karlson 1978 cowing and stevenson 1979 atkinson and halvorsen 1980 isaac 1982 kaserman and tepel 1982 for the most part these papers have analyzed the implications of profit maximization under two alternative regulatory regimes one in which the firm s output price is determined by the terms of an adjustment clause formula and one in which it is not 1 today virtually all electric utilities are subject to some sort of fuel cost adjustment mechanism 2 since the specific formulas embodied in these mechanisms exhibit considerable variation across regulatory virtually all electric utilities are subject to some sort of fuel cost adjustment mechanism one way in which these formulas differ is in their treatment of purchased power this paper examines the effect that alternative treatments of purchased power have on the incentive of the regulated firm to minimize short run costs through its choice of purchased versus owngenerated power the theoretical model indicates that excluding purchased power from the formula creates an economic incentive to overutilize the firm s own generating equipment based on data for 113 privately owned u s electric utilities the empirical analysis confirms the theoretical prediction we gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the public policy research center and the public utilities research center at the university of florida and a grant from resources for the future without implicating them in what follows we also acknowledge the helpful comments on an earlier draft provided by john mayo and especially by two anonymous referees 1 the study by gollop and karlson 1978 is an exception they create an index that varies directly with the value of the adjustment clause formula to the firm 2 fuel adjustment clauses were in effect in 43 states in 1976 see isaac 1982 p 159

power pooling an exercise in industrial coordination interconnected public utilities can achieve cost savings more reliable service lower capacity requirements and optimum siting by closely coordinating generation and transmission transactions within a common pool they can also achieve seasonal diversity and economy of energy in their exchanges despite the advantages the costs of pooling arrangements inefficient allocations of benefits and government regulations have been serious disincentives the relative tightness of agreements in 17 power pools demonstrates that tightly coordinated pools generally experience the most benefits 20 references dck

moral hazard and adverse selection the question of financial structure this paper looks at the moral hazard and adverse selection problems confronting an entrepreneur offering securities to an uninformed but competitive financial market the adverse selection aspect of the problem is generated by the unobservable entrepreneur s ability to transform effort into value moral hazard arises because the investment decision is made subsequent to financing we consider the joint use of both debt and equity and characterize the equilibrium relation between capital structure and unobservable attributes it is shown that 1 investment and financing are not separable 2 there is an underinvestment problem for better firms and 3 simultaneous use of both debt and equity can resolve this difficulty we also establish a connection between expected terminal firm value and debt promised payment level and between share retention and standard deviation agency problems in corporate finance originated with the influential papers of jensen and meckling 11 myers 17 ross 21 and leland pyle 14 they show that the market imperfections induced by unobservable actions lack of contracting ability and information asymmetry generally lead to second best outcomes in which the distribution of corporate ownership is achieved only at significant cost these costs take the form of excessive perquisite consumption overinvestment underinvestment and incomplete diversification of personal investment portfolios moral hazard and adverse selection comprise two forms in which agency problems may take shape arrow 1 equates these two terms with hidden action and hidden information respectively moral hazard arises when the action undertaken by the agent is unobservable and has a differential value to the agent as compared to the principal adverse selection problems arise when the agent has more information than the principal the resolution of such difficulties has been explored in a number of contexts with both signals and contingent contracting mechanisms these definitions exclude certain agency problems in the delegation literature for which the preference incongruity results from a lack of precommitment rather than some exogenous feature of the model in corporate finance one would thus identify the jensen meckling paper with moral hazard because perquisites enter the insider s objective differently from outsiders while darrough is from columbia university and stoughton is from the university of california irvine the second author s research was partially supported by grant number 410 83 0786 r 1 from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada this paper was presented at the 1984 meetings of the western finance association in vancouver and at the 1985 european finance association meetings in bern we thank kose john and frans tempelaar for their comments at the meetings

a penny for your quotes patent citations and the value of innovations the use ofpatents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value and hence simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output the purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts the empirical analysis of a particular innovation computed tomography scanners indeed shows a close association between citation based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field moreover the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear increasing in the number of citations implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin as in previous studies simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous rd however here the association is within afield over time rather than cross sectional

the effect of ethical orientation and professional commitment on earnings management behavior the purpose of this study is twofold the first objective is to examine the impact of an individual s ethical ideology and level of professional commitment on the earnings management decision the second objective is to observe whether the presence of a personal benefit affects an individual s ethical orientation or professional commitment within the context of an opportunity to manage earnings using a sample of 375 undergraduate business majors our results suggest a significant relationship between an individual s ethical orientation and decision making further participants with higher levels of professional commitment seem to be less likely to engage in earnings management behavior and less likely to behave opportunistically these results have the potential to add to our understanding of certain behaviors in entry level personnel and should be of interest to managers practitioners academicians and researchers

driving forces of rapid co2 emissions growth a case of korea abstract this study aims to investigate korea s final demand structure and its impacts on co 2 emissions in order to reduce co 2 emissions and develop environmental policy directions based on the environmentally extended input output model this study adopts a two step approach 1 to estimate the embodied emissions and their intensities for 393 sectors induced by final demand and 2 to calculate the driving factors of emission growth between 2003 and 2011 and then evaluate the result by using structural decomposition analysis sda the findings of this study demonstrate that the impact of composition change in export with less embodied emission intensities tends to offset the increase in co 2 emission by the export scale growth the relatively low residential electricity price has resulted in the rapid growth of household electricity consumption and significantly contributed to emissions growth the result of sda indicates that korea s final demand behavior yielded high carbonization over the same period the findings suggest that korean government should promote exports in industries with less embedded co 2 in order to protect environments in addition emission information of each product and service should be provided for consumers to change their purchase patterns towards contributing to low carbon emissions as active players

conflicts of interest in financial intermediation the last years have seen a surge of scandals in financial intermediation this article argues that the agency structure inherent to most forms of financial intermediation gives rise to conflicts of interest though this does not excuse scandalous behavior it points out market imperfections there are four types of conflicts of interest personal individual personal organizational impersonal individual and finally impersonal organizational conflicts analyzing recent scandals we find that all four types of conflicts of interest prevail in financial intermediation

carbon dioxide emissions in the u s economy a structural decomposition analysis this paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of various influences on carbon dioxide emissions it incorporates methodological refinements of input output structural decomposition analysis which is the examination of economic change by means of a set of comparative static variations in key parameters of i o tables the analysis is performed using a two tiered klem model which allows for estimation of substitution and technological change effects within and between input aggregates the model is used to decompose the sources of change in co2 emissions in the u s over the 1972 82 timeframe using hybrid energy value tables for the initial and terminal years results show the significant effect of substitution within the energy sector and between energy and other inputs as the leading causes of the decline in carbon dioxide emissions

is technological change biased toward energy a multi sectoral analysis for the french economy abstract since the adoption and implementation of new technologies has an important influence on the structure and performance of the economy in both developed and developing countries many research papers are devoted to the technology economy nexus motivated by the fact that the impact of technical progress on the demand for different production factors may vary depending on the bias of the technological change in this paper by estimating a translog cost share system and using state space modeling technique we investigate to what extent the direction of technical change is biased toward energy and away from other factors by applying this methodology to the french economy for the period 1978 2006 the obtained results suggest that first technical change has a non neutral impact on factor demands second capital saving technical progress is present in the majority of the sectors studied third energy demand has increased in all sectors but electricity and gas these findings may have important policy implications for environmental and energy issues in france

the detection of earnings manipulation presented are a profile of a sample of earnings manipulators their distinguishing characteristics and a suggested model for detecting manipulation the model s variables are designed to capture either the financial statement distortions that can result from manipulation or preconditions that might prompt companies to engage in such activity the results suggest a systematic relationship between the probability of manipulation and some financial statement variables this evidence is consistent with the usefulness of accounting data in detecting manipulation and assessing the reliability of reported earnings the model identifies approximately half of the companies involved in earnings manipulation prior to public discovery because companies that are discovered manipulating earnings see their stocks plummet in value the model can be a useful screening device for investment professionals the screening results however require determination of whether the distortions in the financial statement numbers r

is shareholder wealth maximization immoral for those educated in modern business schools the justification for decisions made by financial professionals in business organizations has been supplied by financial economic theory broadly thi

a tale of two market failures technology and environmental policy abstract market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies these combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives and can be cost effectively harnessed through the use of economic incentive based policy in the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives while environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties a long term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success

what causes the change in energy demand in the economy the role of technological change this paper proposes a simple and theoretically clear approach to the estimation of technological change in a multisector general equilibrium framework this study employs the multiple calibration decomposition analysis mcda to evaluate technological change that is responsible for changes in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in the japanese economy in the oil crises period from 1970 to 1985 the mcda serves as an elementary way of separating structural change due to technological change from that due to price substitution effects capturing the interdependence among economic sectors the empirical result provides a better understanding of the effects on the economy of technological change in that significant period

the role of energy technology innovation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions a case study of canada abstract understanding the influence of energy technology innovation in reducing a country s greenhouse gas emissions requires a systematic review to characterize the existing system a comprehensive data review of available financing mechanisms and investments by government and industry is undertaken for the case of canada coupled with an organized examination of existing international federal and regional climate policies that advance innovation results indicate that investments from early research and development through to capital expenditures are heavily weighted towards fossil fuels though federal efforts to meet international commitments have been unsuccessful regions implementing high carbon fuel phase out renewable portfolio standards and feed in tariffs were found to be successful in reducing emissions financing for clean energy projects is readily available however there is no complete database available for investors to discover these opportunities to enhance clean energy innovation in canada and enable success in emissions reductions we suggest that investments from research and development to capital expenditures and regional policies should be aligned with federal commitments along with clear communication of available financing to attract clean energy investors our approach to a systematic review is broadly applicable to other regions where there is interest in understanding and improving the role of innovation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions particularly in countries with federalist political systems and large fossil fuel reserves

structural decomposition analysis of physical flows in the economy many environmental problems can be attributedto the extraction and emissions of physicalsubstances increasing our understanding of theeconomic and technological driving forcesbehind these physical flows can contribute tosolving the environmental problems related tothem the input output framework is a usefulsetting in which to integrate detailedinformation about economic structure andphysical flows in this article a specificmethod in input output analysis is reviewed namely structural decomposition analysis sda it is based on comparative static analysis which decomposes historical changes of a policyvariable into determinant effects sda has beenapplied for example to analyze the demand andtechnological driving forces of energy use co2 emissions and various other pollutantsand resources this article examines thetheoretical aspects of structuraldecomposition in particular those concerningphysical flows and environmental issues furthermore the article includes an extensivesurvey of empirical studies

the kyoto protocol empirical evidence of a hidden success abstract how effective was the kyoto protocol international environmental agreements iea have been on the rise over the past four decades however thus far their effectiveness is controversial in view of the conflicting results found in the related literature this paper addresses its effectiveness by utilizing for the first time the generalized synthetic control method gscm to compare the emissions of the industrialized countries with a no kyoto counterfactual scenario that represents the expected emissions in the absence of the protocol this method facilitates a robust comparison between treated and control countries as done by almer and winkler 2017 and account for the multiple treated units as done by grunewald and martinez zarzoso 2016 so as to capture the collective nature of the protocol results show that the protocol was successful in reducing the emissions of the ratifying countries approximately by 7 below the emissions expected under a no kyoto scenario confirming the importance of accounting for the collective nature of the agreement

a breed apart security analysts and herding behavior herding behavior occurs when security analysts ignore their private opinions and issue public forecasts that mimic the earnings forecasts of others joining the consensus provides cover for analysts reputations we question the ethics of this practice when the motive to protect one s reputation takes precedence over the forecast accuracy motive while seemingly predictable behavior from a self interested perspective herding behavior has subtle but long term ramifications for the efficient pricing of securities and the preservation of the public trust in the financial services profession we call upon each individual analyst as well as the profession to exercise the moral courage necessary to cultivate a climate of personal and public integrity personal resistance and pro active policies are prescribed as actions to assist analysts to become more cognizant of their motivations as well as to promote a more ethical professional context