Organizations & Markets

This paper lays out a comprehensive solution to the problem of accounting for claims based the performance of a firm's stock price. The accounting covers employee stock options, stock appreciation rights, put and call options, convertible debt and preferred stock, warrants, and other hybrid securities. This issue has vexed the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) who have approached the problem on a piecemeal basis, leading to inconsistent treatments of claims that in substance are very similar.

An unanswered question in the debate on public sector inefficiency is whether reforms other than government divestiture can effectively substitute for privatization. Using a 1981–1995 panel dataset of all public and private manufacturing establishments in Indonesia, we analyze whether public sector inefficiency is primarily due to agency-type problems or to the environment in which public sector enterprises operate, as measured by the soft budget constraint and the degree of internal and external competition.

Most models of how perceivers infer the widespread attitudes and qualities of social groups revolve around either the self (social projection, false consensus) or stereotypes (stereotyping). I suggest people rely on both of these inferential strategies, with perceived general similarity moderating their use, leading to increased levels of projection and decreased levels of stereotyping.

Several econometric studies have concluded that technical progress embodied in equipment is a major source of manufacturing productivity growth. Other research has suggested that, over the long run, growth in the U.S. economy's 'health output' has been at least as large as the growth in non-health goods and services. One important input in the production of health pharmaceuticals is even more R&D- intensive than equipment.

While recent research has emphasized the desirability of studying effects of changes in marginal tax rates on taxable income, broadly defined, there has been comparatively little analysis of effects of marginal tax rate changes on entrepreneurial entry. This margin is likely to be important both because of the likely greater elasticity of entrepreneurial decisions with respect to tax changes (relative to decisions about hours worked) and because of recent research linking entrepreneurship, mobility, and household wealth accumulation.

In this paper, we examine how people evaluate unusual objects and how they intuit whether others will like those objects. We focus on two predictions. First, we believe that an object's uniqueness is susceptible to framing by drawing attention toward or away from the object's unusualness. We expect such "uniqueness framing" interacts with needs for uniqueness (NFU): high NFU perceivers will like the same objects (e.g., neckties, names) more when asked to dwell on the object's uniqueness vs. typicality while low NFU perceivers will like them less.

Sometimes multiple tools may be used simultaneously or in succession in everyday mindreading. Yet surely we rely on somoe tools at some times more than others. The central question I wish to address here, and that I suggest is not well answered, is "Which tool is used when?" More complex and elegant answers to this question await us, but in the meantime I develop several claims in this chapter about which-tool-when contingencies.

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In earlier work we presented a mathematical exposition of a theory that demonstrated that mass privatization without institutions to limit asset-stripping may not lead to a demand for the rule of law. The present note makes the same argument in terms of simple diagrams. The central idea is that economic actions (to build value or strip assets) and political positions of individuals are interdependent.