The Use and Abuse of Special-Purpose Entities in Public Finance

States increasingly are raising financing indirectly through special-purpose entities (SPEs), variously referred to as authorities, special authorities, or public authorities. Notwithstanding their long history and increasingly widespread use, relatively little is known or has been written about these entities. This article examines state SPEs and their functions, comparing them to SPEs used in corporate finance. States, even more than corporations, use these entities to reduce financial transparency and avoid public scrutiny, seriously threatening the integrity of public finance. The article analyzes how regulation could be designed in order to control that threat while maintaining the legitimate financing benefits provided by these state entities

The Use and Abuse of Special-Purpose Entities in Public Finance

States increasingly are raising financing indirectly through special-purpose entities (SPEs), variously referred to as authorities, special authorities, or public authorities. Notwithstanding their long history and increasingly widespread use, relatively little is known or has been written about these entities. This article examines state SPEs and their functions, comparing them to SPEs used in corporate finance. States, even more than corporations, use these entities to reduce financial transparency and avoid public scrutiny, seriously threatening the integrity of public finance. The article analyzes how regulation could be designed in order to control that threat while maintaining the legitimate financing benefits provided by these state entities

Accounting for government guarantees: perspectives on fiscal transparency from four modes of accounting

Government guarantees are increasingly important as a policy instrument in public infrastructure investment and to assist the banking and financial sectors following the global financial crisis. This paper analyses how different modes of accounting characterize such guarantees in the contexts of public sector financial reporting, statistical accounting, budgeting and long-term fiscal projections. Guarantees are difficult to specify for accounting treatment and consistent conceptualization of liabilities. These difficulties make it attractive for governments to treat obligations as off-budget and off-balance sheet contingent liabilities, rather than recognize them in financial statements and statistical accounts. Miller and Power’s territorializing, mediating, adjudicating and subjectivizing roles of accounting are utilized to analyse the reporting of UK government guarantees. Provisioning for guarantees is complex in financial reporting statements and often absent in national accounts, a deficiency which Eurostat has attempted to address by devising the concept of standardized guarantees and by securing more disclosure of contingent liabilities. There is potential for future research especially where there is greater mediation between the four modes of government accounting

The Resurrection of the Duty to Inquire After Therasense v. Becton, Dickinson & Co.

Balancing a duty to a tribunal and a duty to a client can paralyze a lawyer. The task raises difficult questions about how to reconcile competing obligations as an advocate and as an officer of the court. Individuals licensed to prosecute patent applications must decide how to honor both their obligations to the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and their obligation to successfully prosecute patent applications. This burden can result in willful blindness, where the patent attorney or patent agent (“patent practitioner”) limits inquiry into information that may bar a patent application. The recent Federal Circuit opinion in Therasense may have eliminated the judicial “duty to inquire” doctrine that kept these obligations in balance. This Issue Brief argues that there is a need to protect against willful blindness and proposes a resurrection of the eliminated doctrines

The Resurrection of the Duty to Inquire After Therasense v. Becton, Dickinson & Co.

Balancing a duty to a tribunal and a duty to a client can paralyze a lawyer. The task raises difficult questions about how to reconcile competing obligations as an advocate and as an officer of the court. Individuals licensed to prosecute patent applications must decide how to honor both their obligations to the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and their obligation to successfully prosecute patent applications. This burden can result in willful blindness, where the patent attorney or patent agent (“patent practitioner”) limits inquiry into information that may bar a patent application. The recent Federal Circuit opinion in Therasense may have eliminated the judicial “duty to inquire” doctrine that kept these obligations in balance. This Issue Brief argues that there is a need to protect against willful blindness and proposes a resurrection of the eliminated doctrines

Autonomous and controlled motivational regulations for multiple health related behaviors: between- and within-participants analyses

Self-determination theory has been applied to the prediction of a number of health-related behaviors with self-determined or autonomous forms of motivation generally more effective in predicting health behavior than non-self-determined or controlled forms. Research has been confined to examining the motivational predictors in single health behaviors rather than comparing effects across multiple behaviors. The present study addressed this gap in the literature by testing the relative contribution of autonomous and controlling motivation to the prediction of a large number of health-related behaviors, and examining individual differences in self-determined motivation as a moderator of the effects of autonomous and controlling motivation on health behavior. Participants were undergraduate students (N = 140) who completed measures of autonomous and controlled motivational regulations and behavioral intention for 20 health-related behaviors at an initial occasion with follow-up behavioral measures taken four weeks later. Path analysis was used to test a process model for each behavior in which motivational regulations predicted behavior mediated by intentions. Some minor idiosyncratic findings aside, between-participants analyses revealed significant effects for autonomous motivational regulations on intentions and behavior across the 20 behaviors. Effects for controlled motivation on intentions and behavior were relatively modest by comparison. Intentions mediated the effect of autonomous motivation on behavior. Within-participants analyses were used to segregate the sample into individuals who based their intentions on autonomous motivation (autonomy-oriented) and controlled motivation (control-oriented). Replicating the between-participants path analyses for the process model in the autonomy- and control-oriented samples did not alter the relative effects of the motivational orientations on intention and behavior. Results provide evidence for consistent effects of autonomous motivation on intentions and behavior across multiple health-related behaviors with little evidence of moderation by individual differences. Findings have implications for the generalizability of proposed effects in self-determination theory and intentions as a mediator of distal motivational factors on health-related behavior