The Decentering of the Global Firm

This paper describes recent changes in the relationship between firms and nation states. Firms are typically linked to the nation in which they began and are considered to have fixed national identities. While firms have reallocated various activities around the world in response to value creation opportunities, they have largely retained their national identities and their headquarter activities remained bundled in their home countries. This characterization is increasingly tenuous. Firms are redefining their homes by unbundling their headquarters functions and reallocating them opportunistically across nations. A firm's legal home, its financial home and its homes for managerial talent no longer need to be colocated and, consequently, the idea of firms as national actors rooted in their home countries is rapidly becoming outdated. The implications for policy makers and researchers are outlined.

EAST AND WEST, THE TWAIN SHALL MEET:A Cross-cultural Perspective on Higher Education

Both India and the U.S. were once colonies of Great Britain, the world''s first but short-lived global power. And both India and the U.S. ultimately threw off the imperialist yoke. Despite independence, both democracies inherited certain things from Great Britain. Whereas India inherited the English language, parliamentary governance, socialism, and, last but not least, the English educational system; the U.S. inherited the English language, the Judeo-Christian value system, and the .white. racial identity. The English educational system of India was augmented by Soviet-style central planning which resulted in several .Institutes. that have come to dominate higher education in India. Despite being ethnically closer to Great Britain, the U.S. evolved its own system of political governance, and, more important, its own educational system. While American higher education has come to define the .gold standard. for higher education, India still lags considerably behind in higher education. This paper seeks to explain certain cultural differences that may have contributed to this imbalance between the Indian and American higher education systems.

Contemporary lessons in Economic Philosophy drawn from two recent Indian Films

The aim of this paper is to derive some important lessons in economic philosophy from two recent Indian films. The two films, Mani Ratnam.s Guru (2007) and Madhur Bhandarkar.s Corporate (2006), are explicitly about the world of business and the people who inhabit it. The former film is not only a history lesson about the political and economic environment in India during the first 40 years after India.s independence, but is also a celebration of Adam Smith.s philosophy and, in general, capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit. At the same time, it brings to the fore the possibly misguided economic policies adopted by India during the first few decades after independence. .Corporate., on the other hand, complements .Guru., in the sense that it highlights the consequences borne by powerless individuals when corporations have profit as their sole aim and are willing to achieve them by hook or by crook. Also, highlighted in .Corporate. is how disastrous events can occur when politics and big business collude to undermine the interests of the working class. Thus, .Corporate. provides a case for Keynesian economics. The role of gender and family in economics is also explored in this film, as is the role and importance of ethics in economics. Last but not least, the limitations of rationality and rational behaviour are highlighted in .Corporate.. Classical economics assumes that people are perfectly rational in their decision-making. This assumption has been challenged by newer economic theories, and is also challenged by .Corporate..

Corporate Tax Avoidance and Firm Value

How do investors value managerial actions designed solely to minimize corporate tax obligations? Using a framework in which managers' tax sheltering decisions are related to their ability to divert value, this paper predicts that the effect of tax avoidance on firm value should vary systematically with the strength of firm governance institutions. The empirical results indicate that the average effect of tax avoidance on firm value is not significantly different from zero; however, the effect is positive for well-governed firms as predicted. Coefficient estimates are consistent with an expected life of five years for the devices that generate these tax savings for well-governed firms. Alternative explanations for the dependence of the valuation of the tax avoidance measure on firm governance do not appear to be consistent with the empirical results. The findings indicate that the simple view of corporate tax avoidance as a transfer of resources from the state to shareholders is incomplete, given the agency problems characterizing shareholder-manager relations.

Unbiased Boolean analysis of public gene expression data for cell cycle gene identification.

Cell proliferation is essential for the development and maintenance of all organisms and is dysregulated in cancer. Using synchronized cells progressing through the cell cycle, pioneering microarray studies defined cell cycle genes based on cyclic variation in their expression. However, the concordance of the small number of synchronized cell studies has been limited, leading to discrepancies in definition of the transcriptionally regulated set of cell cycle genes within and between species. Here we present an informatics approach based on Boolean logic to identify cell cycle genes. This approach used the vast array of publicly available gene expression data sets to query similarity to CCNB1, which encodes the cyclin subunit of the Cdk1-cyclin B complex that triggers the G2-to-M transition. In addition to highlighting conservation of cell cycle genes across large evolutionary distances, this approach identified contexts where well-studied genes known to act during the cell cycle are expressed and potentially acting in nondivision contexts. An accessible web platform enables a detailed exploration of the cell cycle gene lists generated using the Boolean logic approach. The methods employed are straightforward to extend to processes other than the cell cycle

Institutional Tax Clienteles and Payout Policy

This paper employs heterogeneity in institutional shareholder tax characteristics to identify the relationship between firm payout policy and tax incentives. Analysis of a panel of firms matched with the tax characteristics of the clients of their institutional shareholders indicates that "dividend-averse" institutions are significantly less likely to hold shares in firms with larger dividend payouts. This relationship between the tax preferences of institutional shareholders and firm payout policy could reflect dividend-averse institutions gravitating to low dividend paying firms or managers adapting their payout policies to the interests of their institutional shareholders. Evidence is provided that both effects are operative. Instrumental variables analysis indicates that plausibly exogenous changes in payout policy result in shifting institutional ownership patterns. Similarly, exogenous changes in the tax code indicate that as the tax cost of paying dividends changes, managers alter their dividend policy to serve their institutional shareholders.

Taxes and Portfolio Choice: Evidence from JGTRRA's Treatment of International Dividends

This paper investigates how taxes influence portfolio choices by exploring the response to the distinctive treatment of foreign dividends in the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA). JGTRRA lowered the dividend tax rate to 15% for American equities and extended this tax relief only to foreign corporations from a subset of countries. This paper uses a difference-in-difference analysis that compares US equity holdings in affected and unaffected countries. The international investment responses to JGTRRA were substantial and imply an elasticity of asset holdings with respect to taxes of -1.6. This effect cannot be explained by several potential alternative hypotheses, including differential changes to the preferences of American investors, differential changes in investment opportunities, differential time trends in investment or changed tax evasion behavior.