Community involvement lends legitimacy to firms’ social accounting

Sheila Killian and Philip O'Regan did a case study of Shell and its community reporting in North-West Irelan

Taxing thoughts: Ireland, tax competition and the cost of intellectual capital

peer-reviewedThis paper examines the impact of tax competition on the commodfication of ideas, and points towards a particular set of negative consequences that affect the developing world. As multinational business becomes increasingly independent of national borders, the power relationship between business and government has shifted from one in which governments imposed tax on business in return for the privilege of operating within its jurisdiction, to one in which governments distort their tax system to suit business, in the hope of enticing them to locate on their shores. The race to the bottom in terms of tax rates has been well-chronicled in studies such as Christensen et al (2004), and Murphy (2006) Countries which were successful at the first round of tax competition are now finding that tax rates alone will not hold the multinationals on which they have become so dependent. The economic growth associated with their earlier success has brought high operating and wage costs. Multinationals who have remained lightly rooted in the soil of these countries can easily move their manufacturing to cheaper, emerging economies, taking with them their coveted jobs and exports. In order to retain them, these first round winning countries are now encouraging multinationals to locate their research and development as well as their production facilities with them. They hope that this is a less mobile activity, less easily replicated in a developing country, and so will anchor the multinational firmly in their territory. In this new level of the tax competition game, incentives are given not only for gross production, but for the production of knowledge. As a consequence, knowledge itself becomes commodified, and intellectual capital widely defined and privatised. This means that ideas previously shared must now be bought, and products previously sold at a price determined by the local market may now only be sold if the market can support their original, patent-protected form. This paper tracks the development from the old to the new rules of tax competition, using the example of Ireland to illustrate the strategies adopted at each stage. The rational, self-serving response of multinationals is explored, and the immediate downstream effects for developing countries discussed. The writings of Michel Foucault are used to gain perspective on the idea of intellectual capital. Finally, the sustainability of the new form of tax competition is questioned, and some hypotheses are formed about the longterm consequences.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe

Heterogeneity in the Speed of Adjustment to Target Leverage: A UK Study

Responding to the need to address heterogeneity in the speed of adjustment (SOA) to target leverage in a manner that reflects the fractional nature of leverage, we estimate SOAs across sub-samples of UK firms using the Dynamic Panel Fractional estimator (DPF). Using firm risk as a categorising variable, we show that riskier firms tend to adjust to target leverage at a faster rate, suggesting opportunity costs of being away from target leverage are higher for riskier firms. We also demonstrate the bias in SOAs as estimated using a model that does not account for the fractional nature of leverage, and show that this bias can result in spurious inferences being made when comparing SOAs across sub-samples. Our results cast doubt on existing evidence relating to heterogeneity in SOAs of UK firms

Corporate social responsibility

With a Foreword by Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, Corporate Social Responsibility: A Guide, wth Irish Experiences by Sheila Killian explains the theory and explores the practice of CSR in an Irish context

"No accounting for these people”: Shell in Ireland and accounting language

Accounting lays claims to be the language of business: a clear, technical, unambiguous means of communication for decisions on investment and economic development. Accounting concepts have increasingly entered mainstream debate on issues affecting society at large. This makes the fairness and effectiveness of accounting as a mode of communication more important for social justice than ever before. In a contentious development, if the discussion is framed primarily in accounting terms, this may disenfranchise those parties to the dispute whose issues are not readily expressed in the common vocabulary of business. Their concerns may become invisible in the debate. If this happens, then accounting has failed as a means of communication, and that failure is non-neutral in that it favours those whose position is best supported by economic arguments. This paper explores this phenomenon using the case of a dispute between Royal Dutch Shell and a local community in Ireland concerning a gas refinery located in an environmentally sensitive area. The issues in conflict are complex and at times intangible. I explore how the limitations of accounting as a language blinded the protagonists to an understanding of each other’s concerns, marginalised the concerns of protestors from the public discourse, shifting power from objectors within the local community to those whose primary concern was the economic exploitation of natural resources. I argue that accounting failed as a mode of communication to progress a resolution of the dispute, and that this failure was both unnecessary, and systematic in its support of economic interests