7,407 research outputs found
Philanthropy under the Microscope: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Small Nonprofits Conducting Financial Statement Audits
External audits are conducted by Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and ensure the reliability of financial reporting and internal controls of a given organization. Publicly traded corporations are required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to conduct a yearly external audit. In addition, some large or government funded not-for-profits must produce audited financial statements upon request. If an organization is not required to conduct an audit, it may still choose to undergo an independent audit. Among those that may voluntarily conduct an audit are small nonprofit organizations. Due to the unique characteristics of small nonprofits, some elements of an external audit may not be feasible; however, there are still advantages provided by this independent evaluation. The decision to conduct or not conduct a voluntary external audit requires the analysis of the engagement’s costs and benefits. The intent of this paper is to present a cost-benefit analysis related to the observable costs, expenses and advantages of conducting an audit within a nonprofit organization
Entry, Exit and Investment-Specific Technical Change, Second Version
Using European data, this paper finds that (1) industry entry and exit rates are positively related to industry rates of investment-specific technical change (ISTC); (2) the sensitivity of industry entry and exit rates to cross-country differences in entry costs depends on industry rates of ISTC. The paper constructs a general equilibrium model in which the rate of ISTC varies across industries and new investment-specific technologies can be introduced by entrants or by incumbents. In the calibrated model, equilibrium behavior is consistent with stylized facts (1) and (2), provided the cost of technology adoption is increasing in the rate of ISTC.Entry, exit, turnover, investment-specific technical change, entry costs, vintage capital, embodied technical change, lumpy investment
Extensions of system signatures to dependent lifetimes: Explicit expressions and interpretations
The concept of system signature was introduced by Samaniego for systems whose
components have i.i.d. lifetimes. We consider its extension to the continuous
dependent case and give an explicit expression for this extension as a
difference of weighted means of the structure function values. We then derive a
formula for the computation of the coefficients of these weighted means in the
special case of independent continuous lifetimes. Finally, we interpret this
extended concept of signature through a natural least squares approximation
problem
A Nash-Moser theorem for singular evolution equations. Application to the Serre and Green-Naghdi equations
We study the well-posedness of the initial value problem for a wide class of
singular evolution equations. We prove a general well-posedness theorem under
three assumptions easy to check: the first controls the singular part of the
equation, the second the behavior of the nonlinearities, and the third one
assumes that an energy estimate can be found for the linearized system. We
allow losses of derivatives in this energy estimate and therefore construct a
solution by a Nash-Moser iterative scheme. As an application to this general
theorem, we prove the well-posedness of the Serre and Green-Naghdi equation and
discuss the problem of their validity as asymptotic models for the water-waves
equations
A Conversation with George G. Roussas
George G. Roussas was born in the city of Marmara in central Greece, on June
29, 1933. He received a B.A. with high honors in Mathematics from the
University of Athens in 1956, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of
California, Berkeley, in 1964. In 1964--1966, he served as Assistant Professor
of Mathematics at the California State University, San Jose, and he was a
faculty member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, in 1966--1976, starting as an Assistant Professor in 1966, becoming a
Professor in 1972. He was a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Director of
the Laboratory of Applied Mathematics at the University of Patras, Greece, in
1972--1984. He was elected Dean of the School of Physical and Mathematical
Sciences at the University of Patras in 1978, and Chancellor of the university
in 1981. He served for about three years as Vice President-Academic Affairs of
the then new University of Crete, Greece, in 1981--1985. In 1984, he was a
Visiting Professor in the Intercollege Division of Statistics at the University
of California, Davis, and he was appointed Professor, Associate Dean and Chair
of the Graduate Group in Statistics in the same university in 1985; he served
in the two administrative capacities in 1985--1999. He is an elected member of
the International Statistical Institute since 1974, a Fellow of the Royal
Statistical Society since 1975, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics since 1983, and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association
since 1986. He served as a member of the Council of the Hellenic Mathematical
Society, and as President of the Balkan Union of Mathematicians.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS299A the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Does Employment Protection Inhibit Technical Diffusion?
I ask whether differences in labor market performance between the US and Europe can be attributed to an interaction between employment protection legislation (EPL) and an acceleration in the rate of capital-embodied technical change associated with the advent of information technologies. I find that EPL is associated with a slowing in the diffusion of new technologies. I also find that an acceleration in the rate of embodied technical change has a negligible effect on employment in an undistorted economy. In addition, in the presence of EPL, employment decreases in the long run after such a shockembodiment, vintage capital, dismissal costs, employment protection, information technology
- …