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In the wake ofCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission(2010), the case that allowed corporate and union spending in elections, many Americans despaired over the corrosive influence that private and often anonymous money can have on political platforms, campaigns, and outcomes at the federal and state level. InMcComish v. Bennett(2011), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the matching funds feature of so-called \"Clean Elections\" public financing laws, but there has been no strong challenge to the constitutionality of public funding as such. InSubsidizing Democracy, Michael G. Miller considers the impact of state-level public election financing on political campaigns through the eyes of candidates. Miller's insights are drawn from survey data obtained from more than 1,000 candidates, elite interview testimony, and twenty years of election data. This book is therefore not only an effort to judge the effects of existing public election funding but also a study of elite behavior, campaign effects, and the structural factors that influence campaigns and voters. The presence of publicly funded candidates in elections, Miller reports, results in broad changes to the electoral system, including more interaction between candidates and the voting public and significantly higher voter participation. He presents evidence that by providing neophytes with resources that would have been unobtainable otherwise, subsidies effectively manufacture quality challengers. Miller describes how matching-funds provisions of Clean Elections laws were pervasively manipulated by candidates and parties and were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. A revealing book that will change the way we think about campaign funding,Subsidizing Democracyconcludes with an evaluation of existing proposals for future election policy in light of Miller's findings.

U.S. Department of State forwards overview of Election (1984); U.S. Department of State lists names of [Presidential candidates; Vice presidential candidates; Political parties] for the Election (1984); U.S. Department of State provides background information on [Political conditions; Elections; Reforms; Revolutionary Governing Junta] in El Salvador; U.S. Department of State provides statistics on Elections, Constituent Assembly in El Salvador (1982); U.S. Department of State provides statistics on Killings of Civilians; U.S. Department of State provides overview of campaign activities for Election (1984); U.S. Department of State provides information regarding Election (1984) [Decree 039; Public Campaign Financing Law; Decree 036; Electoral process; Constitution]; U.S. Department of State provides synopsis of events to occur on day of Election (1984); U.S. Department of State mentions role played by [Election observer delegations; U.S. Agency for International Development; Salvadoran armed forces] Election (1984); U.S. Department of State comments on importance of [Elections; Contadora Initiative]

We study corporate control tracing controlling shareholders for thousands of listed firms from 127 countries over 2004 to 2012. Government and family control is pervasive in civil-law countries. Blocks are commonplace, but less so in common-law countries. These patterns apply to large, medium, and small firms. In contrast, the development-control nexus is heterogeneous; strong for large but absent for small firms. Control correlates strongly with shareholder protection, the stringency of employment contracts and unions power. Conversely, the correlations with creditor rights, legal formalism, and entry regulation appear weak. These patterns support both legal origin and political theories of financial development.

This study examines whether penalties issued to Chinese listed companies by securities regulators for violations of corporate law affect the cost of debt, and the moderating role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) fulfillment on this relationship. Our sample consists of firms listed on Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2011 to 2017 and the data are collected from the announcements of China Securities Regulatory Commission. The findings are as follows: (1) punishment announcements by regulatory authorities increase the cost of debt; and (2) the effect of punishment announcements on the cost of debt is partially offset by prior CSR performance. These findings are shown to be robust. The reputation insurance effect of CSR is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises and in an institutional environment with low marketization, a weak legal environment, and low information transparency. The findings support the reputation insurance hypothesis of CSR and employ the cost of debt as a governance mechanism.

Private equity has rapidly enlarged its presence in the health care sector, expanding its investment targets from hospitals and nursing facilities to physician practices. The incursion of private equity is the latest manifestation of a long trend toward the corporatization and financialization of medicine. Private equity pools investments from large private investors to buy controlling stakes in companies through leveraged buyouts or similar arrangements that use the companies' own assets to finance debt. These investors seek to earn handsome profits by rapidly increasing revenues before selling off the investment. Private equity's incursion into health care is especially concerning. The drive for quick revenue generation threatens to increase costs, lower health care quality, and contribute to physician burnout and moral distress. These harms stem from market consolidation, overutilization and upcoding, constraints on physicians' clinical autonomy, and compromises in patient care. Policymakers attempting to counter these threats can barely keep up. Like a cloud of locusts, private equity moves so quickly that by the time lawmakers become aware of the problem and researchers study the effects, private equity has moved on to other investment targets. While it remains unclear whether private equity investment is fundamentally more threatening to health policy than other forms of acquisition and financial investment - whether by publicly traded companies, conglomerate health systems, or health insurers - private equity presents a heightened threat of commercialization. Even if private equity is not uniquely harmful, it is extremely adept at identifying and exploiting market failures and payment loopholes. The emphasis on short-term returns and exit, the heavy reliance on debt, and the insulation from professional and ethical norms make private equity investors more avid to exploit revenue opportunities than institutional repeat players. Thus, this article's central claim is that the influx of private equity into health care poses sufficient risks to warrant an immediate legal and policy response. Public policy should primarily target market failures and payment loopholes and only secondarily curb private equity investment per se. The good news is that we already have many tools under federal and state law with the potential to address the harms of commercialization. These can be used or sharpened to address the particular concerns raised by private equity's incursion into physician markets. Key tools include antitrust oversight, fraud and abuse enforcement, and state laws regulating the corporate practice of medicine and the terms of physician employment. In some instances, legislative or regulatory action may be needed to adapt existing laws. In other instances, new laws may be needed to close payment loopholes or correct market distortions. A leading example is the recent 'No Surprises Act', which curtails surprise outof-network medical billing. While the article lays out a roadmap for additional legal and policy actions to protect the health system from the acute risks of private equity, these are patches rather than systemic solutions. If these patches fail to stave off the incessant march toward commercialization of health care, we may see renewed calls to fundamentally rethink the market orientation of the US health system.

As a result of business environment reforms in China’s Hangzou, the cost of business has reduced, the confidence of Hangzhou enterprises has survived the COVID-19 outbreak, and foreign investment continues to increase. Nevertheless, Hangzhou’s business environment has shortcomings, such as insufficient technology, talent, and intelligent infrastructure. Two unresolved questions persist: (i) Has the smart business environment stimulated corporate investment by reducing system costs and boosting corporate confidence? (ii) How do the commercial climate’s shortcomings impact the relationship between the intelligent business environment and business costs/confidence? We examined the impact of a local smart business environment on the corporate investment scale in Hangzhou using factor analysis, cluster analysis, linear regression, and path analyses of data from 297 firm managers. Smart governance improved public administration, financing, and rule of law. The business environment promoted investment by increasing business confidence and decreasing institutional costs. Weak intelligent property protection and legal fairness hindered the positive influence of smart governance on business confidence and system costs. This is the first study combining business environment, smart city, and smart governance concepts to analyze the influence of local smart business environments on business confidence, institutional costs, and investment. Our conclusion on the limitation effect of intelligent business environment on enterprise investment attempts to inspire further research on the intersection of business environments and smart cities. The law of intelligent business environment attracting investment obtained in the context of China, the largest developing country with diversified economic development, is of great significance for other developing countries. Countries can attract investment and promote economic development through intelligent governance. Developing countries should construct smart service platforms, coordinate supervision of public credit, reduce financing constraint, construct a government under the rule of law, improve the quality of land management, and protect intellectual property rights.

This study used China’s accelerated depreciation policy (2014–2015) as an exogenous shock to examine the impact of tax incentives on firm financing structures. Based on data from China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2017, we estimated a difference-in-differences model and found that the accelerated depreciation policy increased firms’ liability–asset ratio. Moreover, this rise was mainly seen in firms’ current liability–asset ratio (i.e., short-term leverage), while long-term leverage remained stable, which shortened firms’ debt maturity. The mechanism exploration showed that the accelerated depreciation policy stimulated fixed asset investment, and this investment increase was mainly financed by short-term debt, leading to greater maturity mismatch between firm assets and liabilities. Further heterogeneity analysis showed that the observed rise in short-term leverage was more serious among firms that were less likely to be allocated long-term credit from banks, including small-sized firms and those with a low share of tangible assets.

Firms’ innovative activities can be sensitive to public policies that affect the availability of capital. In this paper, we investigate the effects of regional and temporal variation in U.S. personal bankruptcy laws on firms’ innovative activities. We find that bankruptcy laws that provide stronger debtor protection decrease the number of patents produced by small firms. Stronger debtor protection also decreases the average quality, and variance in quality, of firms’ patents. We find evidence that the negative effect of stronger debtor protection on experimentation and innovation may be due to the decreased availability of external financing in response to stronger debtor rights, an effect amplified in industries with a high dependence on external financing. Hence, while it is typically assumed that stronger debtor protection encourages innovation by reducing the cost of failure for innovators, we show that it can instead dampen innovative activities by tightening the availability of external financing to innovative firms. This paper was accepted by David Hsu, entrepreneurship and innovation .

This paper shows that managers are influenced by their social peers when making corporate policy decisions. Using biographical information about executives and directors of U.S. public companies, we define social ties from current and past employment, education, and other activities. We find that more connections two companies share with each other, more similar their capital investments are. To address endogeneity concerns, we find that companies invest less similarly when an individual connecting them dies. The results extend to other corporate finance policies. Furthermore, central companies in the social network invest in a less idiosyncratic way and exhibit better economic performance. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance .

We examine how creditor rights affect the trade-off between non-debt and debt tax shields. Using four bankruptcy reforms and a panel of private and public firms from Italy, we show that laws empowering creditors reduce tax avoidance and increase debt financing, consistent with firms substituting non-debt tax shields with debt tax shields. We corroborate the validity of our findings using a panel of public firms across 33 countries. Additionally, we document that the impact of creditor protection laws is mitigated by tax system characteristics, which significantly reduce the incentives to substitute tax avoidance with debt.