Proprietary costs: Why do R&D-active firms choose single-lender financing?

We examine whether proprietary costs drive R&D-active firms’ choice of private loan structure. We find that R&D-active firms are more likely to choose single-lender over multi-lender private loan financing. This is consistent with the theory that high-ability entrepreneurs protect their proprietary knowledge by communicating it to a single lender while disclosing generic and less sensitive information to the public. This propensity, however, significantly decreases after the enactment of the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA), which accelerated public disclosure of firms’ patent details in filings with the US Patent and Trademark Office. This accelerated public disclosure potentially caused R&D information to spill over to rivals, increasing the proprietary costs of single-lender borrowers. AIPA enactment also increased the spread on R&D-active firms’ single-lender loans. These findings contribute to the voluntary disclosure and financing-choice literature by linking R&D-active firms’ choice of single-lender financing to the proprietary costs of public disclosure.

Transparency in Spanish archive and library websites: A comparative study

Transparency is a principle that has attracted a good deal of international attention in recent years, especially in connection with combatting corruption and building open, participatory governments accountable to their citizens. Public libraries and archives are not only information suppliers, but also public bodies obliged to provide the citizenry with information about their own governance and activities. Those obligations are laid down in Spanish Act 19/2013 of 29 December on Transparency, Access to Public Information and Good Governance (Spanish initials LTAIPBG). This article describes the results of applying a transparency measuring tool, TransPa_BA, to 106 regionally administered national historic archives and national public libraries. The tool, in turn the result of a research project, includes 20 indicators to measure active public disclosure by public libraries and 22 by archives in keeping with the provisions of the aforementioned Act. The indicators and their respective parameters (visibility, content, form, accessibility, reusability, dating and currency) provide guidelines to enable these institutions to comply with transparency and accountability requirements by furnishing society in general and their stakeholders in particular with information on their activities and performance in key areas. Further to the findings, the target institutions have made hesitant attempts to enhance transparency with respect to earlier inquiries. Public libraries are observed to be more active than archives, although the transparency scores obtained are low due to the failure to provide information on some indicators as well as on parameters such as dating and reusability. Both types of institution have a long road ahead in the pursuit of greater transparency.

Social Control through Public Disclosure on Tax: A New Approach to Enhance Tax Compliance

The government always strives to boost tax revenue with various instruments and approaches, but the results are often not as expected. Of the various strategies, the tax payer- behavior approach is still rarely applied. The re-emergence of the issue of tax data publication through Pandora Paper after previously being surprised with the Panama Paper, is the right momentum to look back at tax transparency with the naming and shaming instrument. But before that, research is needed on whether the application of this approach is suitable to be applied in Indonesian society with a heterogeneous socio-cultural character. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the level of social control of the community as an initial capital in implementing the public disclosure on tax in an effort to increase tax compliance. Quantitative approach was conducted with online survey as data collection technique. As the result, Indonesian people have strong social control, especially with the existence of social media. The majority of respondents support if the publication of tax data is applied. Public disclosure on tax has a significant role in shaping tax morals.

Do Firms Redact Information from Material Contracts to Conceal Bad News?

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allows firms to redact information from material contracts by submitting confidential treatment requests, if redacted information is not material and would cause competitive harm upon public disclosure. This study examines whether managers use confidential treatment requests to conceal bad news. We show that confidential treatment requests are positively associated with residual short interest, a proxy for managers’ private negative information. This positive association is more pronounced for firms with lower litigation risk, higher executive equity incentives, and lower external monitoring. Confidential treatment requests filed by firms with higher residual short interests are associated with higher stock price crash risk and poorer future performance. Collectively, our results suggest that managers redact information from material contracts to conceal bad news.

Evidence Evaluation Relating to the Public Disclosure of the Community Design on the Internet

<p>The issue of public disclosure of the design is regulated in Article 7 of Council Regulation (EC) no. 6/2002 of 12 December 2001 on Community designs. Pursuant to this provision, a design shall be deemed to have been made available to the public if it has been published following registration or otherwise, or exhibited, used in trade or otherwise disclosed, except cases where these events could not reasonably have become known in the normal course of business to the circles specialized in the sector concerned, operating within the Community. The design is made available to the public in a situation where these events could be known in the course of normal professional activity in an environment specialized in a given sector, operating within the Community. The list of methods of public disclosure contained in Article 7 of Council Regulation (EC) no. 6/2002 is not a closed catalog. Disclosure of the earlier design on the Internet causes difficulties in assessing whether it meets the conditions required for public access, i.e. whether the design could reasonably have become known in the normal course of business to the circles specialized in the sector concerned. Moreover, the disclosure of the design on the Internet generates problems of evidence related to proving the precise date of its disclosure to the public. The article analyzes the jurisprudence of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and European jurisprudence in recent years. In particular, attention was paid to the issues of evidence necessary to recognize that the Community design was made available on the Internet. The article concerns a topic that is current both among representatives of the doctrine and in jurisprudence (Polish and European). It has theoretical and practical significance, because the issue of evidence submitted by the parties on the fact that an industrial design is made available to the public is very often a problem at the stage of court proceedings.</p>

Trust upset: Redefining the terms of trust in maintaining exchange relations

In contractual relations, malfeasance is subject to sanction by formal institutions. Trust is widely held to be an informal basis of non-contractual exchange, in which breaches of trust lead to exposure, resulting in the perpetrator’s loss of reputation and likely exclusion from future exchanges. The present article, on the other hand, shows that breaches of trust may lead to neither of these outcomes. Interview data reported here show that individuals who experience violations of agreement may develop coping strategies that do not include exposure of betrayal, confronting the trust-breaker, or retaliation. A contribution of the present article is to show that these differences can be conceptualized as involving two possible strategies by the betrayed party: one involving retaliation, directed to public disclosure of the betrayer’s unreliability and possible expulsion from future exchanges; the other is self-management, in which betrayal leads to the betrayed modifying their expectations and behaviour. A second contribution is to show how trust may be sociologically understood as a continuous process, requiring renegotiation, rearticulation, and even redefinition, rather than as a resolved and final commitment.

Financial and Non-financial Conflicts of Interest Among the Japanese Government Advisory Board Members Concerning Coronavirus Disease 2019

ObjectivesThis study aimed to assess the extent of conflicts of interest among the Japanese government COVID-19 advisory board members and elucidate the accuracy of conflicts of interest (COI) disclosure and management strategies.MethodsUsing the payment data from all 79 pharmaceutical companies in Japan between 2017 and 2018 and direct research grants from the Japanese government between 2019 and 2020, we evaluated the extent of financial and non-financial COI among all 20 Japanese government COVID-19 advisory board members.ResultsJapanese government COVID-19 advisory board members were predominantly male (75.0%) and physicians (50.0%). Between 2019 and 2020, two members (10.0%) received a total of $819,244 in government research funding. Another five members (25.0%) received $419,725 in payments, including $223,183 in personal fees, from 28 pharmaceutical companies between 2017 and 2018. The average value of the pharmaceutical payments was $20,986 (standard deviation: $81,762). Further, neither the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare nor the Japanese Cabinet Secretariat disclosed financial or non-financial COI with industry. Further, the government and had no policies for managing COI among advisory board members.ConclusionsThis study found that the Japanese government COVID-19 advisory board had financial and non-financial COI with pharmaceutical companies and the government. Further, there were no rigorous COI management strategies for the COVID-19 advisory board members. Any government must ensure the independence of scientific advisory boards by implementing more rigorous and transparent management strategies that require the declaration and public disclosure of all COI.

Evaluación de la transparencia en los archivos históricos provinciales

Se presentan los resultados de transparencia obtenidos mediante la aplicación TransPa_BA en las páginas web de 52 archivos históricos provinciales españoles, además del Real y General de Navarra. Esta herramienta se basa y utiliza parámetros de la Metodología de Evaluación y Seguimiento de la Transparencia (MESTA). A partir de esta, se proponen 22 indicadores para la medición de la publicidad activa en los archivos que atienden a los requerimientos de la Ley de Transparencia. Los indicadores y sus correspondientes atributos (forma, accesibilidad, reutilización, datación y la actualización) ofrecen un marco para que los archivos aumenten en transparencia rindiendo cuentas de su actividad y principales resultados a la sociedad y, en particular, a sus grupos de interés. Los resultados obtenidos indican que, aunque hay ejemplos de buenas prácticas, la información relacionada con la transparencia es escasa. Las mejores se relacionan con el cuadro de clasificación, la colaboración y cooperación y las estadísticas. Es abundante la información que figura enmascarada en otras categorías y dispersa en el sitio web. Las mejoras, por tanto, deben realizarse no solo a nivel de publicidad activa sino de organización de la información, ya que ni la visibilidad ni la accesibilidad a esta información son las más idóneas. Se espera que este trabajo promueva un aprendizaje colectivo y contribuya a que se vaya incorporando gradualmente información que refuerce la transparencia activa de estas instituciones documentales o, si fuera el caso, eliminar elementos redundantes. The article discusses the findings on website transparency for 52 Spanish provincial historic archives and the Archivo Real y General de Navarra [royal and general archive of the province of Navarra], delivered by TransPa_BA software. This tool is based on and uses the parameters defined in the Metodología de Evaluación y Seguimiento de la Transparencia [transparency assessment and monitoring method, Spanish initials, MESTA]. A total of 22 indicators are proposed to measure active public disclosure by archives in keeping with the provisions of the national Transparency Act. The indicators and their respective parameters (form, reusability, dating and currency) constitute guidelines to enable archives to enhance transparency and accountability, reporting their activities and performance in key areas to society in general and their stakeholders in particular. Although the findings reveal some good practices, scant transparency-related information is provided. The improvements suggested refer not only to public disclosure, but also to how information is arranged, for neither visibility nor accessibility is optimal. This study will hopefully encourage collective learning, contributing to the gradual inclusion of more transparent information and the exclusion of any redundant elements present on these institutions’ websites.