Conferences: Winter, 2012

Causes and Consequences of Corporate Culture

An NBER Conference on the "Causes and Consequences of Corporate Culture" took place in Cambridge on December 8-9, 2011. Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago and NBER, and James Poterba, MIT and NBER, organized the conference. These papers were discussed:

• Serguey Braguinsky, Carnegie Mellon University, and Sergey V. Mityakov, Clemson University, "Foreign Corporations and the Culture of Transparency: Evidence from Russian Administrative Data"
• Yan-Leung Cheung and Aris Stouraitis, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Raghavendra Rau, University of Cambridge, "Which Firms Benefit from Bribes, and by How Much? Evidence from Corruption Cases Worldwide"
• Jason M. DeBacker, Department of the Treasury, and Bradley Heim and Anh Tran, Indiana University, "Importing Corruption Culture from Overseas: Evidence from Corporate Tax Evasion in the United States"
• Lee Biggerstaff and Andy Puckett, University of Tennessee, and David C. Cicero, University of Delaware, "Unethical Executives and Corporate Misbehavior"
• Robert Davidson, Georgetown University; Aiyesha Dey, University of Minnesota; and Abbie Smith, University of Chicago, "Executives' Off-The-Job Behavior, Corporate Culture, and Financial Reporting Risk"
• Dhananjay Nanda and Peter Wysocki, University of Miami School of Business, "The Relation between Trust and Accounting Quality"
• Robert G. Eccles and George Serafeim, Harvard University, and Ioannis Ioannou, London Business School, "The Impact of a Corporate Culture of Sustainability on Corporate Behavior and Performance"
• Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University and NBER; Raffaella Sadun, Harvard University and NBER; and John Van Reenen, London School of Economics and NBER, "The Organization of Firms across Countries"
• Mary Margaret Frank and Luann Lynch, University of Virginia; Sonja Olhoft Rego, Indiana University; and Rong Zhao, Drexel University, "Are Aggressive Reporting Practices Indicative of an Aggressive Corporate Culture?"
• Leonce Bargeron, Kenneth M. Lehn, and Jared Smith, University of Pittsburgh, "Corporate Culture and M&A Activity"
• Luigi Guiso, European University Institute; Paola Sapienza, Northwestern University and NBER; and Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago and NBER, "The Value of Corporate Values"

Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis

An NBER Conference on "Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis" took place at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy on December 12-13, 2011. Organizers Alberto Alesina of NBER and Harvard University and Francesco Giavazzi of NBER and Bocconi University chose these papers for discussion:

• Valerie A. Ramey, University of California at San Diego and NBER, "Government Spending and Private Activity"
• Alan J. Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko, University of California at Berkeley and NBER, "Fiscal Multipliers in Recession and Expansion" (NBER Working Paper No. 17447)
• Francesco Giavazzi, and Michael McMahon, University of Warwick, "The Household Effects of Government Spending"
• Mathias Trabandt, European Central Bank, and Harald Uhlig, University of Chicago and NBER, "How do Laffer Curves Differ Across Countries?"
• William Easterly, New York University and NBER, "The Role of Growth Slowdowns and Forecast Errors in Public Debt Crises"
• Richard Evans and Kerk Phillips, Brigham Young University, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Boston University and NBER, "Game Over: Quantifying and Simulating Unsustainable Fiscal Policy"
• Eric M. Leeper, Indiana University and NBER, and Todd B. Walker, Indiana University, "Perceptions and Misperceptions of Fiscal Inflation"
• Ruud de Mooij and Michael Keen, International Monetary Fund, "Tax Reform and Fiscal Policy"
• Pierre Cahuc, Ecole Polytechnique, and Stephane Carcillo, OECD, "Can Public Sector Wage Bills Be Reduced?"
• Axel H. Boersch-Supan, Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy and NBER, "Entitlement Reforms in Europe: Policy Mixes in the Current Pension Reform Process"
• Roberto Perotti, Universita' Bocconi and NBER, "The 'Austerity Myth': Gain without Pain?" (NBER Working Paper No. 17571)
• Alberto F. Alesina; Dorian Carloni, University of California, Berkeley; and Giampaolo Lecce, Bocconi University "The Electoral Effects of Large Fiscal Adjustments" (NBER Working Paper No. 17655)
• Charles Wyplosz, University of Geneva, "Fiscal Rules"

Thirteenth Annual Conference in India

On December 16-18, 2011 the NBER, along with India's National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), sponsored a meeting that included NBER researchers as well as economists from Indian universities, research institutions, and government departments. NBER Research Associates Abhijit Banerjee of MIT and Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago organized the conference jointly with Parthasarathi Shome of ICRIER.

The NBER participants, in addition to the organizers, were: Martin Feldstein, Mark Melitz, and Rohini Pande, Harvard University; Marianne Bertrand and Anil K Kashyap, University of Chicago's Booth School of Business; Anne O. Krueger, Johns Hopkins University; Rob Porter, Northwestern University; Karthik Muralidharan, University of California, San Diego; and Michael Woodford, Columbia University.

The topics discussed at the meeting included the prospects for global economic growth and macroeconomic adjustment in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the state of the Indian economy and strategies for continued economic development, environmental policy and climate change, and the role of public policies in health and education.

Standards, Patents, and Innovation

An NBER Conference on Standards, Patents, and Innovation, organized by Timothy Simcoe, NBER and Boston University, Ajay K. Agrawal, NBER and University of Toronto, and Stuart Graham, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, was held in Tucson, Arizona on January 20-21, 2012. These papers were discussed:

• Emek Basker, University of Missouri, "Raising the Barcode Scanner: Technology and Productivity in the Retail Sector"
• Henry R. Delcamp, Cerna, Mines ParisTech, and Aija Leiponen, Cornell University, "Innovating Standards through Informal Consortia: The Case of Wireless Telecommunications"
• Marco Ceccagnoli, Christopher Forman, and Wen Wen, Georgia Institute of Technology, "Patent Pools, Thickets, and the Open Source Software Entry by Start-Up Firms"
• Joseph A. Clougherty, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Michal Grajek, European School of Management and Technology, "International Standards and International Trade: Empirical Evidence from ISO 9000 Diffusion"
• Bernhard Ganglmair, University of Texas at Dallas, and Emanuele Tarantino, University of Bologna, "Patent Disclosure in Standard Setting"
• Kenneth Flamm, University of Texas at Austin, "A Tale of Two Standards: Patent Pools and Innovation in the Optical Disk Drive Industry"
• Catherine Tucker, MIT and NBER, "Patent Trolls and Technology Diffusion"
• Ryan L. Lampe, DePaul University, and Petra Moser, Stanford University and NBER, "Do Patent Pools Encourage Innovation? Evidence from 20 Industries in the 1930s"
• Hugo Hopenhayn, University of California at Los Angeles and NBER, and Matthew Mitchell, University of Toronto, "Rewarding Duopoly Innovators: The Price of Exclusivity"
• Bhaven Sampat and Scott Hemphill, Columbia University, "Weak Patents Are a Weak Deterrent: Patent Portfolios, the Orange Book Listing Standard, and Generic Entry in Pharmaceuticals"
• Fiona Murray, MIT, and Scott Stern, MIT and NBER, "Learning to Live with Patents: Evolving Norms in Response to Legal Institutional Change"

Economics of Digitization

An NBER Conference on the Economics of Digitization took place at Stanford University on February 24, 2012. NBER Research Associates Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School, and Scott Stern of MIT's Sloan School, organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

• Lesley Chiou, Occidental College, and Catherine Tucker, MIT and NBER, "Copyright, Digitization, and Aggregation"
• Monic Sun, Stanford University, and Feng Zhu, University of Southern California, "Ad Revenue and Content Commercialization: Evidence from Blogs"
• Joo Hee Oh, MIT, and Il-Horn Hann, University of Maryland, "Piracy Propagation of Information Goods: Demand and Supply-side Dynamics in P2P Networks"
• Susan Athey, Harvard University and NBER, and Markus Mobius, Iowa State University and NBER, "The Effect of Localization on News Consumption"
• Rachel Soloveichik and David Wasshausen, Bureau of Economic Analysis, "Copyright-Protected Assets in the National Accounts"
• Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT and NBER, and Joo Hee Oh, MIT, "The Attention Economy: Measuring the Value of Free Goods on the Internet"