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Employee reporting dishonesty is a significant area of concern for firms. In this study, we investigate how providing information about their prosocial actions, such as organizational citizenship behaviors, affects the extent of employee reporting dishonesty. We distinguish prosocial actions whose welfare effects are mutually beneficial (i.e., that help others and the employee), which are common in business practice, from those that are selfless in nature (i.e., that help others at a personal cost to the employee). In addition to examining the effect of the type of prosocial action on the extent of employee reporting dishonesty, we also examine the effect of construal (the manner in which individuals perceive and interpret the action). Using an experiment, we find that participants with high moral identity are less dishonest when they describe their selfless prosocial actions than when they describe their mutually beneficial prosocial actions, but only when they abstractly construe this information. However, we do not find evidence that the reporting dishonesty of participants with low moral identity is influenced by the type of prosocial action they provide information about or the construal of that information. We discuss implications of these results for theory and practice.

We examine the effect of a charitable contribution matching (CCM) program on employee effort. In CCM programs, employers commit to match employees' donations to charity. We expect CCM to activate a norm of other-regarding behavior, inducing employees to increase effort to benefit their employer. Experimental results robustly support our expectation. We find that CCM increases effort under both fixed-wage and performance-based incentive contracts. Further, our results suggest that CCM is more effective at eliciting effort than alternative uses of firm capital. Specifically, CCM is more effective at eliciting effort than the firm allocating an equivalent amount of capital to either direct firm charitable giving or increased performance-based pay. Our study suggests that CCM has efficient and robust effort-elicitation benefits that increase its value as a compensation tool incremental to any initial employee selection benefits from CCM and any effort benefits from firms' direct charitable giving.

Using an experiment, I examine whether managers have preferences for corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a capital budgeting setting and the factors that influence the extent to which they act on these preferences. I find that managers have and act on preferences for CSR by reporting to implement higher cost CSR investments that reduce firm profit even when they have financial incentives not to do so. I also find that when managers need to misreport to act on their preferences for CSR, their willingness to act on such preferences is decreased due to a desire to be honest. Conversely, an opportunity to create slack for personal benefit increases managers’ willingness to act on their CSR preferences, offsetting the decrease resulting from honesty concerns. Together these findings demonstrate that managers’ preferences for CSR investments can influence behavior even in the presence of competing economic incentives and social norms. Finally, an analysis of firm profit shows that firms may be better off financially with managers who act on preferences for CSR investments rather than managers who have strong preferences for wealth. This result obtains because managers with strong CSR preferences do not create slack to the same extent as managers with strong preferences for wealth. These results have implications for both theory and practice because they show that managers’ reports used to make investment decisions are influenced by their personal CSR preferences.

We conduct an experiment to examine the separate and interactive effects of individuals’ risk preferences and two commonly-used performance measures – return on investment (ROI) and residual income (RI) – on risk-taking in capital investment decisions. We predict and find that the use of ROI as a performance measure leads to riskier choices as compared to RI, and that this effect is concentrated in relatively more risk-averse individuals. We also provide process evidence that reveals some of the ways in which ROI and RI performance measures affect decision making. Collectively, our results contribute to literature examining the effects of accounting information and performance measures on managers’ risk-taking behaviors.

This study presents the results of an experimental program on the comparative performance of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) confined concrete specimens with different wrapping schemes. A to...

Although managers’ green investments have no impact on future cash flows in our experimental markets, investors respond favorably when managers make and disclose an investment and highlight the societal benefits rather than the cost to the company. Managers anticipate investors’ reaction and therefore often disclose their investment and the associated societal benefits. Managers and other shareholders benefit from investors’ reaction, but the investment cost always exceeds this benefit, demonstrating that managers make green investments because they value the societal benefits. Collectively, our findings show that both investors and managers tradeoff wealth for societal benefits and help explain managers’ corporate social responsibilty disclosures.

Firms frequently attempt to increase profits by replacing some existing workers with new lower-wage workers. However, this strategy may be ineffective in an incomplete-contract environment because the new workers may provide lower effort in response to their lower wages, and hiring new lower-wage workers may damage the remaining original workers' reciprocal relationship with the firm. We conduct an experiment to examine this issue and find that when new lower-wage workers become available, firms hire them to replace original higher-wage workers and pay the new workers lower wages. However, these lower wages do not improve firm profit because the decision to hire new lower-wage workers causes both the new and remaining workers to provide lower effort. Moreover, hiring lower-wage workers reduces new workers' payoffs and, thus, decreases social welfare. These unintended consequences suggest that firms should consider both the wage savings and the potential costs when deciding whether to replace some workers with new lower-wage workers. We discuss the implications of our findings for contract design, hiring practices, and managerial accountants.

We conduct an experiment to examine investment professionals’ use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures when making personal investment decisions or Investment recommendations to clients. We predict and find that investment professionals are more willing to personally invest and recommend investment to a client when a firm discloses positive CSR performance than when it makes no CSR disclosures. Investment professionals’ decisions and recommendations are influenced by CSR disclosures both because, on average, they believe that better CSR performance results in better current and longer-term financial performance and because they value the societal benefits of CSR activities. We also find that Investment professionals’ general beliefs regarding whether CSR activities benefit society affect how they assess firms’ CSR performance and their view of the relation between CSR performance and financial performance. Finally, investment professionals’ experience appears to protect them from the potential biasing effect of appealing pictures that accompany many CSR disclosures.

M ost companies try to project an image of corporate social responsibility (CSR), often by voluntarily supplementing their annual financial reports with separate CSR reports. Because such CSR reports represent additional disclosures, accounting researchers have become increasingly interested in the role that such disclosures play in firm valuation. The fundamental importance of CSR issues in accounting research is evidenced by the two articles in this Forum (Dhaliwal et al. 2012; Kim et al. 2012), as well as by other recent CSR articles published in The Accounting Review (Dhaliwal et al. 2011; Balakrishnan et al. 2011; Simnett et al. 2009) and other outlets. Traditionally, scholars have considered two broad perspectives on CSR. Economics, finance, and accounting researchers (e.g., Friedman 1970; Shank et al. 2005; Dhaliwal et al. 2011), as well as some writers in the financial press (Karnani 2010), have typically taken the perspective that companies will, or should, only engage in socially responsible activities when doing so maximizes shareholder value. However, there is also a long history of an alternative perspective advocated by

Managers prepare corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports by recalling and describing their past socially responsible actions. Using an experiment, we test whether the manner in which managers prepare CSR reports influences their subsequent ethical decisions. CSR reporting guidelines and firm policies can affect whether managers construe their past socially responsible actions abstractly or concretely (i.e., whether they focus on the underlying reason/purpose of the action or focus on the manner in which it was carried out). Drawing on identity theory and construal level theory, we predict and find that managers subsequently act more ethically if they construe their past socially responsible actions abstractly as opposed to concretely. Further, their ethical decisions are similar regardless of whether their past socially responsible action benefitted or harmed their personal welfare. We also find that the effect of construal reverses when managers prepare reports about past self-interested actions (i.e., actions that benefit the manager but harm others). We discuss practical implications of our results for standard setters, regulators, and senior executives responsible for creating external and internal CSR reporting guidelines.

A catalog of mouse genes expressed in early embryos, embryonic and adult stem cells was assembled, including 250000 ESTs, representing approximately 39000 unique transcripts. The cDNA libraries, enriched in full-length clones, were condensed into the NIA 15 and 7.4K clone sets, freely distributed to the research community, providing a standard platform for expression studies using microarrays. They are essential tools for studying mammalian development and stem cell biology, and to provide hints about the differential nature of embryonic and adult stem cells.

A set of 7407 cDNA clones (NIA mouse 7.4K) was assembled from >20 cDNA libraries constructed mainly from early mouse embryos, including several stem cell libraries. The clone set was assembled from embryonic and newborn organ libraries consisting of ∼120,000 cDNA clones, which were initially re-arrayed into a set of ∼11,000 unique cDNA clones. A set of tubes was constructed from the racks in this set to prevent contamination and potential mishandling errors in all further re-arrays. Sequences from this set (11K) were analyzed further for quality and clone identity, and high-quality clones with verified identity were re-arrayed into the final set (7.4K). The set is freely available, and a corresponding database was built to provide comprehensive annotation for those clones with known identity or homology, and has been made available through an extensive Web site that includes many link-outs to external databases and analysis servers.[The sequence data from this study have been submitted to GenBank under accession nos. BQ550036–BQ563104.]

Most large companies voluntarily disclose information about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. We use experimental markets to examine how managers’ disclosures of a particular type of CSR, green investment, affect investors’ bidding behavior. We find that, although in our setting such investments have no impact on future cash flows, investors value knowing that a green investment was made and also respond more favorably to disclosures that focus on the societal benefits of the investment versus on the cost to the company. Managers appear to anticipate investors’ positive reaction, overwhelmingly disclosing when they made a green investment and more often focusing their disclosures on the societal benefits rather than on the cost to the company. Although managers and other current shareholders benefit when managers disclose their green investment, the benefit is always lower than the cost of the investment, and thus both the manager and other current shareholder always bear a cost when the manager makes a green investment. This suggests that many managers in our study make green investments because they value the associated societal benefits. Collectively, our results show that both investors and managers trade off personal wealth for societal benefits associated with CSR activities and help explain why voluntary CSR disclosures often focus on the benefits to society rather than on the cost to the company. Our study also demonstrates how experiments can effectively study important CSR issues that are difficult to address using archival data.