In the United States, over 50 million low- and moderate-income (LMI) households 1 make daily financial decisions that determine how purchases are made, bills get paid, money is borrowed, and savings set aside. However, the approach LMI households take when making financial choices is far from clear. To explore this topic, the Payment Cards Center and the Community Affairs Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia invited Professor Michael Barr, of the University of Michigan Law School, to collaborate in organizing a conference titled “Payments, Credit, and Savings: The Experience for LMI Households,” which was held May 1- , 007.
In 005, Barr made the keynote remarks at a Payment Cards Center conference examining the role of payment cards in serving the financial needs of unbanked and underserved consumers. At the time, he was just beginning work on survey research in the Detroit metropolitan area. He had been selected to serve as faculty investigator for the 005- 006 Detroit Area Household Financial Services Study, more simply called the Detroit Area Study (DAS). The DAS has been conducted for over 50 years under the auspices of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center. Each year survey researchers explore a different topic. The 005- 006 study was designed to gain a better understanding of 1) how and why LMI households use a wide array of financial services as well as the costs and benefits of such services and ) how LMI households would respond to new types of cost-effective financial products specifically tailored to their needs. Through this survey, Barr and his fellow researchers hoped to develop a more complete understanding of the financial behaviors and motivations of LMI households and the related constraints on their use of traditional and emerging financial products and services.
In the 1980s, an unprecedented number of public corporations and divisions of public companies went private in leveraged buyouts (LBOs), partly fueled by the development of the junk bond market. LBO activity increased from $1.4 billion in 1979 to $77 billion in 1988. The last six years (from the year 2000) have seen the resurgence in going private transactions, but fueled this time by the development of the private equity market. U.S private equity firms are expected to raise $225 billion in 2006 up from $159 billion raised in 2005. Given the size and growth of this market, it is important to understand the economic forces that determine which firms choose to use private equity and opt out of public markets. The goal of our study is to determine the factors that drive the going private decisions of firms.
Productivity improvement has become a key objective for U.S. industry.' Productivity measurement, however, has gone largely unnoticed by accounting professionals, particularly those teaching and doing research in accounting departments and business schools. Accounting textbooks virtually ignore issues of productivity measurement, and accounting journals contain few articles on the subject. Most articles on productivity measurement are written by economists usually interested in productivity measurement at the national economy level—or by industrial engineers and production professionals.
The implicit, and occasionally explicit, rationalization for the accounting profession's lack of interest in productivity measurement apparently arises from the belief that variances computed by the firm's standard cost system, particularly usage variances, are sufficient to measure the efficiency of the enterprise. Presumably, a desire for increased productivity could be signaled by across-the-board tightening of standards by the desired percentage. If a firm were inefficient or failed to meet its productivity improvement target, then the accounting system would report many unfavorable usage variances.
