Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This study exploits the recently-issued Uncertain Tax Position Statement (Schedule UTP) to examine the effect of mandatory disclosures of tax uncertainty to tax authorities on firms' reporting decisions. Schedule UTP requires firms to disclose federal income tax positions to the Internal Revenue Service that have been classified as 'uncertain' for financial reporting purposes. In showing how Schedule UTP disclosure requirements affect private and public reporting decisions, I provide insights into the usefulness of these disclosures. Using confidential tax return data and public financial statement data, I find that after imposition of Schedule UTP reporting requirements, firms report lower financial reporting reserves for uncertain income tax positions, but do not claim fewer income tax benefits on their federal tax returns. These findings suggest some firms changed their financial reporting for uncertain tax positions to avoid Schedule UTP reporting requirements without changing the underlying positions. The effect is concentrated among firms with greater business complexity, whose business operations facilitate tax planning strategies that are more difficult for the IRS to identify. More broadly, my results imply private disclosures of tax uncertainty can affect the informativeness of public disclosures of tax uncertainty. / text

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This dissertation develops three game-theoretic models in each of its three chapters to explore the strategic implications of transparency in the administrative state. Each model contains a similar set of three players: a political principal, an agent representing an agency or a bureaucrat, and an interested third party. The models consider the utility of transparency as a tool for mitigating regulatory capture, in which the third party influences the agent to serve its interest rather than the principal's. Chapter 1, "Transparency and Media Scrutiny in the Regulatory Process," models transparency as the volume of records that the media receives from the agent, which raises the likelihood of news alleging low costs to the interest group after the agent's proposal of lax regulation. Such reports cost these two players and may deter the group from capturing the agent. Among other things, the model describes costs due to distorted policy proposals and loss of information when greater transparency causes inaccurate reports to increase along with accurate ones. In Chapter 2, "Transparency and Power in Rulemaking," transparency is a requirement for the agent to disclose an item of information, such as his message from the regulated party or his signal about the cost of regulation. The agent can always disclose this information, but doing so may increase the principal's power to set regulation higher than he or the regulated party desires. A key result is that transparency is not necessary for the principal to know as much as the agent does but may discourage the generation of the message or signal. Chapter 3, "A Reverse Rationale for Reliance on Regulators," suggests that an agent can benefit a principal not by gathering information from an outsider that she cannot access, but by preventing her from obtaining or acting on this information. The agent benefits the principal when he induces additional effort in the outside party's information generation because he is more adversarial toward that party than she is. Mandatory disclosure of the agent's information is harmful because it effectively allows the outsider to communicate directly with the principal and provide lower quality information.

The first chapter of this dissertation analyzes voting behavior across multiple elections. The voting literature has largely analyzed voter turnout and voter behavior separately, focusing on individual elections. I present a model of voter turnout and behavior in multiple elections. The assumptions are consistent with individual election preferences and decision is derived from utility maximization. Additionally, I provide necessary moment conditions for identification. The framework is applied to the 2008 California elections. The exit polls made national headlines by linking the historic turnout of African-Americans for Presidential candidate Obama in helping pass Proposition 8. The results show that the African-American turnout and voting share for Proposition 8 was lower than indicated by the exit polls. As a counterfactual, I look at the turnout and outcome of Proposition 8, without the presidential race on the ballot. As predicted, there is lower voter turnout: on par with midterm elections. I also find a lower share of Yes votes on Proposition 8 - enough that the referendum would not have passed. / Economics

Data is increasingly represented in annotated graphs, but graphs pose novel security and privacy challenges that at present lack solutions. We begin by identifying the new challenges graphs introduce and explain why existing security approaches are insufficient. / Engineering and Applied Sciences

published_or_final_version / abstract / Law / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

Advances in information technology have amplified issues related to privacy and the disclosure of personal information. New technologies have enabled an explosion in the amount and variety of information created, stored, and potentially shared about people, and there has been a corresponding explosion in privacy-related concerns and conversations in academic and non-academic forums. This dissertation contributes to one such conversation, adding to our understanding of the mechanisms that shape individuals' privacy concerns in the context of disclosure of personal information. Individuals must overcome their information privacy concerns in order for personal information disclosure to take place, but the mechanisms surrounding this process are highly dependent on the context of disclosure. Accordingly, this research seeks to build understanding around the ways in which privacy concerns are mitigated or counterbalanced in three different disclosure contexts. Essay 1, positioned in the e-commerce context, contributes uniquely to an emerging stream of disclosure research that considers irrationality within the privacy disclosure decision process. Essay 2 is focused on a less frequently examined disclosure context - online social networks - and examines the tension between individuals' privacy concerns and their desire for social benefits and personal expression, focusing especially on the social network technology's ability to support impression management behavior. Finally, Essay 3 examines the mitigation of privacy concerns in the context of involuntary disclosure - increasingly common in the modern online environment - wherein the primary goal is to reduce concerns or anxiety regarding the information already disclosed. In comparing disclosure processes across these contexts, this research provides insights regarding consistencies and distinctions among the different domains. Insights gained, both within and across these contexts, are valuable to both privacy researchers and professional stakeholders.

The first essay examines the relation between fund performance and stock selection process. I classify mutual funds into two groups according to their distinctive stock selection approaches: tire kickers who rely on fund managers' personal judgment and fundamental analysis to pick stocks, and quant jocks who use computer-based models to select stocks. I examine how the stock selection approach affects mutual fund performance and economies of scale. I document an increasing trend of quantitative techniques used by mutual funds, in addition to some unique characteristics of quant jocks. Quant jocks and tire kickers have similar factor-adjusted alphas, but quant jocks have higher Sharpe ratios. Quant jocks tend to be much smaller than tire kickers. I explore possible explanations for the size difference. I find that although quant jocks can cheaply screen a large universe of stocks, the stocks that quant jocks invest in are smaller and less liquid, which results in higher transaction costs and limited scalability of quantitative investment strategies. The second essay investigates mutual fund managers' private information about future stock returns as revealed in their portfolio holdings. Specifically, we develop three different stock alpha estimators to predict stock returns based on portfolio compositions and past performance of mutual funds. We find that investment strategies based on our stock alpha estimators perform well, when using information on recent fund holdings and fund purchases. This evidence suggests that fund managers' stock selection skills are quite persistent, and vary widely in the cross-section. We also compare our strategies with 12 quantitative investment signals based on market anomalies, and find that our strategies are not subsumed by these quantitative signals. Thus, our stock alpha estimators reflect private skills of active fund managers that are unrelated to known anomalies. Finally, we develop a conditional stock alpha estimator using information on stock characteristics and fund characteristics. Investment strategies based on the conditional stock alphas deliver further improved performance.