This article seeks to analyze the allocation of federal government discretionary spending among Brazil’s states. In Brazil, the bulk of federal public budget must be compulsorily executed. Personnel expenditures and social taxes, social security benefits and a series of constitutionally mandatory transfers to states and municipalities are examples of expenditures over which the government has n...

This study examines whether firms just above and just below three earnings benchmarks (loss avoidance, earnings changes, and analyst forecast) have differing levels of discretionary accruals. If discretionary accruals are a measure of earnings management, then firms above (benchmark beaters) and firms below a benchmark should have differing levels of discretionary accruals. Dechow et al. (2003)...

OBJECTIVE To rank 39 surgical procedures in order of variation of inpatient surgical rates, according to a new index of variation and to test the hypothesis that there is greater variation for primarily discretionary operations than for primarily non-discretionary operations. DESIGN A population-based retrospective cohort study. SETTING Nine provinces (99.19% of Canada's population). PART...

A decade ago in a paper, “Reassessing Discretionary Fiscal Policy,” published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I concluded that “in the current context of the US economy, it seems best to let fiscal policy have its main countercyclical impact through the automatic stabilizers ... It would be appropriate in the current circumstances for discretionary fiscal policy to be saved explicitly ...

BACKGROUND Accountable care organizations (ACOs) seek to reduce growth in healthcare spending while ensuring high-quality care. We hypothesized that accountable care organization implementation would selectively limit the use of discretionary cardiovascular care (defined as care occurring in the absence of indications such as myocardial infarction or stroke), while maintaining high-quality care...

We consider a model of strategic information transmission in which a firm can communicate its quality to consumers through informative advertising. Our main result is that informative advertising claims can be credible even when the firm faces consumers with ex ante homogeneous preferences. A fundamental assumption of our model is that whether the product is available for purchase is independen...