论中国CPA审计法律责任的制度缺失与重构

目前 ,我国CPA在涉及上市公司审计业务过程中 ,发生的舞弊现象十分严重 ,但是在处罚中存在严重的法律责任制度缺失问题 ,突出表现在法律责任缺乏界定依据 ,起诉主体法律条文不明 ,诉讼门槛起点太高 ,赔偿金额难以确定 ,处罚形式避重就轻。CPA参与上市公司舞弊的重要原因是 :民事赔偿机制严重缺失 ,地方政府过于庇护。重构CPA审计法律责任的制度设想 :明确CPA法律责任的界定依据和机构 ,建立民事责任赔偿机制 ,大力推广合伙制会计师事务所 ,建立CPA法律责任风险防范机制     

Public Pension Benefits Claiming Behaviour: new Evidence from the Japanese Study on Ageing and Retirement

The present study explores public pension claiming behaviour among the Japanese elderly. First, we perform financial simulations, estimate expected utility and depict the typical patterns of pension benefits over a lifecycle. We show that a beneficiary's optimal retirement age depends on that beneficiary's mortality risk, discount rate, initial wealth and risk attitude. Second, we use individual‐level data from the Japanese Study on Aging and Retirement (JSTAR) to empirically examine the determinants of claim timing. We find evidence that most of the factors examined in the simulation are, indeed, significantly associated with early claiming among wage earners of pension benefits.     

Early claiming of social security benefits and labour supply behaviour of older Americans

The labour supply incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the United States Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67 and the labour force participation of older Americans starts to increase. These incentives allow individuals who claim benefits before the NRA but continue to work, or return to the labour force, to increase their future rate of benefit pay by having benefits withheld. Since the adjustment of the benefit rate takes place only after the NRA is reached, benefits received before the NRA can become actuarially unfair for those who continue to work after claiming. Consistent with these incentives, estimates from bivariate models of the monthly labour force exit and claiming hazards using data from the Health and Retirement Study indicate that early claimers who do not withdraw from the labour force around the time they claim are increasingly likely to stay in the labour force.     

Insurance Taxation and Insurance Fraud

It is common practice in the United States to impose a sales tax on insurance premiums. Insurance benefits are not taxed, and it is typically argued that they should not be taxed because they compensate for a loss. In this paper I present a case where the taxation of insurance benefits is preferable to the taxation of premiums. When insurance fraud is present—in the form of ex post moral hazard—a tax on insurance premiums increases the number of fraudulent claims in the economy, whereas a tax on insurance benefits may reduce fraud. More importantly, however, policyholders are made better off with a benefit tax than with a premium tax.     

Can second-order punishment deter perverse punishment?

Recent experiments have shown that voluntary punishment of free riders can increase contributions, mitigating the free-rider problem. But frequently punishers punish high contributors, creating “perverse” incentives which can undermine the benefits of voluntary punishment. In our experiment, allowing punishment of punishing behaviors reduces punishment of high contributors, but gives rise to efficiency-reducing second-order “perverse” punishment. On balance, efficiency and contributions are slightly but not significantly enhanced. JEL Classification C91 · C73 · C41 · D71     

International environmental agreements with ancillary benefits: Repeated games analysis

Both ancillary and primary benefits, generated by climate change mitigation, are indispensable key factors to implement the full participation in international environmental agreement (IEA). This paper presents a new IEA model with ancillary benefits, using a repeated game with the linear and quadratic emission abatement cost functions of each country. This study also investigates the effect of ancillary benefits on the condition for full participation in IEA. Ancillary benefits function as a complementary device of punishment scheme for IEA. Our main results show that ancillary benefits can facilitate full participation in IEA, thus suggesting that they should be considered in climate change negotiations.     

Fraud and fiduciary liability

All employee benefit plans are potential targets of fraudulent schemes. Smaller plans are targeted by unscrupulous brokers and promoters selling fraudulent policies; plans large enough to be self-insured face greater risks of fraud by providers and participants misrepresenting claims. Plan trustees, administrators and consultants should be alert to the many ways fraudulent schemes manifest themselves and to the legal remedies available; establish investigative programs to detect and discourage fraud; and promote education and plan incentives for participants to report fraud.     

Value of public goods from sports stadiums: the CVM approach

Many state and local governments have subsidized the construction of arenas and stadium for the use of professional sports teams. They often justify the subsidies by claiming the projects generate valuable public goods and positive externalities, though such benefits are difficult to measure. This article reports an application of the contingent valuation method (CVM) to measure the value of public goods generated by two proposed projects in Lexington, Kentucky: a new basketball arena for the University of Kentucky and a minor league baseball stadium. Neither project would generate sufficiently valuable public goods to justify public financing. Although the results cannot be generalized to other cases, they do shed light on some of the main issues involved, and they demonstrate the feasibility of applying CVM to the evaluation of the subsidized stadiums.     

The evolution of sanctioning institutions: an experimental approach to the social contract

A vast amount of empirical and theoretical research on public good games indicates that the threat of punishment can curb free-riding in human groups engaged in joint enterprises. Since punishment is often costly, however, this raises an issue of second-order free-riding: indeed, the sanctioning system itself is a common good which can be exploited. Most investigations, so far, considered peer punishment: players could impose fines on those who exploited them, at a cost to themselves. Only a minority considered so-called pool punishment. In this scenario, players contribute to a punishment pool before engaging in the joint enterprise, and without knowing who the free-riders will be. Theoretical investigations (Sigmund et al., Nature 466:861–863, 2010) have shown that peer punishment is more efficient, but pool punishment more stable. Social learning, i.e., the preferential imitation of successful strategies, should lead to pool punishment if sanctions are also imposed on second-order free-riders, but to peer punishment if they are not. Here we describe an economic experiment (the Mutual Aid game) which tests this prediction. We find that pool punishment only emerges if second-order free riders are punished, but that peer punishment is more stable than expected. Basically, our experiment shows that social learning can lead to a spontaneously emerging social contract, based on a sanctioning institution to overcome the free rider problem.     

The Effects of Marginal Employment on Subsequent Labour Market Outcomes

Abstract. Unemployed workers in Austria do not lose their unemployment benefits (UI) if they work in a job where their earnings are below a certain threshold [‘marginal employment’ (ME)]. ME might improve their labour market status by signalling effort, or worsen it through reduced job‐search effort. Those who work in ME while claiming UI have less employment and lower earnings afterwards than those who do not. The penalty lessens over time but is still present after three years.     

Legal Principles in Antitrust Enforcement

We study antitrust enforcement that aims to channel price‐fixing incentives of cartels through setting fine schedules and detection levels. Fines obey legal principles, such as the punishment should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy considerations limit maximum fines, ensure abnormal cartel profits, and impose a challenge for optimal antitrust enforcement. We derive the fine schedule and detection level that are constrained‐optimal under legal principles and sustainability of cartel prices. This fine schedule lies below the maximum fine, makes collusion on lower prices more attractive than on higher prices, and, hence, relates to the body of literature on marginal deterrence.     

A fault confessed is half redressed—Confessions and punishment

Confessions after failures are socially desirable. However, confessions also bear the risk of punishment. In a laboratory experiment I examine how confessions work. I analyze whether the willingness to punish harmful failures depends on how the harmed party has learned about the outcome. The harmed party can learn about the outcome via random detection or self-report by the performer. There are two major findings: first, confessions are a powerful instrument: punishment for confessed failures is less likely than for randomly detected failures. Second, confessions are much more likely to occur if there is no punishment.     

Life Expectancy and Claiming Behavior in a Flexible Pension System

We study the relationship between early claiming of pensions and incentives in the highly flexible Norwegian public pension system, measuring incentives to claim based on an estimated model for expected longevity. Despite a strong correlation between incentives and claiming decisions, the additional costs to public budgets arising from this selection turn out to be modest. Based on analyses exploiting only variation in expected pensions generated by variation in parental longevities and only claiming of pensions not in conjunction with retirement, we conclude that part of the selection is active: some individuals claim pensions early because they gain from doing so.     

Aching to retire? The rise in the full retirement age and its impact on the social security disability rolls

The Social Security Amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of Social Security retired worker benefits in the U.S. by increasing the program's full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62. These changes were phased in gradually, so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected. No corresponding changes were made to the program's disabled worker benefits, and thus the relative generosity of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits increased. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the Amendments on SSDI enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy-induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits. Our findings indicate that the Amendments significantly increased SSDI enrollment since 1983, with an additional 0.6% of men and 0.9% of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving SSDI benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes. Our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades, as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties.     

Voting on Punishment Systems within a Heterogeneous Group

We consider a voluntary contributions game, in which players may punish others after contributions are made and observed. The productivity of contributions, as captured in the marginal‐per‐capita return, differs among individuals, so that there are two types: high and low productivity. Every two or eight periods, depending on the treatment, individuals vote on a punishment regime, in which certain individuals are permitted, but not required, to have punishment directed toward them. The punishment system can condition on type and contribution history. The results indicate that the most effective regime, in terms of contributions and earnings, is one that allows punishment of low contributors only, regardless of productivity. Nevertheless, only a minority of sessions converge to this system, indicating a tendency for the voting process to lead to suboptimal institutional choice.     

The Optimal Use of Fines and Imprisonment If Governments Do Not Maximize Welfare

We consider a stylized model of crime and punishment in which the prosecution policy is defined by three variables: the size of punishment, the type of punishment, and the detection probability. We derive the optimal type of punishment under the assumption that the detection probability is chosen by a government whose objective function places a higher weight on the government's budget than the social welfare function does. We show that for serious crimes exclusive imprisonment is welfare maximizing. If costs of imprisonment are taken into account, the optimal punishment is a prison term with an additional fine that is smaller or equal to the costs of the prison term. For less serious crimes, fines without imprisonment are welfare maximizing. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that the standard result of the literature that fines should be used whenever feasible need not hold in the presence of a rent‐seeking government. Moreover, it offers a new explanation for the widespread use of mandatory imprisonment for serious crimes.     

On an anomaly of the deterrent effect of punishment

A two period choice problem is presented. An individual has to choose in each period between legal and illegal activities. Two punishment policies are compared: (1) The maximal punishment is imposed even for a first offense. (2) A new offender gets a reduced punishment. It is proved that for a given policy of type 1 there exist a utility function and a policy of type 2 which yields a better deterrent on individual characterized by this utility function.     

Can Fraudulent Cues Be Transmitted by Innocent Participants?

The authors explore whether and how linguistic indicators of fraud make their way into the Management Discussion & Analysis (MD&A) section of financial reports. Although research has shown that word choice and tone can help identify fraudulent financial reports, it is as yet unclear how this occurs when these reports are written by many individuals, some of whom are unaware that financial misrepresentation is occurring. Through an examination of industry recommendations and interviews with individuals experienced in writing the MD&A section, the authors confirm that many hands are involved in drafting this portion of financial reports. The authors then structure an experiment, using a real fraud case, that asks participants to write an MD&A from truthful prior U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and a memo from the CFO with suggestions of what to say in the current period MD&A. Unbeknownst to participants the CFO memo was created using phrases from financial statements subsequently identified to be fraudulent. The authors find that individuals do unwittingly write MD&A associated with fraudulent financial statements with relatively little suspicion and that linguistic cues contained in the CFO memo are transmitted to the ultimate MD&A through naive and innocent participants.     

Strong and weak ties in employment and crime

This paper analyzes the interplay between social structure and information exchange in two competing activities, crime and labor. We consider a dynamic model in which individuals belong to mutually exclusive two-person groups, referred to as dyads. There are multiple equilibria. If jobs are badly paid and/or crime is profitable, unemployment benefits have to be low enough to prevent workers for staying too long in the unemployment status because they are vulnerable to crime activities. If, instead, jobs are well paid and/or crime is not profitable, unemployment benefits have to be high enough to induce workers to stay unemployed rather to commit crime because they are less vulnerable to crime activities. Also, in segregated neighborhoods characterized by high interactions between peers, a policy only based on punishment and arrest will not be efficient in reducing crime. It has to be accompanied by other types of policies that take into account social interactions.     

Financial constraints,short selling and corporate fraud: Evidence from China

This study investigates the relationship between financial constraints and corporate fraud commission and its detection and the moderating role of short selling using a partial observable bivariate probit model. First, financially constrained corporations are more likely to commit fraud and their fraudulent behaviours are less likely to be detected. Second, short selling has an interesting effect on corporate fraud. On the one hand, short selling has a direct restraining effect on corporate fraud commission and increases the likelihood of corporate fraud detection. On the other hand, short selling plays a moderating role in the relationship between financial constraints and corporate fraud. This study contributes to the corporate fraud literature by analysing the factors influencing corporate fraud and provides theoretical support for regulators and managers in monitoring fraudulent behaviour.