Initial Public Offerings,Accounting Choices,and Earnings Management*

Abstract. This paper investigates whether entrepreneurs manipulate earnings in the periods prior to taking their firms public through the choice of accounting conventions. The preponderance of evidence, using powerful accrual tests that were able to detect earnings management in other contexts, indicates little, if any, manipulation. To the extent that there is earnings management, the results suggest that this phenomenon is more pronounced among small firms and among firms with large financial leverage and is to a lesser degree related to the quality of the underwriters and auditors employed when going public. Résumé. Les auteurs ont voulu savoir si les entrepreneurs manipulaient les bénéfices dans les exercices précédant un appel public à l'épargne par le truchement du choix des normes et conventions comptables. La prépondérance des preuves recueillies à l'aide des puissantes techniques existantes de sondage des produits et des charges visant à déceler les cas d'? accommodation » des bénéfices dans d'autres contextes, révèle une faible manipulation, sinon aucune. Dans la mesure où il y a accommodation des bénéfices, les résultats obtenus donnent à penser que le phénomène est davantage accentué chez les entreprises de petite taille ou dont le levier financier est élevé, et qu'il est relié de façon plus ténue à la qualité des preneurs fermes et des vérificateurs à qui l'entreprise a recours lorsqu'elle fait appel public à l'épargne.     

POLITICIZED MANAGERIAL CAPITALISM: ENTERPRISE STRUCTURES IN POST-SOCIALIST CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

The paper contributes to the sociological tradition of comparative institutional analysis. It argues that a distinctive form of capitalism is emerging in post 1989 Central and Eastern Europe, politicized managerial capitalism. This is a bifurcated system, one sub‐system internationally oriented, a still peripheral but increasingly integrated part of global capitalism, and a second sub‐system, more nationally oriented, dominated by managerial élites allied with weak states. Politicized managerial capitalism is founded upon the inherited practices of late Socialism, moulded by the post Socialist development process and congruent with the stage of development of capital, labour and product markets. It is unclear as to whether this is a transient or long‐term structure.     

FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY AND THE FISCAL REACTION FUNCTION FOR SOUTH AFRICA: ASSESSMENT OF THE PAST AND FUTURE POLICY APPLICATIONS

How does the South African government react to changes in its debt position? In investigating this question, this paper estimates fiscal reaction functions using various methods (ordinary least squares, threshold autoregressive, state‐space modelling and vector error‐correction model). This paper finds that since 1946, the South African government has run sustainable fiscal policy by reducing the primary deficit or increasing the surplus in response to rising debt. Looking ahead, this paper considers the use of fiscal reaction functions to forecast the debt/gross domestic product (GDP) ratio and gauging the likelihood of achieving policy goals with the aid of probabilistic simulations and fan charts.     

Capital Share Risk in U.S. Asset Pricing

A single macroeconomic factor based on growth in the capital share of aggregate income exhibits significant explanatory power for expected returns across a range of equity characteristic portfolios and nonequity asset classes, with risk price estimates that are of the same sign and similar in magnitude. Positive exposure to capital share risk earns a positive risk premium, commensurate with recent asset pricing models in which redistributive shocks shift the share of income between the wealthy, who finance consumption primarily out of asset ownership, and workers, who finance consumption primarily out of wages and salaries.     

What Is the Expected Return on a Stock?

We derive a formula for the expected return on a stock in terms of the risk‐neutral variance of the market and the stock's excess risk‐neutral variance relative to that of the average stock. These quantities can be computed from index and stock option prices; the formula has no free parameters. The theory performs well empirically both in and out of sample. Our results suggest that there is considerably more variation in expected returns, over time and across stocks, than has previously been acknowledged.     

Can the U.S. Interbank Market Be Revived?

The U.S. interbank market essentially disappeared as the reserve supply dramatically increased after the 2007–2008 crisis. We build a model to study whether the interbank market can revive if the reserve supply decreases sufficiently. The market may not revive due to balance sheet costs associated with recent banking regulations. Although interbank volume may initially increase as reserves decline from abundant levels, the balance sheet costs may engender changes in market structure that completely replace interbank trading by nonbank lending to banks. This nonmonotonic response could lead to misleading forecasts about future interbank volumes.     

Relative Target Setting and Cooperation

A large stream of work on relative performance evaluation highlights the benefits of using information about peer performance in contracting. In contrast, the potential costs of discouraging cooperation among peers have received much less attention. The purpose of our study is to examine how the importance of cooperation affects the use of information about peer performance in target setting, also known as relative target setting. Specifically, we use data from an industrial services company where business unit managers need to share specialized equipment and staff with their peers to manage bottlenecks in their capacity. We construct several empirical proxies for the costs and benefits of information about peer performance and examine their effects on target setting. We find robust evidence that the sensitivity of target revisions to past peer performance is higher when peer group performance has greater capacity to filter out noise but lower when the importance of cooperation among peers is greater.     

Corporate Tax Enforcement Externalities and the Banking Sector

We explore whether corporate tax enforcement can affect bank lending. Specifically, we hypothesize that tax enforcement efforts aimed at small and midsized enterprises (SME) can improve their information environments, which in turn could lead to increased bank commercial lending. Exploiting the regional structure employed by the IRS until 1999, we find that the corporate tax return audit probability for SMEs is associated with greater commercial lending growth for regionally focused banks. We find similar evidence when exploiting the IRS reorganization from a regional to federal system in 2000. Further results show that tax enforcement's impact on SME informational environments is at least partially responsible for this association: The impact of tax auditing on bank lending is stronger for banks facing greater informational disadvantages and in areas where SMEs face greater hold-up problems. Finally, we find that the tax audit rate is positively associated with loan portfolio quality, suggesting that tax enforcement can lead to better loan decisions. Our findings are consistent with the tax authority's mandate having important externalities on bank lending and SME access to capital, suggesting that the benefits to tax enforcement go beyond improving tax collection.     

SHOULD THERE BE INTRADAY MONEY MARKETS?

In this article, we consider the case for an intraday market for reserves. We discuss the separate roles of intraday and overnight reserves and argue that an intraday market could be organized in the same way as the overnight market. We present arguments in favor of and against a market for intraday reserves when the marginal cost of overnight reserves is positive. We also consider how reserves should be supplied when the cost of overnight reserves is zero. In that case, the distinction between overnight and intraday reserves becomes blurred, raising an important question: What is the role of the overnight market?(JEL E44, E58)