Cross‐Country Differences in Unemployment: Fiscal Policy,Unions, and Household Preferences in General Equilibrium

We develop a five‐period overlapping generations model with individuals who differ by ability and with an imperfect labour market (union wage setting) for individuals of lower ability. The model explains human capital formation, hours worked, and unemployment within one coherent framework. Its predictions match the differences in the unemployment rate across 12 OECD countries remarkably well. A Shapley decomposition of these differences reveals an almost equal role for fiscal policy variables and union preferences. As to fiscal policy, differences in unemployment benefits play a much more important role than tax differences. Differences in households’ taste for leisure are unimportant.     

Tainted portfolios: How impairment accounting rules restrict security sales

Contrary to claims that fair value accounting exacerbated banks’ securities sales during the recent financial crisis, we present evidence that suggests – if anything – that the current impairment accounting rules served as a deterrent to selling. Specifically, because banks must provide evidence of their ‘intent and ability’ to hold securities with unrealized losses, there are strong incentives to reduce, rather than increase, security sales when market values decline to avoid ‘tainting’ their remaining securities portfolio. Validating this concern, we find that banks incur greater other‐than‐temporary impairment (OTTI) charges when they sell more securities. We then find that banks sell fewer securities when their security portfolios have larger unrealized losses (and thus larger potential impairment charges), and these results are concentrated in banks with homogenous securities portfolios, expert auditors, more experienced managers, and greater regulatory capital slack. Overall, our results suggest that – contrary to critics’ claims – the accounting rules appear to have reduced banks’ propensity to sell their securities during the financial crisis.     

Extractive Industries Reporting: A Review of Accounting Challenges and the Research Literature

While the extractive industries (EI) are of major significance economically, the reporting of their activities has been the subject of contentious debate posing dilemmas for regulators and standard setters over many decades. In order to ensure alignment with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) research project on EI, we first identify some important economic characteristics of EI and associated accounting challenges together with an overview of how current accounting standards deal with these challenges using International Financial Reporting Standards as the focus. Second, we conduct a review of extant research on EI reporting analyzed around the key areas of: (a) international diversity of accounting practices and the challenges facing information users; (b) standard-setting processes and lobbying behaviour that deals with why the IASB (and other standard setters) have not succeeded in developing rigorous standards for extractive activities; (c) the reporting of oil, gas, and mineral reserves, given that large proportions of the assets of EI firms (the reserves) are off-balance sheet; (d) environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting dealing with how EI firms have increased their reporting of ESG information in response to regulatory demands and pressure for voluntary disclosures; and (e) other EI related topics such as earnings management, risk disclosures, and voluntary disclosure behaviour. Finally, we present some conclusions together with suggestions relating to key areas for future research on EI reporting.     

The premium of dynamic trading in a discrete-time setting

Chiu and Zhou [Quant. Finance, 2011, 11, 115–123] show that the inclusion of a risk-free asset strictly boosts the Sharpe ratio in a continuous-time setting, which is in sharp contrast to the static single-period case. In this paper, we extend their work to a discrete-time setting. Specifically, we prove that the multi-period mean-variance efficient frontier generated by both risky and risk-free assets is strictly separated from that generated by only risky assets. As a result, we demonstrate that the inclusion of a risk-free asset strictly enhances the best Sharpe ratio of the efficient frontier in a multi-period discrete-time setting. Furthermore, we offer an explicit expression for the enhancement of the best Sharpe ratio, which was referred to as the premium of dynamic trading by Chiu and Zhou [op. cit.], although they do not present a computational formula for it. Our results further show that, in the case with a risk-free asset, if an investor can extract some money from his initial wealth at time 0, the efficient frontier with a risk-free asset can be tangent to that without a risk-free asset. Finally, based on real data from the American market, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the results obtained in this paper; a numerical comparison between the discrete-time case and the continuous-time case is also provided. Our numerical results reveal that the continuous-time model can be considered to be a limit of the discrete-time model.     

Nonuniform Staggered Prices and Output Persistence

Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered, but recent empirical evidence suggests that deviations from uniform staggering are common. This paper analyzes how synchronization of price changes affects the response to monetary policy shocks. I find that even large deviations from uniform staggering have small effects on the response of output. Aggregate dynamics in a model of uniform staggering may serve well as an approximation to a more complicated model with some degree of synchronization in price setting.     

试议公司瑕疵设立原则有效

关于公司瑕疵设立，有原则有效和原则无效两种观点。从维护交易效率的角度出发，兼及考虑企业维持理念，我国法律应尊重瑕疵公司作为市场主体的事实存在，设置公司设立瑕疵补正规则和程序，对瑕疵公司进行拯救，原则上承认设立瑕疵公司之人格及既已形成的社会经济秩序。     

The frequency and size of price changes: evidence from non-parametric estimations

The majority of price setting models predict a negative correlation between the frequency and size of price changes. Using a unique micro-level price data from Slovakia, we find that a negative correlation between frequency and size of price changes holds only for more rigid prices. On the other hand, less rigid prices such as gasoline prices exhibit positive correlation in line with Rotemberg's pricing model.     

Price Setting in the Euro Area: Some Stylized Facts from Individual Producer Price Data

This paper summarizes the microevidence on the setting of producer prices in the euro area. The main findings are: (i) 21% of producer prices are adjusted each month, (ii) producer prices are changed more frequently and by smaller amounts than consumer prices (even after controlling for product characteristics), (iii) price decreases are relatively frequent, (iv) inflation correlates positively with the difference between the frequency of price increases and decreases, and (v) there is substantial variation in price flexibility across sectors, which can be explained in part by differences in the cost structure, the degree of competition, and the level of sectoral inflation.