Monetary control uncertainty and inflation bias

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the occurrence of an inflation bias with and without an output goal exceeding natural output. A monetary game model is developed from which an inflation bias emerges because the policymaker increases money growth in order to avoid a recession due to a possible negative control error. Whereas higher additive instrument uncertainty increases the inflation bias, higher multiplicative uncertainty decreases it. Delegating monetary policy to an independent and conservative central banker decreases the inflation bias for all types of control errors.     

Are East Asian Companies Benefiting from Western Board Practices?

Since the Asian crisis, East Asian nations have strived to introduce corporate governance codes, directing companies how to best improve their corporate governance practices. However, these codes have not been universally accepted by East Asian companies. This study examines the adoption of major board-related corporate governance recommendations by large non-financial companies in seven East Asian nations and investigates whether improvements in these board governance mechanisms have been associated with increased operating performance and market value. The results indicate that family-owned companies started with worse board governance and have been least likely to improve their board governance since the crisis. Overall, bigger, faster growing, non-family-owned companies with less concentrated ownership have been more likely to improve their board governance. Splitting of the positions of Chairman and CEO, creation of audit and nomination committees and improvements in overall board governance were found to have a positive relationship with subsequent operating performance and/or market value. John Nowland is a Finance Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. He holds a research masters degree and is completing his PhD at the University of Queensland. His current research focuses on corporate governance and capital markets in Asia.     

The political economy of IMF conditionality and central bank independence

International organizations (IOs) often drive policy change in member countries. Given IOs' limited political leverage over a member country, previous research argues that IOs rely on a combination of hard pressures (i.e., conditionality) and soft pressures (i.e., socialization) to attain their political goals. Expanding this literature, we hypothesize that IOs can enhance their political leverage through loan conditions aimed at enhancing the political independence of key administrative units. Studying this mechanism in the context of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), we argue that through prescribing structural loan conditions on central banks (CBI conditionality), the IMF empowers central banks to gain more political leverage with the aim to limit a government's ability to (ab)use monetary policy for political gain. Divorcing monetary authorities from their respective government, the IMF intends to alter political dynamics towards achieving greater program compliance and enhance long-term macro-financial stability. Relying on a dataset including up to 124 countries between 1980 and 2012, we find that the IMF deploys CBI conditionality to countries with fewer checks and balances, a less independent central bank, and where the government relies more heavily on the monetization of public debt.     

The Impacts of Financial Integration on the Linkages Between Monetary Independence and Foreign Exchange Reserves

This paper investigates the short-run and long-run effects of financial integration on the dynamics between monetary independence and foreign exchange reserves using a GMM system estimation involving two-year non-overlapping average data (2000-2011) from 114 countries. The results indicate that the effect of foreign exchange reserves on the monetary independence is intensified by the level of financial integration. This suggests a positive spill over effect from the financial integration to the monetary policy independence. Besides, a positive implication of financial integration on monetary independence could be established when the foreign exchange reserves is at the maximum level. In addition, the comparisons between the mean of foreign exchange reserves and the threshold levels of foreign exchange reserves that neutralise the impact of financial integration indicate that on average, the foreign exchange reserves are sufficient to offset the effect of financial integration. A stable exchange rate will undermine the positive impact of foreign exchange reserves on monetary independence. Finally, the long-run and short-run impacts occur in the same direction. This paper ends with some policy implications and suggestions for future research.     

A Political Agency Theory of Central Bank Independence

We propose a simple theory to explain why, and under what circumstances, a politician delegates policy tasks to a technocrat in an independent institution and then analyze under what conditions delegation is optimal for society. Our theory builds on Holmström's (1982, 1999) “hidden effort” principal–agent model. The election pressures that politicians face, and the absence of such pressures for technocrats, give rise to a dynamic incentive structure that formalizes two rationales for delegation, one highlighted by Hamilton (1788) and the other by Blinder (1998) . Delegation trades off the cost of having a possibly incompetent technocrat with a long‐term job contract against the benefit of having a technocrat who (i) invests more effort into the specialized policy task and (ii) is better insulated from the whims of public opinion. A natural application of our framework suggests a new theory of central bank independence.     

Central Bank Independence in Transition Economies

The paper discusses recent changes in central bank laws and the relationship between inflation and central bank independence in transition economies. Two indices of legal independence are constructed, covering political and economic aspects of independence. Most of the countries experienced high-inflation episodes in the recent past and changes introduced to the laws after, or simultaneously, with stabilization programmes strengthened the position of the central banks. In further analysis, an inverse relationship emerges between inflation and indices of central bank independence. However, the robust relationship is present only at a high level of economic liberalization. This conclusion is supported by results from regressions on time-aggregated and panel data, even after controlling for the government fiscal position and the absence/presence of an IMF stabilization package.     

Adversarial and Amiable Inference in Medical Diagnosis,Reliability and Survival Analysis

In this paper, we develop a family of bivariate beta distributions that encapsulate both positive and negative correlations, and which can be of general interest for Bayesian inference. We then invoke a use of these bivariate distributions in two contexts. The first is diagnostic testing in medicine, threat detection and signal processing. The second is system survivability assessment, relevant to engineering reliability and to survival analysis in biomedicine. In diagnostic testing, one encounters two parameters that characterize the efficacy of the testing mechanism: test sensitivity and test specificity. These tend to be adversarial when their values are interpreted as utilities. In system survivability, the parameters of interest are the component reliabilities, whose values when interpreted as utilities tend to exhibit co‐operative (amiable) behavior. Besides probability modeling and Bayesian inference, this paper has a foundational import. Specifically, it advocates a conceptual change in how one may think about reliability and survival analysis. The philosophical writings of de Finetti, Kolmogorov, Popper and Savage, when brought to bear on these topics constitute the essence of this change. Its consequence is that we have at hand a defensible framework for invoking Bayesian inferential methods in diagnostics, reliability and survival analysis. Another consequence is a deeper appreciation of the judgment of independent lifetimes. Specifically, we make the important point that independent lifetimes entail at a minimum, a two‐stage hierarchical construction.     

Audit Partner Tenure and Independence in a Low Litigation Risk Setting

We investigate whether long audit partner tenures impair auditor independence, as proxied by the opinion of the audit report, with a sample of Spanish companies for the period: 2002–2010. The Spanish audit market constitutes an ideal setting in which to address this issue, as it is characterized by unusually lengthy engagements with the audit firm. The motivation relies, on the one hand, on the current discussion about the necessity to reinforce the independence of auditors and, on the other hand, on the very limited available research at the partner level. The main result is the lack of significant effects of partner tenure on independence. This finding is robust to various checks. Unlike prior research, we also address the joint effects of firm and partner tenure on independence. Results indicate that partner tenure does not compromise independence, even under long or extremely long audit firm tenures. These findings might have some interesting policy implications, in particular for the intense current debate on auditor rotation regimes which is taking place within the European Union.     

The Dissemination of Results from Supreme Audit Institutions: Independent Partners with the Media?

Maximising media coverage is one way for Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) to account for themselves and it has been argued that SAIs can become independent partners with the media. This strategy may appear appealing in particular when a response to audits is not compulsory. However, based on a case study of the Swedish National Audit Office (SNAO) in the years 2003–2007, this paper shows that several risks follow from a dissemination strategy focused on maximising media coverage. For example, it may result in an overly critical position in relation to the Executive, thereby challenging both SAI neutrality and SAI independence.     

Corporate governance,tourism growth and firm performance: Evidence from publicly listed tourism firms in five Middle Eastern countries

This study explores the under-researched relationship between corporate governance and firm performance in tourism companies. We employ instrumental variable modelling using 2SLS for publicly listed firms in five countries in the Middle East. Board independence is found to be positively related to firm performance and stock performance, suggesting that having independent directors among board members will improve overall firm performance. Board size shows opposing results: large boards enhance firm profitability; however, small boards exhibit more efficient stock performance. Finally, we support the tourism-led-growth hypothesis in our selected sample. These findings have empirical implications for policy makers, governments and academics.