The Effects of Auditor Social and Human Capital on Auditor Compensation: Evidence from the Italian Small Audit Firm Market

Abstract

This study examines whether social and human capital influence the compensation of individual auditors in the small audit firm market. We employ a sample of Italian auditors and use measures from the network and auditing literatures to capture their professional connections, representing social capital, and their industry expertise, representing human capital. Our findings show a positive and economically meaningful association between these individual attributes and auditor compensation. We run several tests to address potential endogeneity issues in our research design. Our results suggest that, in the small audit market, clients perceive as valuable those auditors with higher social and human capital, and as a result, are willing to pay a premium for these specific auditor attributes.     

投入产出表和社会核算矩阵更新研究评述

本文对投入产出(IO)表和社会核算矩阵(SAM)更新方法进行了归类和比较评述。主要观点:第一,已有的IO表或SAM更新方法主要分为统计学方法、优化法和宏观经济学分析方法;第二,以现代经济学为基础的更新技术应引起高度重视;第三,在非普查年份,统计部门应制度化地开展重点IO系数调查,并将相关数据及时公开化;第四,在实际操作中应正确认识更新中已知信息的地位,并注意更新中的保号性问题。     

社会地位对宏观经济变量的动态影响——基于两部门搜索均衡模型的研究

本文将失业理论的搜索模型与社会地位结合起来考察社会地位的动态影响。研究发现社会地位引入效用函数等价于代表性家庭时间偏好率的降低,利用对数效用函数,得到经济系统均衡状态存在的唯一性。在均衡状态下,更强的社会地位意识意味着更高的储蓄率和资本积累,以及提供更多的社会空闲职位、更高的工资、更高的就业率、更为宽松的劳动力市场和更低的利率。     

加强社保基金管理，提高投资收益

2006年上海社保基金案东窗事发，涉案金额达百亿人民币，由于社保基金牵涉老百姓日后生计，关系到社会稳定，一时之间，该案成为社会关注的焦点。但不可否认，在我国社保资金存在巨大缺口的压力下，将社保基金用于投资赚取收益并没有错。这一案件提醒我们，不能因为社保基金的特殊性，就忽略社保基金的投资管理。随着我国社保基金规模不断变大，投资领域和方式的不断出新，加强社保基金投资管理，非常关键。     

The effectiveness of government spending on education and health care in developing and transition economies

Recent studies show that corruption is associated with higher military spending [Eur. J. Polit. Econ. 17 (2001) 794] and lower government spending on education and health care [J. Publ. Econ. 69 (1998) 263]. This suggests that policies aimed at reducing corruption may lead to changes in the composition of government outlays toward more productive spending. However, little empirical evidence has been presented to support the claim that public spending improves education and health indicators in developing and transition countries. This paper uses cross-sectional data for 50 such countries to show that increased public expenditure on education and health care is associated with improvements in both access to and attainment in schools, and reduces mortality rates for infants and children. The education regressions are robust to different specifications, but the relationship between health care spending and mortality rates is weaker.     

The politics of redistributive social insurance

This paper analyses the political support for a social insurance that includes elements of redistribution when there exists an imperfect private insurance alternative. Individuals differ both in their income and risk. The social insurance is compulsory and charges an income-related contribution with pooling of risks. The private insurance is voluntary and charges a contribution based on individual risks. However due to the adverse selection problem, private insurance companies provide only partial insurance. Adopting a non-expected utility model, we show that there is a general majority support for social insurance and that this support is increasing with risk aversion. We also show that a mixed insurance is politically impossible, regardless of the degree of redistribution of social insurance and the joint distribution of risk and income in the population. Lastly, we analyse how the political support for social insurance is affected by any change in its redistributive component and the possibility of using genetic tests.     

Social learning with private and common values

Summary. We consider an environment where individuals sequentially choose among several actions. The payoff to an individual depends on her action choice, the state of the world, and an idiosyncratic, privately observed preference shock. Under weak conditions, as the number of individuals increases, the sequence of choices always reveals the state of the world. This contrasts with the familiar result for pure common-value environments where the state is never learned, resulting in herds or informational cascades. The medium run dynamics to convergence can be very complex and non-monotone: posterior beliefs may be concentrated on a wrong state for a long time, shifting suddenly to the correct state.Received: 6 January 2005, Revised: 5 May 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D82.Jacob K. Goeree: Correspondence toFinancial support from the National Science Foundation NSF (SBR-0098400 and SES-0079301) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Richard McKelvey posthumously for insights and conjectures about information aggregation that helped shape our thinking about the problem. We also acknowledge helpful comments from Kim Border, Tilman Börgers, Bogachen Celen, Luis Corchon, Matthew Jackson and seminar participants at University College London, the University of Arizona, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, the California Institute of Technology, the 2003 annual meeting of ESA in Pittsburgh, the 2003 Malaga Workshop on Social Choice and Welfare Economics, the 2003 SAET meetings in Rhodos, and the 2003 ESSET meetings in Gerzensee.     

Wealth and sustainable development: the role of David Pearce

Green net national product was thought to be one way of measuring sustainable income. However, David Pearce understood that a better measure of sustainable development was to look at what a generation is leaving in form of capital assets to later generations. In this article, his arguments and insights are highlighted against recent theoretical advances.     

企业家社会资本及其与企业绩效的关系--研究综述与理论分析框架

本文从分析企业家社会资本入手,对社会资本的概念界定做了综述,进一步探讨了企业家社会资本的内涵,提出了企业家社会资本影响企业绩效的机理以及理论分析框架--企业家社会资本是通过获取企业所需的关键资源,再将资源通过内部学习和整合机制转化为动态能力,进而保持企业竞争优势、提升企业绩效.     

Reinforcing the Link Between Contributions and Pensions: The Effect of the Population Aging

In this paper, we analyze a majority voting process on the earnings-related part of pension benefits in a Social Security system with flexible retirement. We show that the aging of the population may make it easier to implement one of the proposed reforms to achieve a delay in the average retirement age of workers, to reinforce the link between contributions and pensions.