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Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Do we know how much poverty there is?

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. The sensitivity analysis is applied to household survey data from 17 Latin American countries, which include 92% of the population in the region. By varying these parameters within reasonable boundaries we found that the proportion of poor could be said to be either 20% or 66%. Furthermore, the ranking of countries with respect to poverty is highly sensitive to the underlying choices for poverty measurement. We also perform sensitivity analysis to the use of different poverty lines and poverty indexes, which are issues that have been explored much more in the literature. Even after considering these elements, the most sensitive choice appears to be the method used to adjust for misreporting. These findings point, first, to the need to be explicit about the underlying assumptions behind poverty statistics, second, to the need to perform sensitivity analysis when estimating levels and trends in poverty, and third, to the importance of establishing a set of conventions that would be accepted as “best practices” in estimating poverty indexes.     

The Effects of Alternative Justification Memos on the Judgments of Audit Reviewees and Reviewers

Prior research on justification has typically focused on the differences in judgments between auditors required, or not required, to justify their decisions. However, justification memos can be prepared using different approaches. In this study we examine the impact of using three justification memos: supporting, balanced, and component. Using a comprehensive control environment case based on an actual client that experienced fraud, we find that the justification memo used can affect the judgments of auditors preparing the memos as well as the judgments of auditors who review their work. Specifically, the results indicate that auditors using an unrestricted component memo, who were required to write memos for components of their task by providing important positive and negative evidence, thought that the firm's control environment was more likely to prevent fraud as compared with the supporting and balanced memo groups. Additional analyses suggest that the reason for this result is that an unrestricted component memo focuses auditors' attention on a larger percentage of positive control environment characteristics when a firm's underlying evidence set is mostly positive. This may be problematic because firms can have more positive than negative control environment characteristics, even when fraud is present.     

The trilemma of a monetary union: Another impossible trinity

A monetary union among autonomous countries cannot simultaneously maintain an independent monetary policy, national fiscal sovereignty and a no-bailout clause. These three features make up an impossible trinity, and attempts to preserve all three concurrently will ultimately end in failure. In order to save EMU, one of these three must be abandoned.     

Technological change and the growing inequality in managerial compensation

Three of the most fundamental changes in US corporations since the early 1970s have been (1) the increased importance of organizational capital in production, (2) the increase in managerial income inequality and pay-performance sensitivity, and (3) the secular decrease in labor market reallocation. Our paper develops a simple explanation for these changes: a shift in the composition of productivity growth away from vintage-specific to general growth. This shift has stimulated the accumulation of organizational capital in existing firms and reduced the need for reallocating workers to new firms. We characterize the optimal managerial compensation contract when firms accumulate organizational capital but risk-averse managers cannot commit to staying with the firm. A calibrated version of the model reproduces the increase in managerial compensation inequality and the increased sensitivity of pay to performance in the data over the last three decades. This increased sensitivity of compensation to performance provides large, successful firms with the glue to retain their managers and the organizational capital embedded in them.