Does personal background influence a finance minister to cook the books? An investigation of creative accounting in Swiss cantons

This article aims to identify the factors influencing the use of creative accounting in the public sector. Its distinctive feature is that it sheds light on creative accounting when used, not to hide public deficits, but to conceal surpluses. It especially explores the impact of the finance minister’s (FM)’s background on the phenomenon. We take advantage of the quasi-experimental settings of the Swiss cantons in which the financial management act sets out the possibility of implementing certain accounting gimmicks, including mainly additional ‘depreciation’ charges. These charges, which are depreciations in name only, enable the FM to artificially inflate expenses, thus increasing the deficit or reducing the surplus. Our panel data set of the 26 cantons over the period 1980–2012 includes a new data set of creative accounting and of 116 cantonal FMs. Our results indicate that the FMs cook the books irrespective of their personal or ideological background with the exception that trained economists tend to apply creative accounting more. Additionally, stringent fiscal rules urge FMs towards more surplus-hiding accounting.     

Expose succinct d'une theorie generale de la valeur

Sans résumé     

ARE FINANCIAL AND SOCIAL EFFICIENCY MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE? A CASE STUDY OF VIETNAMESE MICROFINANCE INSTITUTIONS

A major debate in microfinance focuses on the existence of a trade‐off between the financial sustainability of microfinance institutions (MFIs) and their outreach to poor clients. This paper adds to this debate by analyzing whether financial and social efficiency are mutually exclusive in a context of implicit subsidies by the state and international donors. We use data from a sample of 28 Vietnamese MFIs and apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify the existence of a trade‐off. Our analysis shows that for Vietnamese MFIs financial and social efficiency are not related. We interpret this as evidence for the fact that there is no support to believe that there is such a trade‐off. Subsidies, based on which most Vietnamese MFIs currently operate, helps them to show high financial efficiency, while at the same time being able to attain their social goals. Nevertheless, this model may not be sustainable in the long‐term.     

A result similar to the Odlyzko's ‘Paris Metro Pricing’

The two-stage competition is investigated in which two Internet Service Providers (ISP) choose sequentially their capacities and then their prices while facing a flow of new customers who decide to belong to one ISP or the other on the basis of a comparison of access prices and of expected congestion rates. At the equilibrium of the game a vertical differentiation between the Internet Service Providers endogenously emerges: the firm which provides the larger network has the lowest rate of congestion and the highest access price. The ISP providing the smallest network (thus the most congested) earns the larger profit. It will be noticed that the spontaneous functioning of oligopolistic competition produces a result similar to the Odlyzko's ‘Paris Metro Pricing’: at the equilibrium the two competitors propose different prices and rates of congestion, the most expensive one being also the least congested.     

Normative and positive theories of public finance: contrasting Musgrave and Buchanan

This paper assesses James M. Buchanan's claim of following a positive approach in stark contrast to the normative approach to public finance of Richard A. Musgrave. The goal of this paper is to shed light on the foundations of modern American public finance by analysing one aspect of the methodology of its two most prominent fathers. I show (1) that it is difficult to distinguish Musgrave's and Buchanan's theories of public goods along the positive/normative dividing line and (2) that Buchanan's theory can also be considered normative. In the first three parts, I follow the Weberian methodological tradition in looking for value judgements in the theories, and by reflecting on the nature of ideal types. In the last part, I propose a broader interpretation of Buchanan's methodological stance within the academic context of the 1960s.     

Macroeconomic forecast accuracy in a data‐rich environment

The performance of six classes of models in forecasting different types of economic series is evaluated in an extensive pseudo out‐of‐sample exercise. One of these forecasting models, regularized data‐rich model averaging (RDRMA), is new in the literature. The findings can be summarized in four points. First, RDRMA is difficult to beat in general and generates the best forecasts for real variables. This performance is attributed to the combination of regularization and model averaging, and it confirms that a smart handling of large data sets can lead to substantial improvements over univariate approaches. Second, the ARMA(1,1) model emerges as the best to forecast inflation changes in the short run, while RDRMA dominates at longer horizons. Third, the returns on the S&P 500 index are predictable by RDRMA at short horizons. Finally, the forecast accuracy and the optimal structure of the forecasting equations are quite unstable over time.     

A new contribution to the ‘Paris Metro Pricing’ proposal

Using the concept of the ‘Paris Metro Pricing’, we will show that, when the distribution of the capacity between sub-networks leads to any loss of technical effectiveness and when a traditional condition on the ‘hazard rate’ is checked, it is always optimal for the monopolist to subdivide his main network in as many sub-networks as there are different types of net surfers.     

Arguing over Goals for Negotiation: Adopting an Assumption-Based Argumentation Decision Support System

Computational models of argumentation has been put forward as a promising approach to support decision making. In this context several recent works have proposed argumentation-based frameworks for decision making. In this paper we describe an application based on an argumentation-based mechanism for decision-making to concede. Adopting the assumption-based approach of argumentation, we propose an argumentation framework in which preferences are attached to goals. Arguments are defined as tree-like structures. Our framework is equipped with a computational counterpart for solving a decision problem, modeling the intuition that high-ranked goals are preferred to low-ranked goals which can be withdrawn. In this way, our framework suggests some decisions and provides an interactive and intelligible explanation of this choice. Our implementation, called MARGO, has been used for service selection within the ArguGRID project. We illustrate our approach with an industrial application, and illustrate the operation of the system with a running example.