The Monetary Multiplier

After modelling the circulation of money as a Markov chain, a special multiplier is set up, explained and investigated. It describes, in mathematical terms, the enlivening course of new money, or the propagation of a monetary injection into a given economy, which David Hume inspected in his famous essay. Some explanation is given to why he considered it, justly, as a transitory phenomenon.     

SOCIAL DISCOUNTING AND THE LONG RATE OF INTEREST

The well‐known theorem of Dybvig, Ingersoll, and Ross shows that the long zero‐coupon rate can never fall. This result, which, although undoubtedly correct, has been regarded by many as surprising, stems from the implicit assumption that the long‐term discount function has an exponential tail. We revisit the problem in the setting of modern interest rate theory, and show that if the long “simple” interest rate (or Libor rate) is finite, then this rate (unlike the zero‐coupon rate) acts viably as a state variable, the value of which can fluctuate randomly in line with other economic indicators. New interest rate models are constructed, under this hypothesis and certain generalizations thereof, that illustrate explicitly the good asymptotic behavior of the resulting discount bond systems. The conditions necessary for the existence of such “hyperbolic” and “generalized hyperbolic” long rates are those of so‐called social discounting, which allow for long‐term cash flows to be treated as broadly “just as important” as those of the short or medium term. As a consequence, we are able to provide a consistent arbitrage‐free valuation framework for the cost‐benefit analysis and risk management of long‐term social projects, such as those associated with sustainable energy, resource conservation, and climate change.     

Why No Shop Committees in America: A Narrative History

This article explores the origins of the prohibition against shop committees in modern labor law. It identifies World War I as the crystallizing moment and argues that shop committees might have become a permanent feature of American industrial relations at that time but for a series of contingent events arising in particular from the great steel strike of 1919. Historians have missed this linkage, the article concludes, because in the intervening 1920s, employee representation became disassociated from industrial democracy, with the notable exception of the railroads, where blatantly antiunion use of employee representation prompted the judicial condemnation of employer domination of labor organizations that provided the doctrinal foundation for Section 8a(2) of the National Labor Relations Act.     

Preposterior analysis for option pricing

The second partial derivative of a European-style vanilla option with respect to the current price of the underlying asset—the option gamma—defines a probability density function for the current underlying price. By use of entropy maximization it is possible to obtain an option gamma, from which the associated option pricing formula can be recovered by integration. A number of pricing formulae are obtained in this manner, corresponding to different specifications of the constraints. When the available market information consists solely of a set of traded option prices, the entropic formulation leads to a model-independent calibration procedure. The result thus obtained also allows one to recover the relevant Greeks.     

External auditors' willingness to rely on the work of internal auditors: The influence of work style and barriers to cooperation

The extent to which external auditors rely on the work of internal auditors is an important judgment. Recently, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has recommended that external auditors “rely (more) on the work of others” to reduce the greater-than-expected costs associated with compliance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. Reliance decisions, however, are complex decision tasks that require professional judgment and may be influenced by a number of factors, both external (environmental) and internal (cognitive and affective), including the auditors' working style and pervious experiences related to barriers to external/internal auditor cooperation (e.g., previously experienced low versus high internal auditor objectivity and/or competence). We experimentally examine these influences in our research reported herein. Consistent with expectations, external auditors' work styles significantly influenced the extent of planned audit testing, internal auditor reliance judgments, and interpretation of analytical procedures results. Auditors' perceptions about internal auditors' competence and objectivity, developed over years of interaction, also influenced these judgments, and interacted with work styles. Inconsistent with expectations, auditor rank (senior versus manager) did not influence judgments.