Riding out of a financial crisis: The joint effect of trust and corporate ownership

We study how generalized trust shapes the ability of firms with different ownership forms to obtain trade financing and perform during a financial crisis. Exploiting geographic variations in trust across Italian regions and the occurrence of the 2008-09 financial crisis in a difference-in-differences setting, we show that generalized trust makes family firms less able to obtain trade financing during the crisis. This finding maps into performance results: trust alleviates the negative effect of a crisis for non-family firms, while it aggravates the negative effect for family firms. This latter result depends crucially on a firm's corporate governance: trust does not harm family firms whose board is open to non-family directors. Collectively, our findings illustrate how culture interacts with corporate attributes in shaping a firm's prospects.     

Corporate social responsibility and the assessment by auditors of the risk of material misstatement

This paper investigates whether, and how, firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance influences the auditor's assessment of the risk of material misstatement, whether due to fraud or error, at the financial statement level by analysing their pricing decision (i.e., audit fees). Using a panel data set of 12,330 firms from 28 countries over the period 2003–2012 and different measures of CSR performance, we find a U‐shaped relationship between firms’ CSR performance and audit fees. This result suggests that there is an optimal level of CSR performance that minimizes the auditor's assessment of the risk of material misstatement, which in turn lowers the need for greater auditor effort; that is why auditors charge firms significantly less when their CSR performance is at the optimal level. Finally, we also show that the optimal level of CSR performance varies with the degree of environmental dynamism, ownership concentration and leverage.     

Inflation,Output Growth,and Their Uncertainties: Empirical Evidence for a Causal Relationship from European Emerging Economies

In this paper, we analyze the causality among inflation, output growth, and their uncertainties in all European countries with emerging economies. For these countries, high uncertainty regarding economic growth during the current economic and financial crisis that started in 2008 caused their governments to increase their efforts to sustain growth, and to maintain a low level of inflation. Of the twelve possible hypotheses regarding the causal relationships among inflation, output growth, and their uncertainties, we consider five relationships for which we find strong theoretical arguments and empirical evidence in the literature. The empirical evidence strongly supports the Friedman-Ball hypothesis that inflation Granger-causes inflation uncertainty. For the other four tested hypotheses, fewer significant causal relationships are obtained.