Comments on Orphanides and Williams’ “Robust monetary policy”

Comments on the paper by Orphanides and Williams from the November 2006 Carnegie-Rochester conference.     

中注协关于印发《中国注册会计师协会关于推动会计师事务所做大做强的意见》的通知

各省、自治区、直辖市注册会计师协会:为适应我国社会主义市场经济发展需要,贯彻落实国家“十一五”规划对行业提出的新要求,服务于企业“走出去”战略,进一步推进注册会计师行业建设,实现行业做大做强和国际化发展的目     

Sustainability reporting: The role of “Search”, “Experience” and “Credence” information

Corporate sustainability reporting quality has been frequently criticised as being unbalanced, presenting an overly positive view or failing to address material issues. The purpose of this article is to provide a fresh explanation for poor quality sustainability reporting and to propose how quality issues may be addressed. The theoretical framework combines the legitimacy and accountability perspectives using Akerlof's (1970) Market for Lemons theory. Akerlof's approach is extended by differentiating between three types of information in sustainability reports namely search, experience and credence. The article concludes that the type of information must be considered when determining measures to improve report quality.     

Firm age and the evolution of borrowing costs: Evidence from Japanese small firms

This paper investigates how firms’ borrowing costs evolve as they age. Using a new panel data set of about 100,000 bank-dependent small firms for 1997–2002 and focusing on the channel of “adaptation” (i.e., surviving firms’ borrowing costs decline as they age) and that of “selection” (i.e., total borrowing costs decline as defaulting firms exit), we find that the reputation hypothesis suggested by Diamond (1989) provides a more plausible explanation of the downward sloping age profile of borrowing costs than the firm dynamics (Cooley and Quadrini, 2001) or the relationship banking (Boot and Thakor, 1994) hypothesis. In addition, we examine whether the firm selection process in Japan has been natural or unnatural. Our findings suggest that it has been natural in that firms with lower quality are separated, face higher borrowing costs, and are eventually forced to exit, which contrasts with the results of previous studies on credit allocations in Japan, including Peek and Rosengren (2005). Further, we find that the evolution of borrowing costs is partially due to selection but is mainly attributable to adaptation.