IFACnet——一个属于全球职业会计师的专用搜索引擎

IFACnet是国际会计师联合会(IFAC)及其13个成员组织于2006年10月发起设立的一个全球会计职业搜索引擎,网址为www.ifacnet.com。     

Google IPO:搜索引擎的资本变数

随着 Google 的上市,高科技股市将迎来前所未有的资本狂欢。在搜索引擎所及的各个角落,到处都渗透着资本的气息     

Restatement costs and reporting bias

Financial restatements are costly, but frequent, events and many firms restate several times. We explore why rational managers engage in misreporting despite the costly consequences. To guide our analysis, we build a parsimonious model of reporting bias and the cost of restating. In our model, the observed cost of a restatement conveys information about the true cost of biasing financial statements, which the manager incorporates into the optimal choice of bias. A restatement hence offers managers an opportunity to learn about the true cost of reporting bias, which allows them to update their biasing strategy if the observed cost differs from the expected. We test the model's predictions by analyzing how firms' accruals quality changes after observing the costs attached to restating, which we measure as the market loss following a restatement scaled by the restatement's net income effect. We find that future accruals quality is increasing in the cost of restating and the change in the cost of restating. Consistent with our stylized model, our results indicate that rational managers use the insights from prior restatements to improve their future bias strategy.     

Immigration and equity home bias

Why do investors hold such large positions in domestic equity when there are gains to be made from international diversification? This equity home bias puzzle has received considerable attention in the literature, with asymmetric information on domestic and foreign assets (whether by individual choice or by market imperfection) emerging as the most plausible explanation. What happens when we consider a subset of investors whose information sets are closer to investors in foreign countries? I assess the relationship between immigration and equity home bias and find that inward migration is positively correlated with increased foreign equity positions and reduced home bias. Looking across income groups, outward migration reduces home bias for relatively rich countries, but may actually increase home bias when migration occurs to or from a developing country. These results suggest that immigration generates a positive externality of increased information flows for developed countries, but not for developing nations. The effects of immigration on investment are strongest within the Euro-Zone, suggesting that this positive externality of immigration is largest when barriers to portfolio diversification (such as currency risk) are lowest.     

The home-institution bias

We document a new investor preference we call the home-institution bias. Whereas the home-asset bias is a preference for domestic assets, the home-institution bias is a preference for domestic financial institutions. Our data come from Sweden’s government-mandated retirement system. In cross-fund regressions, we find that funds offered by Swedish institutions received around 10 times more money than similar funds offered by foreign institutions. We show that this preference for home institutions is distinct from the home-asset preference, is not driven by information asymmetries, and is consistent with an underlying preference by individuals to deal with the familiar. Cross-individual regressions also support a behavioral explanation because the home-institution bias is strongest among financially-unsophisticated and provincial investors.     

Word-of-mouth communication and search

We develop a word-of-mouth search model where information flows from the old to the new generation for an experience good with unknown quality. We study the features of the social network that determine product quality and welfare and characterize the demand-side (under provision of search effort) and supply-side (inefficient entry by firms) factors that result in inefficiencies. One striking result is to show that the more connected but also the less-unequal a friendship network is (in the sense of second order stochastic dominance of the degree distribution), the less can disreputable (low-quality) firms thrive in equilibrium.     

Prominence and consumer search

This article examines the implications of “prominence” in search markets. We model prominence by supposing that the prominent firm will be sampled first by all consumers. If there are no systematic quality differences among firms, we find that the prominent firm will charge a lower price than its less prominent rivals. Making a firm prominent will typically lead to higher industry profit but lower consumer surplus and welfare. The model is extended by introducing heterogeneous product qualities, in which case the firm with the highest‐quality product has the greatest incentive to become prominent, and making it prominent will boost industry profit, consumer surplus, and welfare.     

Equity home bias and corporate disclosure

I show that more comprehensive corporate disclosure reduces investors’ uncertainty about domestic companies’ payoffs at no cost, thereby decreasing investors’ equity home bias toward a country. Since investors should base their investment decisions on valid and easily interpretable company information only, more comprehensive disclosure will reduce the home bias only if domestic securities law is sufficiently stratified and domestic companies use international accounting standards. Using panel data for 38 countries from 2003 to 2008 I find that more comprehensive disclosure reduces investors’ home bias, though significantly only for countries that sufficiently enforce their securities law and implement international accounting standards.     

Management disclosure bias and audit services

This paper considers the level of bias observed in management disclosures of earnings forecasts and historic earnings data in Australian prospectuses. Management forecasts and naïve forecasts derived from managements’ normalised historic data are analysed. A key focus is upon the possible association between such forecast bias and differential audit services performed upon the data. Audit firm size and level of engagement are modelled against bias. The full sample revealed no overestimation bias for any of the forecast models, but underestimation was observed for elements of the management and random walk naïve forecasts. Cross-sectionally, a significant association was observed between forecast bias and audit firm size across all three forecast models. Specifically, the audit firm size variable (Non Big-5/Big-5) was inversely associated with the extent to which forecasted and normalised historic earnings data were upwardly biased. On the other hand, the level of engagement was not a significant discriminator for forecast bias. These outcomes are contrasted against others reported elsewhere in the literature and suggest a risk in generalising across contexts. The findings imply a level of ‘disclosure management’ regarding company IPO forecasts and normalised historic accounting data, with forecast overestimation and error size more extreme when the monitoring expertise and/or reputation of auditors is lower (JEL D80, G14, M41, N27).     

Familiarity bias and earnings-based equity valuation

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This study examines whether investors’ familiarity bias affects their earnings-based equity valuation. Building on theoretical and empirical...     

Patriotic name bias and stock returns

Companies whose names contain the words “America(n)” or “USA” earn positive abnormal returns of about 6% per annum during World War II, the Korean War, and the War on Terrorism. These abnormal returns are not realized immediately upon the outbreak of each of the wars but are accumulated gradually during wartime. Given that no such effect is observed for the Vietnam War, we hypothesize that major, victorious wars arouse investors' patriotic feelings and cause them to gradually and perhaps subconsciously gravitate toward stocks whose name has a patriotic flavor.     

Survivor bias and mutual fund performance

Mutual fund attrition can create problems for a researcher becausefunds that disappear tend to do so due to poor performance.In this article we estimate the size of the bias by trackingall funds that existed at the end of 1976. When a fund mergeswe calculate the return, taking into account the merger terms.This allows a precise estimate of survivorship bias. In addition,we examine characteristics of both mutual funds that mergerand their partner funds. Estimates of survivorship bias overdifferent horizons and using different models to evaluate performanceare provided.     

On quality bias and inflation targets

Does Ramsey optimal policy call for adjusting the inflation target by the size of the quality bias in measured inflation? We find that if it is nonhedonic (or sticker) prices that are sticky, the conventional view, according to which it is optimal to adjust the inflation target upward by the size of the quality bias, is misguided. Furthermore, we establish that quality improvement is crucial for the determination of the optimal inflation target even in the absence of quality bias. In this case, if nonhedonic prices are sticky, sticker prices should fall at the rate of quality growth.     

Ordered search

I present an ordered‐search model that, in contrast with random‐search models, yields an intuitively appealing equilibrium in which there is price dispersion, prices and profits decline in the order of search and consumers with lower search costs search longer and obtain better deals. These features of the search equilibrium hold regardless of whether consumers are informed of prices prior to searching.     

Prices and heterogeneous search costs

We study price formation in a model of consumer search for differentiated products in which consumers have heterogeneous search costs. We provide conditions under which a pure‐strategy symmetric Nash equilibrium exists and is unique. Search costs affect two margins—the intensive search margin (or search intensity) and the extensive search margin (or the decision to search rather than to not search at all). These two margins affect the elasticity of demand in opposite directions and whether lower search costs result in higher or lower prices depends on the properties of the search cost density.     

Stock market openness and analyst forecast bias

Biases in analysts’ forecasts can be reduced not only through regulation but also through market mechanisms. In 2014, China launched the Shanghai-Hong Kong Connect program, which opened part of its domestic equity market to foreign investors. The implementation of this program provides a quasi-natural experimental setting to explore whether stock market openness plays a governance role in brokerage firms and minimizes their affiliated analysts' forecast biases. We find that the participation of foreign institutional investors mitigates the forecast biases of affiliated analysts. We also show that these analysts exert more significant effort by conducting more site visits. Our findings suggest that market liberalization can help improving the quality of analysts’ forecasts.     

Investor sentiment and management earnings forecast bias

This study investigates whether investor sentiment is associated with behavioral bias in managers’ annual earnings forecasts that are generally issued early in the year when uncertainty is relatively high. I provide evidence that management earnings forecast optimism increases with investor sentiment. Furthermore, I find that managers’ annual earnings forecasts are more pessimistic during low‐sentiment periods than during normal‐sentiment periods. Since managers lack incentives to further deflate stock prices during a low‐sentiment period, this evidence indicates that sentiment‐related management earnings forecast bias is likely to be unintentional. In addition, I find that the relationship between management earnings forecast bias and investor sentiment is stronger for firms with higher uncertainty, consistent with investor sentiment having a greater influence on management earnings forecasts when uncertainty is higher.     

Australia's home bias and cross border taxation

The paper examines the impact of cross border taxation on Australia's free float home bias. The paper controls for various sources of home bias including familiarity, explicit cost, diversification motives and governance issues when examining the impact of cross border tax variables. In our sample of 44 foreign countries where Australia invests over the period 2001 to 2009, about 66% (82%) withhold taxes on realized capital gains (dividends) of foreign investors. A tax credit variable for foreign taxes paid on dividends is constructed and found to be statistically significant in reducing home bias.     

Selection bias and the perils of benchmarking

To find the secrets of business success, what could be more natural than studying successful businesses? In fact, nothing could be more dangerous, warns this Stanford professor. Generalizing from the examples of successful companies is like generalizing about New England weather from data taken only in the summer. That's essentially what businesspeople do when they learn from good examples and what consultants, authors, and researchers do when they study only existing companies or--worse yet--only high-performing companies. They reach conclusions from unrepresentative data samples, falling into the classic statistical trap of selection bias. Drawing on a wealth of case studies, for instance, one researcher concluded that great leaders share two key traits: They persist, often despite initial failures, and they are able to persuade others to join them. But those traits are also the hallmarks of spectacularly unsuccessful entrepreneurs, who must persist in the face of failure to incur large losses and must be able to persuade others to pour their money down the drain. To discover what makes a business successful, then, managers should look at both successes and failures. Otherwise, they will overvalue risky business practices, seeing only those companies that won big and not the ones that lost dismally. They will not be able to tell if their current good fortune stems from smart business practices or if they are actually coasting on past accomplishments or good luck. Fortunately, economists have developed relatively simple tools that can correct for selection bias even when data about failed companies are hard to come by. Success may be inspirational, but managers are more likely to find the secrets of high performance if they give the stories of their competitors'failures as full a hearing as they do the stories of dazzling successes.     

整合经理在并购整合中的角色和职责

从并购频繁发生的西方国家的整合工作实践来看，一人新的管理职位－ 整合经理正在应运而生。目前，在欧美国家整合经理已成为整合工作的核心人物，在并购中发挥着举足重的作用。本将对整合经理的存在需要、角色定位、选拔标准、职责规划等问题进行分析，力图色勒出其在企业并购中的地位和活动情况，为我国企业并购活动提供一点可资借鉴的信息。