有条件会计稳健性与无条件会计稳健性分析——理解稳健性的新切入点

本文认为,当前对于会计稳健性的理论分歧,主要是由于混淆了有条件的会计稳健性和无条件的会计稳健性。有条件的稳健性起源于契约中的委托代理关系,并受到诉讼、管制和税收的影响,是会计对不确定经济环境的一种谨慎反应,它能够维护契约执行、落实受托责任、缓解代理冲突,是降低代理成本的有效的制度安排。无条件的稳健性主要是因应管制和税收的需要而产生,随着经济环境的变化其存在的合理性受到质疑。有条件的会计稳健性和无条件的会计稳健性并非相互独立,而是相互联系、相互制约,无条件的稳健性比有条件的稳健性优先,但后者对前者也会产生影响。     

International Differences in Conditional Conservatism – The Role of Unconditional Conservatism and Income Smoothing

Abstract

Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad vs. good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings attributes internationally. First, using panel data, we investigate whether competing earnings attributes such as unconditional conservatism and income smoothing affect conditional conservatism and its international differences. We find that these attributes are predictably correlated with conditional conservatism. Second, we address the question whether income smoothing and conditional conservatism are two fundamentally different earnings attributes. We show theoretically that both attributes yield different earnings distributions and that the motivations for producing earnings which possess these attributes differ. To test these predictions empirically, we calculate firm-specific time-series measures of asymmetric timeliness, using a novel trigonometric measure based on the standard Basu (1997)-type regression. Using this cross-sectional data, we test whether conditional conservatism and income smoothing are different and find them to be only weakly correlated for a broad international sample. Also, we demonstrate that income smoothing explains international differences in conditional conservatism. Finally, we estimate simple determinant models of conditional conservatism and income smoothing, showing that both earnings attributes are driven by different explanatory firm-level factors: Conditional conservatism increases with the importance of debt financing, while income smoothing increases with the importance of dividends. Despite some important limitations, we believe our results to be meaningful because they show that cross-country differences in conditional conservatism are influenced by the effects of other accounting properties, predominantly income smoothing. Especially, legal regime appears to drive income smoothing while losing its explanatory power for conditional conservatism when firm-specific factors are controlled for.     

A Cross‐Country Analysis of the Risk Factors for Depression at the Micro and Macro Levels

Past research has provided evidence of the role of some personal characteristics (age, gender, religion) as risk factors for depression. However, few researchers have jointly examined the specific impact of each characteristic and whether country characteristics (economic performance and others environmental factors) change the probability of being depressed. In general, this is due to the use of single‐country databases. The aim of this article is to extend previous findings by employing a much larger dataset and including the above‐mentioned country effects. We estimate probit models with country effects (model I) and we also explore linkages between specific environmental factors and depression (model II includes variables such as per capita Gross Domestic Product and the GINI index). The dataset for this research comes from the 2007 GALLUP Public Opinion Poll that allows us to consider a large and widely heterogeneous set of micro‐data. Findings indicate that depression is positively related to being a woman, adulthood, divorce, widowhood, unemployment, and low income. Moreover, we provide evidence of the significant association between economic performance and depression. Inequality raises the probability of being depressed, specially for those living in urban areas. Finally, we find that some population characteristics such as age distribution and religious affiliation facilitate depression.     

The Effect of Religion on Accounting Conservatism

This paper investigates whether religiosity, a key informal institutional factor, strongly influences a firm’s adoption of accounting conservatism. Using a sample from the U.S. stock market, we find that firms located in geographic areas with higher levels of religiosity tend to exhibit greater accounting conservatism. Further tests show that this effect is through the channel of engaging managers in activities that emphasize firms’ long-term growth, concern stakeholder interests, and avoid the risk of litigation. Moreover, we demonstrate that it is the religious environment in an area rather than the personal religious belief of a CEO that drives our baseline results. Finally, a supplementary test suggests that religiosity increases not only the conditional (ex post) conservatism of firms but their unconditional (ex ante) conservatism as well.     

The Effects of Conservative Reporting on Investor Disagreement

We examine whether the level of a firm's conditional conservatism affects investor disagreement around earnings announcement dates. Investor disagreement is relevant for its repercussions on stock market efficiency. However, the literature related to the effect of firms’ reporting policies on disagreement is scant. Prior research suggests that conservatism, by requiring higher verifiability of profits, constrains earnings overstatements and encourages more complete revelations of losses, thus improving the information environment. In this paper, we further hypothesize that these effects of conservatism enhance news credibility and decrease information asymmetry, particularly for bad news announcements. This results in a lower disagreement and improved interpretation of earnings news. We consistently find that conservatism measures are negatively associated with proxies of announcement-time investor disagreement and that this effect is stronger when the firm is reporting bad news. Additional analyses indicate that the impact of conservatism is stronger when market surprise to the announcement is greater, while it is weaker in the presence of frequent and precise voluntary disclosure that preempts the earnings announcement. Finally, we show that a higher percentage of institutional investors’ ownership and a higher level of commitment to conservatism reinforce the impact of the latter.     

The Basu Measure as an Indicator of Conditional Conservatism: Evidence from UK Earnings Components

Following the work of Basu in 1997, the excess of the sensitivity of accounting earnings to negative share return over its sensitivity to positive share return (the Basu coefficient) has been interpreted as an indicator of conditional accounting conservatism. Although this interpretation is supported by substantial evidence that the Basu coefficient is associated with likely demands for conservatism, concerns have arisen that it may reflect factors not directly related to conservatism, and that this may adversely affect its validity as an indicator of that phenomenon. We argue that evidence on the validity of the Basu coefficient as an indicator of conditional conservatism can be obtained by disaggregating earnings into components, classifying those components by whether or not they are likely to be affected by conditional conservatism, and examining whether the Basu coefficient arises primarily from components likely to be affected by conditional conservatism. We implement this procedure for UK firms reporting under FRS 3: Reporting Financial Performance from 1992 to 2004. Although a substantial proportion of the Basu coefficient emanates from cash flow from operating and investing activities (CFOI), which cannot directly reflect accounting conservatism, its incidence across other components of earnings is predominantly within those components likely to be affected by conditional conservatism. Also, although the bias documented by Patatoukas and Thomas in 2009 is present in all of our aggregate earnings measures, it is heavily concentrated in the CFOI component of earnings and largely absent from components classified as likely to be affected by conditional conservatism. With the important caveat that researchers should test the robustness of their results to the exclusion of the element of the Basu coefficient due to cash flows, our findings are consistent with the conditional conservatism interpretation of the coefficient.     

湖南省地区生产总值ARMA分析

运用计量经济学原理对湖南省1952年以来地区生产总值进行动态分析,建立了ARMA模型,并利用历史数据论证模型的正确性,研究地区生产总值变化趋势和特征,给出了地区生产总值的预测方法,为经济决策提供依据。     

越南外商直接投资及经济增长关系的实证研究

越南从1986年开始改革开放（经济改革、对外开放政策）以来,经济建设取得举世瞩目的发展。当然,外商直接投资FDI对经济发展起了很大的推动作用,本文运用经济学的基本原理和方法（ADF检定,AIC准则,SC准则,OLS）对越南外商直接投资FDI对经济发展的推动作用进行实证分析和研究。并得出FDI有效推动经济发展,给出一些加强FDI推动经济发展的意见和建议。     

An envelopment-based approach to measuring regional social progress

Today, more than ever, it is becoming evident that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) alone is not sufficient in guiding national development strategies. In this sense, measuring the social progress of a country can provide an additional lens on national performance, which would eventually help policymakers to not only gain an advanced understanding of the ways that would unleash greater long-term economic success, but also be able to propose strategies that would create the conditions for all individuals in a society to reach their full potential, enhancing and sustaining the quality of their lives. In this paper, we propose a method to measure social progress at the sub-national level, with an application to the Peruvian regions. As such, this paper builds a unified envelopment-based model for integrating a two-stage process of the index generation. We compare and contrast the radial and non-radial envelopment approaches; it is evident from the model that the non-radial approach provides better insights when compared to the radial approach.     

Robust inference concerning recent trends in US environmental quality

Understanding trends in environmental quality is important for individuals and policymakers. Typically, trends in environmental quality are determined solely through comparisons of unconditional or conditional mean pollution levels. However, reaching unambiguous conclusions on the basis of only the first moment of the (unconditional or conditional) distribution is problematic since it ignores what is occurring in different regions of the distribution. Even relying on indices that incorporate both mean and variance is suspect to the extent that relative rankings are not typically robust to index choice. Addressing these concerns, we adapt recent developments in the stochastic dominance literature to test for unambiguous relations between current and past distributions of toxic releases. Using EPA data from 1988–1999, we find statistically significant evidence that the unconditional 1999 distributions of air, land, underground and total toxic releases dominate in a first‐degree sense their respective 1988 distributions. While some of this improvement is explained by economic growth, pollution net‐of‐income improved over the sample period as well. Finally, we document robust differences in the distribution of pollution across regions in the US. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

关于会计稳健问题的理论探讨

本文通过立足于会计稳健原则,引入和借鉴国外学者的研究成果,分类出有条件稳健(盈余稳健)应计项目稳健和无条件稳健(资产负债表稳健)等会计稳健,并对其来源和检验方法进行了分析,对有条件稳健和无条件稳健衡量指标检验方法之间的关系进行了探讨,同时分析了会计稳健产生的原因和经济后果,以期为后续的研究提供参考。     

Global convergence of inflation rates

This research analyzes the convergence of the world’s inflation rates, spanning 98 countries during the 1970–2016 period. Compared to previous studies, this study’s contribution is its analysis of the convergence sequence of different countries from a nonlinear perspective and its examination of the factors influencing the convergence order. We find that most countries’ inflation rates tend to converge with one another, with the exceptions of Japan, Poland, Chile, Sweden, and Burundi. The results also show that the inflation levels of high-income countries converge faster to the mean value than those of low-income countries. We show that countries that have volatile inflation rates are more likely to converge earlier than other countries. The robust results of the econometric analysis show that countries with improving per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) levels and growing globalization levels are more prone to earlier convergence than countries with lower level per capita GDP values or lower globalization levels. The results demonstrate that most of the countries in the world conform to the law of one price, and the money illusion hypothesis is invalid in the long run.     

Is there a risk–return trade‐off? Evidence from high‐frequency data

This paper examines the intertemporal relation between risk and return for the aggregate stock market using high‐frequency data. We use daily realized, GARCH, implied, and range‐based volatility estimators to determine the existence and significance of a risk–return trade‐off for several stock market indices. We find a positive and statistically significant relation between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of market returns at the daily level. This result is robust to alternative specifications of the volatility process, across different measures of market return and sample periods, and after controlling for macro‐economic variables associated with business cycle fluctuations. We also analyze the risk–return relationship over time using rolling regressions, and find that the strong positive relation persists throughout our sample period. The market risk measures adopted in the paper add power to the analysis by incorporating valuable information, either by taking advantage of high‐frequency intraday data (in the case of realized, GARCH, and range volatility) or by utilizing the market's expectation of future volatility (in the case of implied volatility index). Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Capitalization of Costs and Expected Earnings Growth

Abstract

This paper offers a model that shows how the capitalization of costs affects contemporaneous earnings and the growth path of expected earnings. It makes three points. First, reported earnings under successful efforts are more price relevant than earnings under full costing or full expensing. Second, whether conditional or unconditional, conservatism always enhances the growth rate of expected earnings. Third, independent of capitalization policy, the long-run expected earnings growth rate converges either to the long-run expected free cash flow growth rate or to the depreciation rate. Therefore, while capitalization policy affects the price relevance of earnings and short-run expected earnings growth, it does not affect long-run expected earnings growth.     

Growth,deficits and uncertainty: Theoretical aspects and empirical evidence from a panel of 27 countries

We examine the relationship between fiscal deficits and per-capita income growth in a panel of 27 European countries, allowing for perceived risks, in terms of fiscal sustainability, associated with additional government spending. Such risks are proxied by the conditional variability of manufacturing production and stock market returns and by the unconditional variability of two survey-based economic-sentiment indicators. To help clarifying how fiscal variables impact on growth and to provide a point of reference for the interpretation of the empirical results a structural growth model is first identified. We find evidence of an asymmetric relationship, in that fiscal deficits give rise to adverse growth effects if they coincide with high uncertainty regarding the prospects of the economy and no significant negative growth effects in the low-uncertainty case.     

Unconditional tests for association in 2 × 2 contingency tables in the total sum fixed design

The asymptotic approach and Fisher's exact approach have often been used for testing the association between two dichotomous variables. The asymptotic approach may be appropriate to use in large samples but is often criticized for being associated with unacceptable high actual type I error rates for small to medium sample sizes. Fisher's exact approach suffers from conservative type I error rates and low power. For these reasons, a number of exact unconditional approaches have been proposed, which have been seen to be generally more powerful than exact conditional counterparts. We consider the traditional unconditional approach based on maximization and compare it to our presented approach, which is based on estimation and maximization. We extend the unconditional approach based on estimation and maximization to designs with the total sum fixed. The procedures based on the Pearson chi‐square, Yates's corrected, and likelihood ratio test statistics are evaluated with regard to actual type I error rates and powers. A real example is used to illustrate the various testing procedures. The unconditional approach based on estimation and maximization performs well, having an actual level much closer to the nominal level. The Pearson chi‐square and likelihood ratio test statistics work well with this efficient unconditional approach. This approach is generally more powerful than the other p‐value calculation methods in the scenarios considered.     

MULTIVARIATE VOLATILITY MODELING OF ELECTRICITY FUTURES

We model the dynamic volatility and correlation structure of electricity futures of the European Energy Exchange index. We use a new multiplicative dynamic conditional correlation (mDCC) model to separate long‐run from short‐run components. We allow for smooth changes in the unconditional volatilities and correlations through a multiplicative component that we estimate nonparametrically. For the short‐run dynamics, we use a GJR‐GARCH model for the conditional variances and augmented DCC models for the conditional correlations. We also introduce exogenous variables to account for congestion and delivery date effects in short‐term conditional variances. We find different correlation dynamics for long‐ and short‐term contracts and the new model achieves higher forecasting performance compared \to a standard DCC model. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A SURVEY OF MEASUREMENT BIASES IN PRICE INDEXES

Abstract. This paper reviews the literature on measurement error in the major US price indexes—the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Producer Price Index (RPI), and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflators. We take as our point of departure Triplett's, 1975, survey and focus on the studies of measurement error that have appeared since then. We review the problems of substitution bias, quality bias, new goods bias, and outlet substitution bias that are generally considered to be the main sources of error in price indexes. The bulk of the paper is devoted to problems in the CPI and PPI, as the GDP deflators tend to be based mainly on the components of these series. We find that there has been surprisingly little work on the problem of overall measurement error in any of these price indexes, and we conclude that there is very little scientific basis for the commonly accepted notion that measured inflation at 2 to 3 percent a year is consistent with price stability.     

经济发展、人口增长与耕地资源动态变化研究——以南京市为例

本文通过对经济发展、投资增长、人口增加与耕地资源动态变化弹性关系的分析,发现1980～1997年间随着南京市社会经济的不断发展,国民经济的投资报酬率及土地产出率不断提高,据此作者建立了动态回归模型,进一步验证了耕地资源动态变化与经济发展、投资增长、人口增加之间的数量关系,根据这一数量模型还预测了2000年及2010年南京市的耕地资源保有量。通过与耕地资源动态变化一元回归模型预测结果的比较分析,两者相差甚微,故预测结果可信     

Financial development and economic growth in Vietnam

By making use of a panel dataset that covers 61 provinces of Vietnam over the period 1997 to 2006, this paper examines the link between financial development and economic growth. Our analysis, which is based on endogenous growth theory, reveals that financial development has contributed to economic growth in Vietnam. We find that high ratio of credit to Gross Provincial Product (GPP) has accelerated economic growth in Vietnam. We also found a strong positive link between financial development and economic growth when alternative measures of financial development were used. The impact of foreign direct investment on economic growth will be stronger if more resources are invested in financial market development.