Skinner's “Interpretation Panel”— A Means to Balance “Power”

The rules versus principles debate and the vital importance of context ‐ the circumstances‐specific nature of judgment ‐ are at the heart of Ross Skinner's suggestion for an “interpretation panel". International considerations and developments involving governance and regulation have created imbalances in power, expertise, and impartiality, increasing the importance of and need for such a panel. This analysis considers the nature of the problem, how professional judgment has been characterized, and why a panel would be appropriate to address, among other concerns, the audit committee's dilemma when accounting disputes arise. Evidence is provided that management turnover is higher in cases involving multiple restatements, governance problems, or regulators' sanctions. Although, intuitively, management turnover is likely to be associated with widely publicized restatements, some patterns suggest that it is a function of entity size, scope of management changes considered, and the manner in which the restatement was identified. Specifically, an identifiable source of discovery, as well as external involvement, is associated with a greater propensity for management change. In contrast, restatements linked to changes in available guidance from regulators are less likely to result in such turnover. One implication is that effective control design and monitoring to facilitate internal discovery of errors can decrease the likelihood of multiple restatements and reduce fault finding that leads to management change. The judgmental nature of restatements suggests that an infrastructure supporting “right‐mindedness” does have merit. An interpretation panel would increase the feasibility of principles‐based standards, facilitating timely resolution of accounting‐associated disputes and thereby enhancing the information environment underlying the allocation of capital.     

The accounting of “The Meeting”: Examining calculability within a “Fluid” local space

This study traces events in an empirical setting where a key local space, “The Meeting”, was made calculable. Building on field data from interviews and documentary sources at ABB Industry/Finland, the study theorizes in the interpretive genre, elaborating on the notion of the calculable space. It argues the following: Accounting can be extended into un-formalized and more elusive local spaces – into “fluid” spaces which are not clearly mapped within the organizational hierarchy, and which lie beyond recognized responsibility units or physically distinct cells at the factory floor. By opening visibility into the discretion of these “fluid” local spaces, a tighter alignment between programmatic ideals and real action at the organizational grass-root can be achieved. Self-devised non-financial measurement, mediating local tensions and the interests of “autonomous” actors, becomes the technology of government in this process of normalization – which is, however, not to be acknowledged as being unproblematic.     

Disclosure “Bunching”

This paper studies managers' preferences among information acquisition and disclosure policies when their firms are required to engage in “real‐time” or “continuous” financial reporting. The paper predicts that for many, but not all, processes describing the distribution of their firms' cash flows, when subject to such reporting requirements, managers will engage in disclosure “bunching,” that is, they will bunch the discretionary component of the information they acquire and disclose into a single point in time rather than spread the acquisition and disclosure of that information over time. We show that managers' preferred bunching period depends on managers' strategy for trading in their firms' shares, managers' risk aversion, the risk premium the capital market attaches to firms' shares, and the size of managers' initial ownership stakes in their firms. We also study and characterize how the equilibrium prices of firms' shares vary over time and also how managers' optimal trading strategies vary with their most preferred “bunching” strategies. Several extensions confirm the robustness of the optimality of disclosure “bunching.”     

The Effects of Monetary Policy “News” and “Surprises”

There is substantial agreement in the monetary policy literature over the effects of exogenous monetary policy shocks. The shocks that are investigated, however, almost exclusively represent unanticipated changes in policy, which surprise the private sector and which are typically found to have a delayed and sluggish effect on output. In this paper, we estimate a New Keynesian model that incorporates news about future policies to try to disentangle the anticipated and unanticipated components of policy shocks. The paper shows that the conventional estimates confound two distinct effects on output: an effect due to unanticipated or “surprise” shocks, which is smaller and more short‐lived than the response usually obtained in the literature, and a large, delayed, and persistent effect due to anticipated policy shocks or “news.” News shocks play a larger role in influencing the business cycle than unanticipated policy shocks, although the overall fraction of economic fluctuations that can be attributed to monetary policy remains limited.