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 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.     

Accounting for “negative salvage”

Many businesses are overlooking a current cost of operation which should be matched against current revenues. This cost, really a bundle of related cost items, is incurred at the end of an asset's useful life. In the public utility sector the general term ascribed to this cost element is “negative salvage”. In this note some current examples of negative salvage are identified and some of the causes of negative salvage are discussed. The introduction of negative salvage into the classroom discussion of depreciation provides an interesting new example of the matching/allocation problem.     

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.”     

Futures Manipulation with “Cash Settlement”

This paper investigates the susceptibility of futures markets to price manipulation in a two-period model with asymmetric information and “cash settlement” futures contracts. Without “physical delivery,” strategies based on “corners” or “squeezes” are infeasible. However, uninformed investors still earn positive expected profits by establishing a futures position and then trading in the spot market to manipulate the spot price used to compute the cash settlement at delivery. We also show that as the number of manipulators grows, profits from manipulation fall to zero. However, even in the limit, manipulation still has a nontrivial impact on market liquidity. More broadly, we interpret manipulation as a form of endogenous “noise trading” which can arise in multiperiod security markets.     

Subsidizing research programs with “if” and “when” uncertainty in the face of severe informational constraints

We study subsidy policies for research programs when firms have private information about the likelihood of project viability, but the government cannot form a unique prior about this likelihood. When the shadow cost of public funds is zero, first‐best welfare can be attained as a (belief‐free) ex post equilibrium under both monopoly and competition, but it cannot be attained when the shadow cost is positive. However, max‐min subsidy policies exist under monopoly and competition and consist of pure matching subsidies. Under a Research and Development (R&D) consortium, the highest max‐min matching rate is lower than under competition, and R&D investment intensity is higher.     

“Lucas” in the Laboratory

We study the Lucas asset pricing model in a controlled setting. Participants trade two long‐lived securities in a continuous open‐book system. The experimental design emulates the stationary, infinite‐horizon setting of the model and incentivizes participants to smooth consumption across periods. Consistent with the model, prices align with consumption betas and comove with aggregate dividends, particularly so when risk premia are higher. Trading significantly increases consumption smoothing compared to autarky. Nevertheless, as in field markets, prices are excessively volatile. The noise corrupts traditional generalized method of moment tests. Choices display substantial heterogeneity, with no subject representative for pricing.     

Examining “The quantified customer”

Accounting has not escaped The Customer's influence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting, a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces first the introduction of this quantitative knowledge. The paper examines the order of “The Quantified Customer”, its effects on organizational action, and its disciplinary implications. But this enquiry also uncovers a rival knowledge of The Customer. The resistant local knowledge is mobilized against the new calculable space—changing the trajectory of events.