Information system and corporate income tax enforcement: Evidence from China

This paper adds the literature by investigating the effect of information system on corporate income tax (CIT) enforcement. We exploit the regional variations generated by the implementation in 2013 of the third stage of the China Tax Administration Information System (CTAIS-3) pilot. The CTAIS-3 is a nationally unified information system that significantly reduces information asymmetry between different tax authorities across regions. We find that the CTAIS-3 pilot significantly reduced firms’ conforming and non-conforming tax avoidance. The enhanced tax enforcement is particularly prominent if a firm is of a smaller size, or is administrated by the State Administration of Taxation, or is a non-state-owned enterprises, or locates in cities with a higher level of local fiscal pressure. Furthermore, we show that the CTAIS-3 improved the CIT enforcement by deterring firms from underreporting accounts receivable, as well as over-reporting accounts payable, inventory and the number of employees. In general, it would be more difficult for firms to hide profits from tax authorities under the CTAIS-3.     

The price discovery role of day traders in futures market: Evidence from different types of day traders

Using proprietary account-level transaction data in the futures market where day traders are self-declared ex ante, this study investigates whether day traders enhance price discovery at the market level. From a natural classification of day traders, we find that heterogeneous day traders have differential effects on price discovery. Self-declared day traders, who benefit from low margin requirement, do not improve price discovery measured by information share. In contrast, non-declared traders, who are not self-declared as day traders, improve price discovery. Their positive impacts on price discovery are particularly significant during periods of high volatility and arrival of new information. Overall, a margin stimulating policy may encourage more day trading, but may also attract overconfident investors, especially inexperienced ones, and who do not enhance price discovery.     

A behavioural explanation to the asymmetric volatility phenomenon: Evidence from market volatility index

This study examines how the behavioural explanations, in particular loss aversion, can be used to explain the asymmetric volatility phenomenon by investigating the relationship between stock market returns and changes in investor perceptions of risk measured by the volatility index. We study the behaviour of India volatility index vis‐à‐vis Hong Kong, Australia and UK volatility index, and provide a comprehensive comparative analysis. Using Bai‐Perron test, we identify structural breaks and volatility regimes in the time series of volatility index, and investigate the volatility index‐return relation during high, medium and low volatility periods. Regardless of volatility regimes, we find that volatility index moves in opposite direction in response to stock index returns, and contemporaneous return is the most dominating across the four markets. The negative relation is strongest for UK followed by Australia, Hong Kong and India. Second, volatility index reacts significantly different to positive and negative returns; negative return has higher impact on changes in volatility index than positive return across the markets over full‐sample and sub‐sample periods. The asymmetric effect is stronger in low volatility regime than in high and medium volatility periods for all the markets except UK. The strength of asymmetric effect is strongest for Hong Kong and weakest for India. Finally, negative returns have exponentially increasing effect and positive returns have exponentially decreasing effect on the changes in volatility index.     

The effects of board structure on corporate performance: Evidence from East African frontier markets

The effectiveness of the well-known corporate governance practices may not be universal due to fundamental differences in the environments under which firms operate. By using hand-collected data from all the non-financial firms listed on the unexplored East African frontier markets (i.e., Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda), we examine the effect of board characteristics on the performance of firms. Our results show that board size has a negative and significant effect on firm performance. The presences of foreigners and civil servants on the board play positive roles on financial performance, where the agency and resource dependence theories apply. Further, we find that board members with higher education also contribute to firm performance. These findings still hold when we consider the 2008–2009 financial crisis period. Overall, we show that in a business climate where ownership is largely dominated by few shareholders, the conventional governance mechanisms do not work effectively.     

Economic policy uncertainty and credit growth: Evidence from a global sample

This study extends the research of Bordo, Duca, and Koch (2016) and Hu and Gong (2018) by examining the influences of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) at domestic and global levels on aggregate bank credit growth. The empirical analysis is conducted through both supply and demand side factors of bank credit growth in 22 economies over the period 2001–2015. This study employs different measures of EPU and applies panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) and feasible generalized least squares (FGLS), which are suitable for unbalanced panel data models. Three principal findings are follows. First, higher level of EPU has negative impact on bank credit growth, which is significant for domestic EPU measures. Second, the positive change in EPU appears to have favorable effects on bank credit growth. The effects in both cases are different for the credit demand and supply sides. The findings suggest the need for appropriate measures to tackle bank credit risk-taking activities in uncertain conditions. Third, the impacts of EPU in emerging economies are negative and somewhat stronger than in advanced economies.     

Conditional Properties of Hedge Funds: Evidence from Daily Returns*

Using daily returns on a set of hedge fund indices, we study (i) the properties of the indices' conditional density functions and (ii) the presence of asymmetries in conditional correlations between hedge fund indices and other investments and between hedge fund indices themselves. We use the SNP approach to obtain estimates of conditional densities of hedge fund returns and then proceed to examine their properties. In general, a nonparametric GARCH(1,1) model appears to provide the best fit for all strategies. We find that the conditional third and fourth moments are significantly affected by changes in the current volatility of returns on hedge fund indices. We examine changes in the conditional probability of tail events and report significant changes in the probability of extreme events when the conditioning information changes. These results have important implications for models of hedge fund risk that rely on probability of tail events. We formally test for the presence of asymmetries in conditional correlations to determine if there is contagion between hedge funds and other investments and between various hedge fund indices in extreme down markets versus extreme up markets. We generally do not find strong evidence in support of asymmetric correlations.     

The Dynamics of Gasoline Prices: Evidence from Daily French Micro Data

Using millions of individual gasoline prices collected at a daily frequency, we examine the speed at which market prices of refined oil are transmitted to retail gasoline prices in France. For that, we estimate a reduced‐form model of state‐dependent pricing where thresholds triggering price changes are allowed to vary over time and depend on the duration since the last price change. We find that the degree of pass‐through of wholesale prices to retail gasoline prices is on average 0.77 for diesel and 0.67 for petrol and depend on local market characteristics. The duration for a shock to be fully transmitted into prices is about 10 days. There is no significant asymmetry in the transmission of wholesale price to retail prices. Finally, the duration since the last price change has a significant effect on thresholds triggering price changes but a large variance of idiosyncratic shocks on thresholds is also crucial to replicate the size distribution of price changes.     

An Investigation of the Flight-to-Quality Effect: Evidence from Asia-Pacific Countries

Flight to quality has long been a feature of international financial markets when there are extreme variations in the negative relationship between returns on stocks and sovereign bond indices. This study analyzes the existence of a flight-to-quality effect from stocks to long-term government bonds in five Asia-Pacific countries by modeling a dependency structure from a copula-based perspective. The authors employ various copula functions to examine the degrees of dependence on symmetric and asymmetric structures in these countries. They find a negative relationship between stock and bond returns, that there is a flight to quality in the Asia-Pacific region, and that it intensified during the financial crisis period, indicating that investors considered government bonds to be safer financial instruments than stocks during this period. Furthermore, the authors show that the level of economic freedom in a country affects the tendency toward flight to quality.     

Compliance costs for personal income tax in a transition country: the case of Slovenia

The evaluation of taxpayers' compliance costs has grown in significance within tax system research over the last 15 years. In 2001, two surveys of VAT and personal income taxpayers were conducted in Slovenia to evaluate compliance costs for the 2000 fiscal year. This paper presents the results of research into compliance costs for personal income tax in Slovenia. The results show that compliance costs for personal income tax are relatively low, primarily because most taxpayers consider filing their tax declaration to be a simple procedure, which means that consultancy costs are low.     

State ownership and adjustment speed toward target leverage: Evidence from a transitional economy

Using a quantile regression approach and 5,374 Vietnamese firm-year observations from 2000 to 2016, this paper examines the effect of state ownership on the speed of adjustment SOA toward target leverage across various levels of capital structure. The findings consistently show that these effects on SOA vary depending on the leverage level. The relationship is negative for low-leveraged firms, positive for high-leveraged firms, but insignificant in the central area of leverage distribution. Moreover, the negative effects are greater than the positive effects.     

Tax Deferral and Mutual Fund Inflows: Evidence from a Quasi‐Natural Experiment

We propose a new method to identify the impact of a change in the tax burden on mutual fund inflows. We use quasi‐experimental data from Italy where, starting from July 2011, the tax regime for domestic mutual funds was changed from an accruals basis to a realisation basis, while the taxation of foreign funds remained on a realisation basis. We find that the reform has had a positive effect on net inflows of Italian funds (the treated group) with respect to foreign funds (the control group). The effect is both economically and statistically significant. Moreover, there is no evidence that the increase in the demand for Italian funds came at the expense of foreign funds.     

Risk-preparedness mechanism and audit quality: Evidence from mandatory increase of professional indemnity insurance and professional risk fund

We examine the risk-preparing benefits of Chinese audit firms’ professional indemnity insurance (PII) and professional risk fund (PRF) by using the Notice on Adjusting the Application Requirement of Audit Firms for Securities Qualifications as an exogenous shock. This policy requires audit firms to raise the sum of the cumulative compensation limit of their PII and PRF from 6 million to 80 million yuan. It is found, first, that the capital market regards this policy revision as a signal to strengthen investor protection and responds positively; client firms with high audit risks have a stronger response. Second, auditors’ governance of financial information has strengthened, resulting in the significant improvement of their clients’ financial reporting quality, with a stronger effect on firms with higher earnings management risk. There is no evidence that audit firms pass the costs on to their clients. Finally, the mismatch between auditors and new client firms is alleviated. We show that in an emerging market with weak investor protection, establishing a sound risk-preparedness mechanism for audit firms and strengthening the capacity for civil compensation ex post greatly improve the adaptive degree between international auditing standards and the legal environment of China, thereby enhancing the overall service quality of the audit market.     

Sectoral effects of disinflation: Evidence from India

This paper makes an attempt to measure sacrifice ratios for the farm and non-farm sector as disinflation policy is believed to have differential impact on these sectors. Using the non-parametric approach of Ball (1994), five disinflation episodes are identified for India over the period from 1950–51 to 2009–10. These disinflations are largely due to contractionary monetary policy pursued by the Reserve Bank of India. The estimates of the sacrifice ratio and the presence of persistence and hysteresis effects indicate that disinflationary monetary policy is more harmful to output growth in the non-farm sector. In contrast, the negative sacrifice ratio in the farm sector implies that there is output gain during disinflationary periods. This output gain in the farm sector seems to have been driven by those factors which are independent of contractionary monetary shocks. These evidences also suggest that use of aggregate time series data might produce errors in the measurement of sacrifice ratios.     

The real effects of financial constraints: Evidence from a financial crisis

We survey 1,050 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in the U.S., Europe, and Asia to directly assess whether their firms are credit constrained during the global financial crisis of 2008. We study whether corporate spending plans differ conditional on this survey-based measure of financial constraint. Our evidence indicates that constrained firms planned deeper cuts in tech spending, employment, and capital spending. Constrained firms also burned through more cash, drew more heavily on lines of credit for fear banks would restrict access in the future, and sold more assets to fund their operations. We also find that the inability to borrow externally caused many firms to bypass attractive investment opportunities, with 86% of constrained U.S. CFOs saying their investment in attractive projects was restricted during the credit crisis of 2008. More than half of the respondents said they canceled or postponed their planned investments. Our results also hold in Europe and Asia, and in many cases are stronger in those economies. Our analysis adds to the portfolio of approaches and knowledge about the impact of credit constraints on real firm behavior.     

税率降低与企业固定资产投资的DID实证分析——来自上市公司的经验证据

为考察我国企业所得税改革对固定资产投资的影响效应,以税改前后上市公司执行税率的不同作为研究的切入点,借鉴国外衡量政策效应的主流计量研究方法——DID(Difference in Difference)方法,使用上市公司数据对此予以实证分析。研究结果表明,税改前后上市公司执行税率的不同,对不同所有制性质的上市公司的固定资产投资影响明显不同。因此,要有效调整企业的固定资产投资,应对这两类身份不同的企业制定有所区别的政策。     

The effectiveness of interactive professional learning experiences as a pedagogical tool: Evidence from an audit setting

This paper describes an interactive professional learning experience (IPLE) and provides guidance for implementing an IPLE in an audit classroom. The IPLE described in this paper exposes students to a realistic practice environment within the classroom by bringing practitioners together with students in a professional supervisory setting. Practitioners review students’ work and then meet with students one-on-one to provide feedback on their work. We also document evidence of the pedagogical value of an IPLE by using a between-subjects experimental design in which learning outcomes for participants are compared to a control group that received the same instructions and completed the same written assignment, but did not participate in the professional interaction. In addition, pre- and posttests of students’ audit knowledge allowed for a within-subjects self-assessment of knowledge acquisition. The results strongly suggest that participation in the IPLE improves students’ performance on a skills test of relevant audit material and increases their self-perceptions of knowledge gained. In addition, results indicate that both students and audit professionals consider the IPLE a positive professional learning experience.     

The real effects of delisting: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design

We study how the delisting of a firm’s stock, and the accompanying drop in liquidity, causally affects a firm’s real economic decisions. Although delisting is endogenous, we identify a causal effect by using regression discontinuity design (RDD). This technique suits the delisting problem because the probability of delisting rises discontinuously when observable variables pass known thresholds. We find that delisting results in a modest decline in investment and cash saving and an important and robust decline in employment.     

The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns: New Evidence from an Emerging Market

Over 300 factors have been found to explain the cross-section of expected stock returns. Empirical studies also show that findings from multifactor asset-pricing models have not been consistent in an emerging market. Using DuPont analysis and a residual income valuation model for 284 nonfinancial companies on Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange during the period 2008–2014, findings suggest that the return on equity and its change are informative for stock returns in Vietnam. In addition, the level of capital turnover, financial cost ratio (FCR), and changes in capital and in the FCR contain incremental explanatory power for stock returns.