Compliance and Controversy: The AAS 25 Reporting Paradox

The adoption of AAS 25, which specifies uniform reporting requirements for superannuation funds, has been particularly controversial. While the Australian Accounting Research Foundation (AARF) has maintained that uniform reporting practices for superannuation funds are necessary to provide performance information to investors, the superannuation industry has argued that AAS 25 will cause "confusion, misunderstanding and unnecessary concern among fund members". Although the controversy has been widely reported, little information has emerged about the extent to which funds were already complying, or substantially complying, with the standard. This paper reports the results of a survey which indicates, contrary to expectations, that in the two years before the introduction of AAS 25 most funds were reporting in a way which would effectively comply with provisions of the standard.     

Another New Look at the Monday Effect

We link up the findings of Abraham and Ikenberry (1994) and Wang, Li and Erickson (1997) by showing that negative Monday returns concentrate on days 18 to 26 of a month and they can be completely explained in the statistical sense by the negative returns on the previous Friday. More importantly, we observe a 'week–four effect'. Not only the returns on Mondays but also returns on other days are lower during the fourth week of a month. We suggest that liquidity selling by individual investors may be the reason.     

Another Look at the East Asian Miracle

This article examines the main ingredients of the East Asiansuccess story in each subphase of its post-war transition growthprocess. It focuses mainly on Taiwan (China), with comparativeside glances at the Republic of Korea. The initial conditionsfacing the region were favorable, especially in Taiwan (China).The early import substitution subphase was unusually mild andcontributed to the emergence of strong linkages between agriculturaland nonagricultural activities. Subsequently, flexible labormarkets, human capital policies, and major macro and structuralpolicy reforms culminated in an increasingly export-orientedindustrialization effort. Once labor surpluses were ultimatelyexhausted, government policies accommodated Taiwan (China)'sentry into the technological era of the 1970s and 1980s. Duringthe past four decades of a signally successful transition growtheffort, public policies in East Asia have consistently accommodatedthe changing needs of the economy, rather than guide its pathdirectly.     

Informed Trading Around Earnings Announcements: Another Look

This study is an empirical test of the Easley, O'Hara, and Srinivas (1998) multimarket sequential trade model of stock and option markets. We employ two approaches to determine the information content of signed stock and option trades executed around quarterly earnings announcements. The first approach expands the vector autoregression (VAR) technique of Hasbrouck (1991a) to include signed option trade volumes and inter‐trade durations. Estimates from the VAR models provide insight into whether both equity and option trades are viewed as informative by the equity specialist. The second approach focuses on the information content of the earnings releases to determine whether signed equity and option trades executed prior to the announcements are informed. Results indicate that although informed traders prefer to transact in both markets around earnings announcements, option market transactions contain no incremental information.     

The Capital Structure Puzzle: Another Look at the Evidence

Since the formulation of the Miller and Modigliani propositions over 60 years ago, financial economists have been debating whether there is such a thing as an optimal capital structure—a proportion of debt to equity that can be expected to maximize long‐run shareholder value. Some finance scholars have followed M&M in arguing that both capital structure and dividend policy are irrelevant in the sense of having no significant, predictable effects on corporate market values. Another school of thought holds that corporate financing choices reflect an attempt by corporate managers to balance the tax shields and disciplinary benefits of more debt against the costs of financial distress. Still another theory says that companies do not have capital structure targets, but instead follow a financial pecking order in which retained earnings are generally preferred to outside financing, and debt is preferred to equity when outside funding is required. In reviewing the evidence that has accumulated since M&M, the authors argue that taxes, bankruptcy and other contracting costs, and information costs all appear to play important roles in corporate financing decisions. While much, if not most, of the evidence is consistent with the idea that companies set target leverage ratios, there is also considerable support for the pecking order theory's contention that managements are willing to deviate widely from their targets for long periods of time. According to the authors, the key to reconciling the different theories—and thus to solving the capital structure puzzle—lies in achieving a better understanding of the relation between corporate financing stocks (that is, total amounts of debt and equity) and flows (which security to issue at a particular time). Even when companies have leverage targets, it can make sense to deviate from those targets depending on the costs associated with moving back toward the target. And as the authors argue in closing, a complete theory of capital structure must take account of these adjustment costs and how they affect expected deviations from the targets.     

Another Look at the Cross-section of Expected Stock Returns

Our examination of the cross-section of expected returns reveals economically and statistically significant compensation (about 6 to 9 percent per annum) for beta risk when betas are estimated from time-series regressions of annual portfolio returns on the annual return on the equally weighted market index. The relation between book-to-market equity and returns is weaker and less consistent than that in Fama and French (1992). We conjecture that past book-to-market results using COMPUS-TAT data are affected by a selection bias and provide indirect evidence.     

Inflation Targeting Does Not Matter: Another Look at OECD Sacrifice Ratios

Recently in this journal, Gonçalves and Carvalho (2009) concluded that inflation targeters were able to bring inflation down at less cost than nontargeters (p. 242). This comment shows that their conclusion is not robust but instead is the result of comparing a particular subset of inflation targeting (IT) disinflations with nonsimultaneous disinflations that occurred under very different macroeconomic conditions. In their sample, simple extensions such as justifiably varying the treatment group of IT disinflations, to control for common time‐varying effects or to control for the Maastricht Treaty effects, suggest that IT does not matter.     

Mean Reversion and Momentum: Another Look at the Price-Volume Correlation in the Real Estate Market

Based on behavioral finance and economics literature, we construct a theoretical framework in which consumers of newly constructed housing units perceive prices to follow a stochastic mean reversion pattern. Given this belief and the high carrying cost maintained by real estate developers, potential buyers opt to either exercise immediately or defer the purchase. We simulate the model within a real option framework by which we show that the optimal time to wait before exercising a purchase is positively related to the price level; hence, a negative (positive) correlation between transaction volume and price level (yield) emerges. Observing data on housing prices and new construction sales in Israel for the years 1998–2007, we apply an adaptive expectation regression model to test consumers’ belief in both mean reversion and momentum price patterns. The empirical evidence shows that while consumers’ demand pattern is simultaneously consistent with the belief in both momentum and mean reversion processes, the effect of the latter generally dominates. Moreover, while the data does not allow for testing the volume and price-level correlation, it does provide support to the positive volume-price yield correlation.     

Another Look at Bookbuilding,Auctions, and the Future of the IPO Process

In an earlier series of articles published in this journal, one of the three authors of this article predicted the rise of auction IPOs, possibly to the point of displacing the traditional bookbuilding process for pricing and allocating IPOs, only to find himself forced to explain in later articles the continuing preference of issuers for the conventional IPO process. In a 1999 article, for example, this author cited WR Hambrecht as posing a serious challenge to bookbuilding. And in a 2005 article, shortly after Google used an auction for its IPO, he suggested that the time was ripe for change. In this article the authors revisit the debate, taken up most recently in a 2012 exchange between Congressman Darrell Issa and the SEC. They begin by discussing why bookbuilding persists before focusing on several recent developments that could undermine the case for bookbuilding. The authors point out that bookbuilding rests on banks' discretion in allocating IPO shares and, critically, on both issuers and investors trusting that it will be deployed appropriately. After discussing developments that have undermined trust in the financial markets, the authors suggest that, when combined with recent regulatory changes intended to streamline public offerings by small firms, such changes have created opportunities for auctions to gain traction in the U.S. IPO market.     

借鉴税收遵从理论提高纳税人税收遵从度

税收遵从体现了现代公共财政体制下税制优化目标,涵盖了现代社会公民自我意识与国家意识提升的基本思想,成为衡量现代税收管理绩效的一个关键标准。从理论和实践来看,研究税收遵从对于从根本上提高税收征管的质量和效率,促进税收事业的健康发展是有深远意义的。     

Voluntary Auditing: A Synthesis of the Literature

Voluntary auditing has received increased attention from researchers in recent decades. Empirical studies that have examined demand for voluntary audits have suggested that regulatory intervention may not always be necessary, though some argue that regulators protect society from market failure by demanding statutory audits [Barton, J., & Waymire, G. (2004). Investor protection under unregulated financial reporting. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 38, 65–116]. To date, there has been no review of the literature on determinants of voluntary audits. I provide a research framework to categorize the attributes that affect demand for voluntary audits and identify areas that need further examination. While the given compact body of literature has served different purposes, two major reasons for voluntary auditing are apparent: the importance of audited financial statements to lenders and the intention to further deregulate audits for smaller companies to relieve cost burdens. However, I contribute to the auditing literature by identifying the main attributes associated with the demand for voluntary audit. In doing so, I develop a framework consisting of firm attributes, separation of ownership and control attributes, agency relationship attributes, management attributes, and signalling attributes.     

土地财政:关口抉择

企业型财政、资源型财政乃至转移型财政,其主要财力来源之一,都是土地财政。然而现在,我们正在面临着土地财政的危情。面对危情,我们该怎么办?土地和房价的双重飙升有人认为,土地出让金收入高居不下,和房价是一种相辅相成的关系。经济学家、亚     

匈牙利金融业

编者按:本刊上期刊登了中国社科院金融研究中心副主任何德旭研究员关于匈牙利金融改革的研究文章的前两部分,本期我们刊登后两部分,即货币政策和金融监管.     

警惕企业上市中的猫腻

首次公开发行对于任何一家企业来说都是首次,因此,那些从未经历上市的企业在IPO面前往往是眼前一抹黑。殊不知,在上市的华丽外衣下,有时潜伏着形形色色的猫腻。     

农村金融深化与农民组织化:建立以金融为核心的普惠合作体系

本文综合金融抑制与金融深化的一般理论,对农村金融抑制的根源进行探讨,在对中国农村金融市场的相关特点进行分析后,继续对农村金融的信用与信息、风险与控制,农民组织化特别是合作化促进金融深化等问题进行深入研究,在此基础上提出建立以金融为核心的普惠合作体系,以期为中国农村金融深化和农民组织化提供借鉴。     

Shaping Liquidity: On the Causal Effects of Voluntary Disclosure

Can managers influence the liquidity of their firms’ shares? We use plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of public information to show that firms actively shape their information environments by voluntarily disclosing more information than regulations mandate and that such efforts improve liquidity. Firms respond to an exogenous loss of public information by providing more timely and informative earnings guidance. Responses appear motivated by a desire to reduce information asymmetries between retail and institutional investors. Liquidity improves as a result and in turn increases firm value. This suggests that managers can causally influence their cost of capital via voluntary disclosure.