Recruiting new “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse”: a prolegomenon to the human colonization of space

This paper is offered as an introduction to some of the personnel problems we are likely to face when substantial off-Earth colonization becomes feasible. Most of the literature to date on the subject portrays future colonies as similar in population and community structure to contemporary North American or European communities. A consideration of the history of colonization and of human population movements in general indicates the likelihood that future space colonization will also be hard to control and will take unexpected turns not always to the liking of those in supposed charge. Thus, the greatest impetus to move to the new colonies will come, as in the past, most likely from those throughout the world with the most desperate needs. Again, many nations may, as in the past, take the opportunity to use the new colonies as places to jettison unwanted or undesirable subgroups.     

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.     

From Accounting to “Forecounting”*

Using Ross Skinner's 1995 CA Magazine article, “Judgment in Jeopardy", as a stepping stone, we revisit the meaning of professional judgment in accounting in light of developments in standard setting, financial markets, and business operations that have taken place over the past two decades. We argue that it is time to change the view that accountants' professional judgment is the application of accounting‐based knowledge and experience in the selection of an appropriate accounting method. Accountants now face a standard‐setting context that emphasizes the estimation of future cash flows as well as new business and financial realities. This context implies that, in exercising their professional judgment to choose between forecast alternatives, accountants must rely on knowledge and experience from other disciplines (even though this is not well integrated into accounting). Hence, accounting must evolve from its traditional stewardship role to the new role of “forecount‐ing” (the estimation of future cash flows). The implications as well as the challenges of that evolution are discussed.     

Modernizing innovations Analysing their use and prospects in Brazil

A recent study, conducted in Brazil, has investigated the difusion of new technologies and new organizational techniques—both important facets of the emerging technoeconomic paradigm—in the context of a newly industrializing country. In addition to examining current levels of use of these innovations in leading firms, it examines the expectations of managers as to future prospects for their use, and the implications for employment, training and competitive circumstances. As well as presenting methodological innovations, this article reports on the empirical results—indicating considerable uptake of some elements of the new paradigm, but less effort with respect to others—and develops scenarios for the future of the Brazilian economy.     

Can Mutual Fund “Stars” Really Pick Stocks? New Evidence from a Bootstrap Analysis

We apply a new bootstrap statistical technique to examine the performance of the U.S. open‐end, domestic equity mutual fund industry over the 1975 to 2002 period. A bootstrap approach is necessary because the cross section of mutual fund alphas has a complex nonnormal distribution due to heterogeneous risk‐taking by funds as well as nonnormalities in individual fund alpha distributions. Our bootstrap approach uncovers findings that differ from many past studies. Specifically, we find that a sizable minority of managers pick stocks well enough to more than cover their costs. Moreover, the superior alphas of these managers persist.     

“A deficient performance”: The regulation of the train operating companies in Britain's privatised railway system

This paper focuses on the performance and regulation of the train operating companies in Britain's privatised railway system. It places regulation in context by examining rail privatisation, with particular scrutiny given to the theory and practice of the franchising process which established these companies. The record of the regulatory authority is assessed up to the announcement in 2004 of its planned abolition. This assessment employs critical financial analysis, and draws on non-financial performance indicators, in order to examine the extent to which it achieved its five main objectives: increasing the number of rail passengers; managing franchises in the interests of passengers; encouraging efficiency and economy in the provision of passenger rail services; encouraging investment in rail services; and securing a progressive improvement in the quality of rail services. The paper concludes that the regulatory authority's performance was “deficient” as it only achieved the first of these objectives. It places this failure in context by highlighting the fundamental problem—the flawed concept of fragmenting and privatising a loss-making rail industry in the interests of British capitalism. The “stronger” regulation envisaged by the Blair Government is revealed as a smoke screen behind which there is a continuing transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the owners and providers of capital.     

Sustainable technologies and the innovation–regulation paradox

This article examines the paradox between innovation and regulation and its implication for the adoption of sustainable technologies in the domestic sector of the construction industry. The case of UK is examined, where progress towards the inclusion of social and environmental considerations has been slow. Recent change in attitude in the private sector, combined with government initiatives, has prompted a more sustainable agenda in construction. With significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions required to meet climate change targets, the case for a particular energy-saving technology—natural thermal insulation materials for cavity wall insulation—suitable for widespread use in residential buildings, is assessed. In addition to the inherent conservatism in the construction industry, additional barriers inhibiting the uptake of new sustainable thermal insulation technologies include capital costs, the failure of the market to account for social and environmental costs and savings and their perceived cost-effectiveness and performance over a 50-year lifetime. Policy implications are drawn from the analysis.     

The Role of Bank Reputation in “Certifying” Future Performance Implications of Borrowers’ Accounting Numbers

We investigate the role played by the reputation of lead arrangers of syndicated loans in mitigating information asymmetries between borrowers and lenders. We hypothesize that syndications by more reputable arrangers are indicative of higher borrower quality at loan inception and more rigorous monitoring during the term of the loan. We investigate whether borrowers with more reputable lead arrangers realize superior performance subsequent to loan origination relative to borrowers with less reputable arrangers. We further examine whether certification by high‐reputation lead banks extends to the quality of borrowers’ reported accounting numbers. Controlling for endogenous matching of borrowers and lead banks, we find that higher bank reputation is associated with higher profitability and credit quality in the three years subsequent to loan initiation. We also show that bank reputation is associated with long‐run sustainability of earnings via higher earnings persistence, and debt contracting value of accounting via a stronger connection between pre‐loan profitability and future credit quality. We further document that the enhanced earnings sustainability associated with higher reputation lead banks reflects both superior fundamentals and accruals more closely linked with future cash flows.     

Through a glass darkly The future and business

Although the phrase think-tank is little more than 30 years old, the search for new opportunities in commerce and industry has been going on a long time. The rapid overseas expansion of European nations began with the maritime centre which Henry the Navigator established at Sagras in Portugal. Four centuries later other searchers after new areas of exploitation—Nasmyth, Bessemer, Stephenson—had immense effect on the growth of the new steam-powered industries and dependent businesses. And so it has gone on ever since—to the development of the new transistor in the Bell Laboratories in 1947, to Alistair Pilkington's invention of float glass in 1952 and beyond. As Denis Loveridge shows in this article, these and many similar revolutionary inventions depend on personal endurance for their successful completion, while their widespread adoption has repercussions over many decades, making it imperative for industries to look ahead. Foresight in this context needs to adopt a wider view than simply that of technological optimism; what is needed is business built on the philosophy of wisdom, on the concept of value, which embraces the wider issues of business and creates achievable visions for its future.     

Inside the “Black Box” of Sell‐Side Financial Analysts

Our objective is to penetrate the “black box” of sell‐side financial analysts by providing new insights into the inputs analysts use and the incentives they face. We survey 365 analysts and conduct 18 follow‐up interviews covering a wide range of topics, including the inputs to analysts’ earnings forecasts and stock recommendations, the value of their industry knowledge, the determinants of their compensation, the career benefits of Institutional Investor All‐Star status, and the factors they consider indicative of high‐quality earnings. One important finding is that private communication with management is a more useful input to analysts’ earnings forecasts and stock recommendations than their own primary research, recent earnings performance, and recent 10‐K and 10‐Q reports. Another notable finding is that issuing earnings forecasts and stock recommendations that are well below the consensus often leads to an increase in analysts’ credibility with their investing clients. We conduct cross‐sectional analyses that highlight the impact of analyst and brokerage characteristics on analysts’ inputs and incentives. Our findings are relevant to investors, managers, analysts, and academic researchers.     

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.     

Chinese institutional investors’ sentiment

We use daily survey data on Chinese institutional investors’ forecasts to measure investors’ sentiment. Our empirical model uncovers that share prices and investor sentiment do not have a long-run relation; however, in the short-run, the mood of investors follows a positive-feedback process. Hence, institutional investors are optimistic when previous market returns were positive. Contrarily, negative returns trigger a decline in sentiment, which reacts more sensitively to negative than positive returns. Investor sentiment does not predict future market movements—but a drop in confidence increases market volatility and destabilizes exchanges. EGARCH models reveal asymmetric responses in the volatility of investor sentiment; however, Granger causality tests reject volatility-spillovers between returns and sentiment.     

Macroeconomic Implications of “Deep Habits” in Banking

Recent empirical evidence shows that price‐cost margins in the market for bank credit are countercyclical in the U.S. economy and that this cyclical behavior can be explained in part from the fact that switching banks is costly for customers (i.e., from a borrower hold‐up effect). Our goal, in this paper, is to study the “financial accelerator” role of these countercyclical margins as a propagation mechanism of macroeconomic shocks. To do so, we apply the “deep habits” framework in Ravn, Schmitt‐Grohé, and Uribe (2006) to financial markets to model this hold‐up effect within a monopolistically competitive banking industry. We are able to reproduce the pattern of price‐cost margins observed in the data, and to show that the real effects of aggregate total factor productivity shocks are larger the stronger the friction implied by borrower hold‐up. Also, output, investment, and employment all become more volatile than in a standard model with constant margins in credit markets. An empirical contribution of our work is to provide structural estimates of the deep habits parameters for financial markets.     

“Non‐Financial” Is a Misnomer,but Doesn't Have to Be a Missed Opportunity

With enterprise values now representing increasing multiples of companies' net book assets, investors are clearly looking beyond financial reporting for enhanced insights and understanding of when and how companies are adding value. This shift includes growing attention to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information. Although ESG data presents its own unique challenges, dismissing it as “non‐financial” can be misleading. When explicitly linked to a company's long‐term value creation strategy, ESG information can serve as a valuable input to more farsighted financial analysis. Market‐driven initiatives, notably that of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), aim to standardize a subset of business‐critical, industry‐specific sustainability data for investors. Research indicates such approaches can generate positive outcomes not only for providers of financial capital, but for their portfolio companies and markets in general. In illustrating these concepts, the authors explore ESG impacts in three sectors and industries, while examining how access to consistent, comparable, reliable sustainability information in those sectors can augment an analysis of traditional business fundamentals. One example focuses on water management in the Oil & Gas Exploration & Production industry, a major environmental issue where geographic considerations can shed light on company‐specific exposures to cost increases, production disruptions, increased CapEx and R&D spending, as well as the potential for asset write‐downs. In the Food & Beverage sector, health and nutrition concerns are shown to be changing consumer preferences, triggering regulatory action, and reshaping companies' product portfolios—with significant implications for the companies' brand values and ability to compete for market share. Finally, in Aerospace & Defense, lapses in business ethics such as bribery of government officials present a governance challenge that comes with the risk of value‐destroying fines and penalties and, even more significant, associated reductions in revenues.     

Discussion of “The implications of unverifiable fair-value accounting: Evidence from the political economy of goodwill accounting”

Ramanna [2007. The implications of unverifiable fair-value accounting: evidence from the political economy of goodwill accounting, Journal of Accounting and Economics] provides interesting and novel evidence on how firms use contributions from their political action committees (PACs) to members of Congress as a means of lobbying for preferred positions on the two exposure drafts that led to SFAS-141 and SFAS-142. My discussion raises some concerns about his main conclusion: that pooling firms lobbied the FASB to obtain a “fair-value”-based impairment rule to facilitate their ability to manipulate financial statements. I offer a more benign explanation and make some other observations about how this line of research could proceed in the future.     

Management by the Numbers: A Formal Approach to Deriving Informational and Distributional Properties of “Unmanaged” Earnings

We explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings truthfully, with the market pricing the firm based on those reported earnings. We generate benchmarks against which empirically observed earnings‐returns relations and aggregate earnings distributions can be evaluated. This parsimonious model shows a coherent set of results: reported losses are less persistent than reported gains, decision making diminishes the S‐shaped market response to earnings and earnings relate to returns asymmetrically in the way documented by Basu [1997]. Furthermore, the implied frequency distribution of aggregate earnings is neither symmetric nor necessarily single‐peaked. Instead, it may exhibit a kink at zero and look similar to the plots reported by Burgstahler and Dichev [1997]. However, within our model, none of these phenomena are due to reporting noise, bias, or some undesirable strategic managerial behavior. They are the natural consequences of using past earnings as the basis for value increasing managerial decision making that in turn generates the future earnings on which future decisions will be based.     

新生代劳动力供给变化对产业升级的影响研究-基于分地区新生代劳动力供给和产业结构数据的实证

基于1995-2014年全国31个省(市)新生代劳动力供给与产业结构数据,构建面板FGLS模型,考量新生代劳动力供给变化影响产业升级效应.结果表明:全国新生代劳动力供给数量与质量上升均有利于我国产业升级;分地区新生代劳动力供给数量增加对中部地区产业升级正向影响效应显著,西部次之,东部较弱;新生代劳动力质量改善对西部地区产业升级的助推作用最大,中部次之,东部较小.因此,应适当放开计生政策和延长退休年龄以缓解劳动力供给数量下行压力,扶持西、中部地区教育事业发展,加速提高当地人均受教育年限,以加快缩小区域差距等.     

Rethinking knowledge: ‘Islamization’ and the future

The Islamization of knowledge debate is central to Muslim futures, focusing on the nature of Muslim identity, modernity and ways of thinking about present and future Muslim reality. The debate, however, has become interwoven with factors that have marginalized Muslim identity—both for participants and observers. This article views Islamization as a civilizational project of rethinking, taking the Qur'an as the frame of reference. Institutional and conceptual approaches are analysed. The development of new disciplines of knowledge within Islamization is seen as having three parameters—an emphasis on holism, the centrality of risk and uncertainty, and acknowledgment of ignorance. Although Islamization involves critique of western civilization, it may seem rejectionist, but synthesis is the aim. The Islamization discourse is at present mainly theoretical; practice requires time and effort.