Tax and spend or spend and tax? An empirical investigation for Austria

The aim of this contribution is to discriminate between the rivallingspend and tax andtax and spend hypotheses in order to check empirically the relationship between government spending and taxation decisions in Austria. For that purpose, the authors estimate a tri-variate structural VAR Model of Austria's public sector that, besides expenditures and revenues, includes aggregate income as an additional variable. They implement impulse-response functions and frequency domain techniques in order to identify the causal relation between government outlays and receipts. The budget making process is interpreted as an error correction model which allows to estimate to what extent revenues and expenditures are adjusted whenever the government sees its long run budget constraint violate. The empirical findings strongly support the spend and tax view that budget decision-making is significantly dominated by the expenditure side in Austria.We are gratefully indebted to Peter Weiss and three anonymous referees for many valuable comments and suggestion.     

Why More Forward-Looking Accounting Standards Can Reduce Financial Reporting Quality

A premise of standard setters and of much empirical research is that improving the quality of accounting standards and their implementation increases information in capital markets. This paper challenges this premise and shows that there are situations in which ‘better’, that is, more forward-looking, accounting standards reduce the information content of financial reports. The reason is that a forward-looking accounting standard affects the smoothness of reported earnings, which can conflict with the manager's smoothing incentive and her willingness to incorporate private information in the financial report. Although the manager could eliminate the effect by earnings management, it is too costly to do so. As a consequence, the capital market's ability to infer the financial and nonfinancial information in reported earnings declines. This finding should increase the awareness that an ‘improvement’ in accounting standards, without considering incentives and other information residing in firms, can adversely affect the quality of financial reporting.     

Too Much of a Good Thing? The Boomerang Effect of Firms’ Investments on Corporate Social Responsibility during Product Recalls

Prior research shows that a good record of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has an insurance-like effect on shareholder value in negative events. We posit and provide empirical evidence that excessive CSR activities can also cause a boomerang effect during negative events. In the setting of product recalls, we show that overinvestment in CSR has a boomerang effect on shareholder value when a company with excessive CSR activities announces a recall. Further analysis shows that the boomerang effect is exacerbated when institutional ownership is low or when customer awareness is high. Our study adds to the literature new insights on how CSR affects shareholder value during a reputation crisis.     

Who will guard over the guardians?

Human rights have been weaponized and transformed into geopolitical tools to target certain states and not others. The rhetoric of human rights has been distorted by politicians, media, think tanks and the emerging “human rights industry” that serves hegemonic powers and not humanity. This constitutes an affront against human dignity.     

金融包容和金融稳定:当前的政策问题

胡锦涛总书记公开倡导包容性增长,指出实现包容性增长,可以解决经济发展中出现的社会问题,为实现经济长远发展奠定坚实的社会基础。包容性增长的概念最早由亚洲开发银行在2007年首次提出。所谓包容性增长,即为倡导机会平等的增长。这个概念与这些年中国政府提出的科学发展观、和谐社会是十分吻合的。本期发表的亚洲开发银行研究院的这篇文章,对金融包容政策进行了研究,指出金融包容致力于将贫困人群纳入正规的金融体系,为他们提供金融服务。金融包容性增长能够促进经济增长,提高国民收入。本文对全球范围内金融包容措施的最新发展进行了分析,指出了成功的金融包容措施应遵循的原则。作者认为金融包容有利于提高金融的稳定性而非相反,在本次金融危机之后更应积极倡导金融包容性发展。     

Management accounting systems change and departmental performance: the influence of managerial information and task uncertainty

Despite the proliferation of new management accounting techniques amidst pressures of organizational and global change, the issue of changes in firm-wide management accounting and control systems (MACSs) has largely been ignored in the research literature. This study explores the indirect effect of MACSs change on departmental performance for a cross-sectional sample of 232 medium-sized Singaporean firms. It is hypothesized that MACSs change affects performance but not directly. Instead, this relationship is mediated by managerial-relevant information (MRI) that is impacted by MACSs change, which, in turn, enhances performance. Task uncertainty is expected to moderate the intervening linkages; specifically, the latter are anticipated to strengthen under conditions of more task variability and task difficulty and, thus, augment the indirect effect of MACSs change on performance. The results offer support for the positive indirect effect of improving departmental performance from more MRI, triggered by MACSs change. Although not large, the indirect effect is strengthened when task variability and task difficulty are high. Overall, the findings are consistent with the stated purposes of management accounting that are embedded in normative definitions, and which are relied upon to motivate the framework for analysis.     

Optimal Precision of Accounting Information in Debt Financing

This paper studies qualitative characteristics of accounting systems that are used in debt financing. We consider a financially constrained firm that provides to lenders information on the value of assets that serve as collateral in a financing contract for a risky investment project. We find that the investor prefers an accounting system that provides biased signals about the value of assets. This bias adjusts the information content of the signals to maximize the probability of undertaking the project. Under fair value accounting, low book values are more precise measures of actual value than high book values, which is consistent with conditional conservatism. Next, we study accounting risk to study the effect of institutions that govern the financial reporting policy based on the optimal precision. We find that fair value measurement introduces greater accounting risk and is preferred by financially constrained firms to measurement at historical cost.     

Interaction patterns of systemic problems in distributed energy technology diffusion: a case study of photovoltaics in the Western Cape province of South Africa

ABSTRACT

Compared to large-scale renewable energy systems, distributed systems have diffused relatively slowly in recent years, particularly in developing countries. In this study, we analysed the barriers to the diffusion of distributed photovoltaics in South Africa by applying the technological innovation system framework. More specifically, we carried out an interview-based structural-functional analysis to identify underlying systemic problems, reveal their patterns of interaction, and analyse the implications of these patterns for the relationship among the key processes within the innovation system, the so-called system functions. We identified a variety of interlinked problems, shed light on the specific roles of different, mal-performing, system functions, and revealed constellations where specific functions blocked each other and, thereby, created lock-in situations. Although the findings reveal the complexity of the problems that are associated with the implementation of distributed energy technologies, they also indicate that these problems may be addressed successfully.     

On real interest rate persistence: the role of breaks

The role of structural breaks in long spans of ex-post real interest rates for 10 industrialized countries is studied. First, the persistence of the real interest is assessed with newly proposed low-frequency tests of Müller and Watson (2008). Second, the test of Leybourne et al. (2007) for a change in persistence of a time series is applied to the real interest rate. The results show that real interest rates over the full sample period do not fit a covariance-stationary or unit-root model, nor a fractionally integrated, near-unit-root or local-level model. Instead, the persistence of real rates changes over time and there are periods when the real rate is covariance-stationary and other periods when it follows a unit-root process.