Effective Macroprudential Policy: Cross‐Sector Substitution from Price and Quantity Measures

Macroprudential policy is increasingly being implemented worldwide, and is mostly applied to banks. A key question is whether this prompts substitution toward nonbank credit. Using two different global data sets on macroprudential measures and different methodologies, including detrended series, panel estimations, and propensity score matching, we find evidence of such substitution. Substitution toward nonbank credit appears to be stronger when policy measures are binding and are implemented in economies with well‐developed nonbank credit markets. This substitution partially offsets the fall in bank credit, thus dampening the policies’ effect on total credit.     

Leisure lifestyle courses in old age

This paper examines representations of English identity in the popular press through a review of the tabloids' coverage of the 2002 Football World Cup. Utilizing a qualitative discourse analysis approach, the paper assesses the content, style and tone of reports of the England team during the tournament and places these within the context of contemporaneous news and current affairs. It is argued that much of the coverage of England's matches was flavoured with the kind of military metaphors and xenophobic cliche;aa evident in previous reporting of football tournaments. The coincidence of England's progress in the World Cup with the Golden Jubilee celebrations afforded the opportunity for the tabloids to declare that a ‘new kind of national confidence and patriotism’ had been born. However, whilst a new, more inclusive Englishness was evolving amongst England supporters, this was not reflected in associated tabloid coverage, where a narrower and more nostalgic Englishness was commonly observed.     

CONTESTED ELECTIONS IN A CITIZEN CANDIDATE MODEL

This work follows the citizen candidate model of Besley and Coate (1997) to show that for a unidimensional policy issue, a moderate default policy rules out equilibrium outcomes in which there is an uncontested candidate.     

ALCOHOL ADVERTISING IN MAGAZINES: DO BEER,WINE, AND SPIRITS ADS TARGET YOUTH?

In 2003, the alcohol beverage industry spent more than $1.6 billion on advertising, including $394 million on ads in magazines. Critics allege that these activities target adolescents. This article examines count data for alcohol ads placed in 28 magazines in 2001–03. Specifying a demand function for advertising space, regressions are estimated that are conditioned on magazine characteristics and readership demographics, including the percent of youth in the audience. The explanatory variables include real prices of advertisements and audience size. Results indicate significant effects for price, audience size, and adult demographics, but fail to support claims that advertisers target youth. ( JEL L82, L66, M37)     

EXPERIMENTAL WORK ON SUBSIDIES,MORAL HAZARD,AND MARKET POWER IN AGRICULTURAL MARKETS

Laboratory markets are created to capture the important features of agricultural commodity markets. Sellers make production decisions and hold inventories before goods are sold. In a posted‐bid auction environment, price supports create a moral hazard for sellers. Part of the price‐support subsidy is transferred to buyers in the form of lower prices, which are close to those predicted by the buyers' Cournot level. The subsidy program is expensive for this reason. Lump‐sum payments correct the moral hazard problem and are better at transferring income to sellers. However, transfers made at the beginning of each production period cause a decline in production levels. (JEL D44, C92)     

Real and Financial Industry Booms and Busts

We examine how product market competition affects firm cash flows and stock returns in industry booms and busts. Our results show how real and financial factors interact in industry business cycles. In competitive industries, we find that high industry-level stock market valuation, investment, and financing are followed by sharply lower operating cash flows and abnormal stock returns. Analyst estimates are positively biased and returns comove more. In concentrated industries these relations are weak and generally insignificant. Our results are consistent with participants in competitive industries not fully internalizing the negative externality of industry competition on cash flows and stock returns.     

Creating Early Success in Financial Accounting: Improving Performance on Adjusting Journal Entries*

Adjusting journal entries constitute a necessary component of accrual basis accounting and are critical to the accuracy of financial statements. However, accounting students often struggle to comprehend these accounting entries, which is a concern given that failure to understand early topics in accounting courses has been found to impact course performance and selection of undergraduate major. Perceiving accounting as a language, we utilize psycholinguistic theory to understand how an instructor may improve coherence of students’ mental structures of accounting problems. We conduct an experiment to investigate the extent to which a simple instructor intervention, requiring that the initial deferral transaction be recorded, is able to improve student performance on the subsequent deferral adjustments, and whether this improvement is consistent across problem sets that differ in task difficulty. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we find that this intervention results in improved performance. The beneficial effect of the intervention is found to differ across problem‐set task difficulty. Implications for accounting education are discussed.