Connecting for competitiveness: future transport in UK city regions

Britain's major cities have fallen behind the best practice in transport of European and north American cities, and need to address this to compete in global markets. A number of potential mechanisms are available to UK cities, but only if central government is willing to transfer (limited) financial powers to the city regions.     

Does Mandatory Adoption of IFRS Guarantee Compliance?

In this study, we examine whether the mandatory adoption of IFRS by Turkish listed companies in 2005 was successful in practice and what role firm and country level factors played in the adoption. We determine the firm-specific factors that affect the degree of change in both measurement and disclosures by conducting a multivariate analysis. Further, we conduct interviews with external auditors to throw light on the challenges associated with adoption and the outcomes of adoption. We find that while the standards clearly impact certain accounts, adoption is not uniform across accounts. The overall measurement change is positively associated with auditor prominence and gearing, and negatively associated with the degree of free float. With regard to disclosures, we find that although there are some improvements, the vast majority of the disclosure items required by IFRS were not disclosed. Auditor type, size, and the degree of foreign ownership of shares exert a positive impact on the overall improvement in disclosures. Our interview analysis reveals that the dominance of tax laws, the lack of enforcement, corporate governance issues, and inadequate management information systems were all significant constraints to the successful adoption of IFRS.     

Does unconventional monetary policy affect inequality? Evidence from Japan

Inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy, but is gaining more attention recently. Here, we exclusively focus on the impact of unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on inequality. We look at how the recent UMP in Japan affected inequality, using household survey data. Our vector auto regression (VAR) results show that UMP widened income inequality after 2008Q3 as the Bank of Japan (BoJ) resumed its zero-interest rate policy and reinstated UMP. This is largely due to the portfolio channel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically analyse the distributional impact of UMP. Japan’s extensive experience with UMP may hold important policy implications for other countries.     

The incidence of a classified property tax

Under a classified property tax, different classes of property are taxed at different rates. The incidence of such a tax is analyzed in a two-sector, two-factor model.