Boekbespreking

Groningen, December 1929.     

Does SEC FRR No. 48 disclosure communicate risk management effectiveness?

We hypothesize that the quality of market risk disclosure mandated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Financial Reporting Release No. 48 (FRR No. 48) provides useful information for assessing risk management effectiveness. Measuring risk disclosure quality as the degree of modification, we find that higher-than-expected disclosure modification is associated with lower future cash flow volatility. On average, an increase in risk disclosure modification from the lowest to the highest decile is associated with a 5.34 percent decrease in cash flow volatility. Given the significant impact of cash flow volatility on firm value and capital investment, our results highlight the importance of market risk disclosures and should be of interest to investors and analysts.     

Subjective evaluations with performance feedback

Firms use subjective performance evaluations to provide employees with both incentives and feedback. This article shows that if an objective measure of performance, however imperfect, is available, subjective evaluations with incentive effects can be sustained even without repeated interaction. Although full efficiency cannot be achieved in general, it is achievable if the firm can commit to a forced distribution of evaluations and employs a continuum of workers. When the number of workers is small, a forced distribution is useful only if the objective measure is poor. The model also shows that a leniency bias in evaluations can improve incentives.     

A causality analysis of growth and export performance

This study examines both bivariate causal relationships between manufactured export performance and manufactured output growth and trivariate causal relationships between manufactured exports, investment, and manufactured output. Before the causality testing, integration and cointegration processes are tested in order to select the appropriate functional form. The causality testing process employs the vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Little evidence is found in the bivariate causal results and mixed evidence of causal relationships is found in the trivariate testing results.     

Latent Theoretical Convergence upon a Pluralist Conception of Economic Action: Adam Smith and Max Weber

This paper engages in exploring certain latent theoretical convergences between the works of Adam Smith and Max Weber. The fact that these two have been major protagonists in the establishment and development of political economy and sociology respectively gives a rationale to such an endeavor. Another rationale is provided by the paucity of attempts at exploring the theoretical relations between Smith and Weber in the current economic and sociological literature. Helping fill in this gap in the literature is the paper's intended contribution. That Weber's writings contain pertinent convergences with Smith's work is the general premise of this article. In particular, the treatment of economic action epitomizes these congruencies between Smith's political economy and Weber's economic sociology.     

Constant market shares analysis: uses,limitations and prospects*

In this paper, we generalise the constant market shares (CMS) framework, with particular attention to the underlying theoretical conditions required for diagnostic interpretation. The approach is applied to the analysis of the export performance of the Australian processed food sector in South‐East Asia over the period 1980–2003. We conclude that the usefulness of CMS analysis for evaluating a country's international trade performance depends upon the empirical validity of the aggregation assumptions implicit in the diagnostic interpretation.