Do Client Bankruptcies Preceded by Clean Audit Opinions Damage Auditor Reputation?*

There is a maintained assumption within the accounting literature that client bankruptcies preceded by clean audit opinions (Type II going concern opinion (GCO) errors) damage an auditor's reputation. Consistent with this view, the PCAOB proposes that stakeholders may use Type II GCO errors as indicators of low audit quality. This study examines audit committee and investor responses to Type II GCO errors. I find no evidence that audit offices with Type II GCOs are more likely to be dismissed, have lower subsequent audit fees, or have a lower likelihood of being selected for new audit engagements. These findings are consistent with audit committees not using Type II GCO errors as indicators of low auditor quality. Using event study analysis, I find evidence of modest incremental negative investor responses for clients of audit offices with Type II GCO errors. However, these negative investor responses are found only during the financial crisis period of 2008–2010 and are observed only within windows of 30 days or less. Given this limited evidence that stakeholders do respond to Type II GCO errors, I examine whether stakeholders should respond to Type II GCO errors. I find that audit office Type II GCO errors are positively associated with subsequent restatements, an established measure of low audit quality. Taking the results as a whole, I do not find that audit offices incur substantial reputational costs for Type II GCO errors. However, the negative investor response and the positive association with restatements provide some evidence that Type II GCO errors may serve as indicators of low audit quality.     

Analyzing tourists’ length of stay at destinations with survival models: A constructive critique based on a case study

The statistical modeling of tourists’ length of stay at destinations is a topic that recently has received much attention from tourism scholars. In this regard, so-called “survival models” have been introduced as a means of studying how a set of independent variables explain variation in the number of days tourists spend at destinations. This paper provides a critical look at these studies. There are two main findings. (1) The various justifications offered for favoring the survival models over the traditional OLS regression do not hold up under closer scrutiny. (2) An empirical study shows that the OLS regression model describes the association between a set of independent variables and length of stay at least as effectively as a battery of survival models. In line with the principle of parsimony it is concluded that future studies on tourists’ length of stay should abandon survival models if they are conducted along similar lines as the ones to date.     

文茨皮尔斯自由港：欲开辟欧亚大陆桥新的桥头堡

欧盟包括拉脱维亚十分重视新亚欧大陆桥这条国际大通道的畅通与发展,拉脱维亚的文茨皮尔斯自由港从地理位置以及本身所具有的功能上都具备欧亚大陆桥西行桥头堡的条件。因为从莫斯科到拉脱维亚的铁路受到欧盟的支持和资金帮助。在欧洲的众多的国营和民营铁路中只有得到欧盟的承认和支持的铁路,其运力才能得到保障。在前苏两时期,拉脱维亚的文茨皮尔斯自由港就是前苏联重要的进出大西洋的港口,而现在俄罗斯的货物仍然选择从文茨皮尔斯自由港运到欧洲各地或从欧洲进口各种货物。     

Speed in a high-speed society

Abstract

Speed control is the most important aspect of promoting road safety world-wide. The question is how are speeds developing? The European Transport Safety Council concludes: There is little progress on reducing speeds in Europe. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the US and Australia. Attitude surveys show that people’s answers are not very consistent and represent statements without any strong bearing on norms or behaviour. Many factors are ‘pro-speed’: higher performance vehicles, more comfort, media coverage, etc. Enforcement, particularly with cameras and with section control is efficient, but the scale of adoption is too small. Traffic calming is efficient in cities, but the most obvious measure is one that makes it impossible to drive faster than the speed limit. During the last 30 years, a few trials have taken place which are promising; speeds at or below the speed limit, improved behaviour, and attitudes. The predicted effect is a reduction of up to 50% of fatalities in a regulation-driven scenario and a benefit to cost ratio of 3.5 to 4.8. It is time for authorities to see to it that lower speeds with the help of efficient vehicle-based solutions becomes part of the agenda.     

Sticky Swedes and flexible Finns: manufacturing labour markets in Finland and Sweden during the Great Depression

ABSTRACT

Nominal wage stickiness is a popular explanation for the greatness of the Great Depression. According to the sticky-wage explanation, the slow adjustment of nominal wages raised real wages above the market-clearing level, causing a reduction of output and labour, thus increasing unemployment. Explanations for nominal wage stickiness are usually sought within the labour-market institutions and their changes after the First World War. This paper examines the role of labour-market institutions by comparing manufacturing labour markets in Finland and Sweden. These two countries had quite similar economic structures, trade patterns, and exchange rate policies, but different systems of industrial relations. Results indicate that stronger trade unions and collective bargaining made nominal wages stickier in Sweden, while in Finland, where collective agreements did not exist, unions were weaker, and wage adjustment was more flexible. As a result, real product wages rose in Sweden but fell in Finland. This created in Sweden stronger pressure for reducing labour input than in Finland. Our results show on one hand that labour market institutions clearly influenced the course of the Great Depression, but on the other hand that they alone do not explain the different economic outcomes during the depression and the recovery.     

The Swedish model and the future of labour standards after Laval

This article reflects on the European Court of Justice ruling in the case of Laval, involving Latvian posted workers in Sweden. It analyses the implications of the ruling and ensuing debate over the Laval case for the future of the ‘Swedish model’ and labour standards. It suggests that profound dilemmas now face trade unions both at Swedish national and European level as to appropriate strategies to adopt to defend national pay and working conditions in the light of the European Court decision and especially in the Swedish context due to the subsequent ruling by the Swedish Labour Court. Nevertheless, a human rights discourse is emerging in which the European Court of Human Rights may act as a counterbalance to the European Court of Justice, especially in the context of the Lisbon Treaty.     

Assessing early warning signals of currency crises: a fuzzy clustering approach

In the period of 1990s alone, four waves of financial crises occurred around the world. The repeated occurrence of financial crises stimulated a large number of theoretical and empirical studies on the phenomena, in particular studies on the determinants of or early warning signals of financial crises. Nonetheless, the different studies of early warning systems have achieved mixed results and there remains much room for further investigation. Since, so far, the empirical studies have focused on conventional economic modelling methods such as simplified probabilistic models and regression models, in this study we examine whether new insights can be gained from the application of the fuzzy clustering method. The theories of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic offer us the means to deal with uncertainties inherent in a wide variety of tasks, especially when the uncertainty is not the result of randomness but the result of unknown factors and relationships that are difficult to explain. They also provide us with the instruments to treat vague and imprecise linguistic values and to model nonlinear relationships. This paper presents empirical results from analysing the Finnish currency crisis in 1992 using the fuzzy C‐means clustering method. We first provide the relevant background knowledge and introduce the fuzzy clustering method. We then show how the use of fuzzy C‐means method can help us to identify the critical levels of important economic indicators for predicting of financial crises. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Accounting for the Accuracy of Beta Estimates in CAPM Tests on Assets with Time-varying Risks

This paper advocates two ways to make more efficient use of available information in reducing the bias of the risk premium estimate in two-pass tests of the CAPM. First, explicit modelling of the time-variability of betas can improve the accuracy of the beta forecasts. Second, the cross-sectional information available can be exploited more efficiently using individual stocks instead of portfolios provided that noisy beta predictions are given a smaller weight than more accurate ones. This paper proposes an adjustment of the cross-sectional regressions of excess returns against betas to give larger weights to more reliable beta forecasts. A significant positive relationship between returns and the beta forecast is obtained when the proposed approach is applied to data from the Helsinki Stock Exchange, while the traditional Fama–MacBeth approach as such finds no relationship at all.     

Guangdong: A catalyst for economic growth and exports in hunan province

This paper uses the concept of Granger-causality to analyze the link between export expansion in the rapidly growing Guangdong province and GDP growth and exports in Hunan, its adjacent northwest neighbor province. Data cover the 1978 to 2001 period. A long-run equilibrium relationship is found between the variables and a long-run positive causality is detected from export expansion in Guangdong to both GDP growth and exports in Hunan. Hence, the results seem to support the unbalanced regional development policy implemented by the central government in the late 1970s and early 1980s.