The erosion of jurisdiction: Auditing in a market value accounting regime

In recent years, accounting standards worldwide have been modified so as to render them more heavily based on fair or market value. This paper explores the behavioural and jurisdictional consequences of the normative drift towards fair value. Being informed by Giddens’ work on late modernity, trust and expertise and drawing on a series of interviews with Canadian professional accountants, we argue that fair value accounting makes it increasingly harder for auditors to feel and actually be in control of their own expertise. That is, auditors’ system of expertise is now considerably more reliant on a “secondary” – but perhaps in actual fact primary – layer of expertise revolving around market valuation techniques and principles. In so doing, the auditors’ job is increasingly transformed as the involvement of valuators now represents a recurrent and pervasive phenomenon in audit processes. The auditor's role nowadays resembles that of an arbiter having to mediate discrepancies over subjective values – a number of which being produced by highly specialized valuators. Important implications ensue from a system of expertise in which the experts’ degree of control over their own jurisdictional work is increasingly eroding.     

Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada

Abstract The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions. The tests, which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household‐level surveys, are implemented using the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) for 1996, 1999, and 2002. Although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions, the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines. Failing to take into account SLID’s sampling variability (as is sometimes done) can inflate significantly one’s confidence in ranking poverty. Taking into account SLID’s complex sampling design (as has not been done before) can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred.     

Jules Dupuit,Société d'économie politique de Paris and the issue of population in France (1850 – 66) ∗

Abstract

The tradition that views Dupuit only as a brilliant engineer-economist who trained at the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées remained strong in the fifty years that followed World War II. Within this tradition, research on Dupuit mostly was focused on his publications on surplus theory, road tolls and discriminating monopoly. His participation in the debates about other issues taking place within the various learned societies to which he belonged (Société d'économie politique de Paris, Société d'économie sociale, Société de statistique de Paris) long remained unexplored. But recent research has begun filling the gap. This paper follows on these latter research efforts. It aims at uncovering a largely unknown facet of Dupuit, endeavouring to fully elicit his role in the various controversies that took place in France between 1850 and 1866 on the issues of population and the Malthusian principle of population.     

Output/Endowment and Commodity/Factor Price Relationships and Welfare in a Multilateral Trade Model with Partial Factor Mobility

A multilateral model of trade with both commodity flows and partial mobility of factor flows is set up. This model is used to develop factor endowment/output relationships as well as commodity/factor price relationships. Welfare consequences of these parametric shifts are examined. The model is built on the customs union framework which involves three countries and both commodity and factor flows. Owing to spillover effects in multilateral trade models, many nontraditional results are obtained. Many developed countries accept skilled and unskilled migrants from other countries. These migrants are generally accepted on a quota system. Moreover, it has been established that an increase in the migrant quota in the presence of factor mobility may raise or lower the output and welfare in the country not receiving migrants. In fact it is shown that the non‐migrant receiving country could be immiserized due to loss of capital. The main message of this paper is that in a multilateral trade framework there exist international spillover effects which must be taken into consideration in national policymaking.     

On the folk theorem with one-dimensional payoffs and different discount factors

Proving the folk theorem in a game with three or more players usually requires imposing restrictions on the dimensionality of the stage-game payoffs. Fudenberg and Maskin (1986) assume full dimensionality of payoffs, while Abreu et al. (1994) assume the weaker NEU condition (“nonequivalent utilities”). In this note, we consider a class of n-player games where each player receives the same stage-game payoff, either zero or one. The stage-game payoffs therefore constitute a one-dimensional set, violating NEU. We show that if all players have different discount factors, then for discount factors sufficiently close to one, any strictly individually rational payoff profile can be obtained as the outcome of a subgame-perfect equilibrium with public correlation.     

Search, migration, and urban land use: The case of transportation policies

We develop a search-matching model with rural-urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steady-state equilibrium. We then consider three different policies: a transportation policy that improves the public transport system in the city, an entry-cost policy that encourages investment in the city and a restricting-migration policy that imposes some costs on migrants. We show that all these policies can increase urban employment but the transportation policy has much more drastic effects. This is because a decrease in commuting costs has both a direct positive effect on land rents, which discourages migrants to move to the city, and a direct negative effect on urban wages, which reduces job creation and thus migration. When these two effects are combined with search frictions, the interactions between the land and the labor markets have amplifying positive effects on urban employment. Thus, improving the transport infrastructure in cities can increase urban employment despite the induced migration from rural areas.     

Are the Mediterranean countries competitive in fresh fruit and vegetable exports?

For many of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, fruit and vegetables are very important products. In light of the increasing trade liberalization and thus increasing competition between countries, this paper aims to investigate the competitiveness of ten Mediterranean countries with respect to fresh fruit and vegetables. The analysis rests on two foundations. First, a set of indicators are calculated to give a general impression of trends and potentials. Second, a constant market share analysis is performed where the countries' competitiveness in world trade is investigated. The results show that the competitiveness of the investigated countries has deteriorated over the period.     

Georges Perrin and the GP cost calculation method: the story of a failure

After the Second World War, a number of costing methods were developed in France in response to the perceived limitations of Rimailho's 'homogeneous sections' method. The common feature of all these methods was the provision of a more thorough analysis of operations through the adoption of techniques which were simple to use. The GP method, developed by Georges Perrin, was the most successful but, despite its many advantages, its success was limited, due to deficiencies in Perrin's communication policy and his network of contacts.     

Pricing policy and quality upgrading in the Swedish car market: Do import surveillance and exchange rate instability matter?

Recent years have seen an increased use of quantitative restrictions in passenger car trade. In this paper we investigate the impact of import surveillance on product and pricing policies of car manufactures in the Swedish car market over the period 1986–1989. Evidence is found of substantal upgrading in Japanese (and German) car supply. The evidence on changes in quality-adjusted prices is less conclusive. In addition it is found that exchange rate changes were not passed through to car prices.