Determinants of Mortgage Default and Consumer Credit Use: The Effects of Foreclosure Laws and Foreclosure Delays

The mortgage default decision is part of a complex household credit management problem. We examine how factors affecting mortgage default spill over to other credit markets. As home equity turns negative, homeowners default on mortgages and home equity lines of credit at higher rates, whereas they prioritize repaying credit cards and auto loans. Larger unused credit card limits intensify the preservation of credit cards over housing debt. Although mortgage nonrecourse statutes increase default on all types of housing debt, they reduce credit card defaults. Foreclosure delays increase default rates for housing and nonhousing debts. Our analysis highlights the interconnectedness of debt repayment decisions.     

The Global Impact of Brexit Uncertainty

We propose a text-based method for measuring the cross-border propagation of large shocks at the firm level. We apply this method to estimate the expected costs, benefits, and risks of Brexit and find widespread reverberations in listed firms in 81 countries. International (i.e., non-U.K.) firms most exposed to Brexit uncertainty (the second moment) lost significant market value and reduced hiring and investment. International firms also overwhelmingly expected negative first-moment impacts from the U.K.'s decision to leave the European Union (EU), particularly related to regulation, asset prices, and labor market impacts of Brexit.     

Labor Market Regulation and Productivity Growth: Evidence for Twenty OECD Countries (1984–2004)

We present empirical evidence for a cross section of twenty OECD countries (1984–2004) that a relatively regulated and coordinated ("rigid") industrial relations system promotes long-run labor productivity growth. This conclusion is reinforced when we differentiate between (three) categories of OECD industrial relations systems and test for differences in productivity performance.     

How Control System Design Influences Performance Misreporting

This paper investigates reporting honesty when managers have monetary incentives to overstate their performance. We argue that managers who report about their performance will take into account how their report affects their peers (i.e., other managers at the same hierarchical level). This effect depends on the design of the organization's control system, in particular, on the reward structure and the information policy regarding individual performance reports. The reward structure determines if peers’ monetary payoff is increased or decreased when managers claim a higher level of performance. The information policy determines if managers will be able to link individual peers to their reports and affects the nonmonetary costs of breaking social norms. We present the results of a laboratory experiment. As predicted, we find that participants are more likely to overstate their performance if this increases the monetary payoff of others than if their reported performance decreases others’ monetary gains. In addition, overstatements are lower under an open information policy, where each individual's reported performance is made public, compared to a closed information policy, where participants only learn the average performance of the other participants. Our findings have several important implications for management accounting research and practice.     

发展生物燃料乙醇对我国区域农业发展的影响分析

本文利用"中国农业可持续发展决策支持系统"分析了不同燃料乙醇发展政策可能对我国农产品价格、整体和各区域农业生产及净产值等的影响。研究结果表明:燃料乙醇发展将显著提高能源作物的农产品价格,对农业发展和农民增收将起到积极的促进作用,但对稻谷和小麦等粮食安全有一些负面影响;燃料乙醇发展对不同区域及不同农户的影响有较大差异;多数地区的农业部门都将从中受益,获益的大小主要取决于各地区在种植能源作物上的比较优势。研究也指出,未来的重点应放在非粮作物以及第二代生物燃料乙醇技术上(即用纤维素生产乙醇),并且应该提高在这些方面的科研投资水平。