What are the real prospects for total EC integration?

Nothing can stop the momentum behind the movement for total European integration, or so it would seem. But what about the impact of Gemn reunijication, strong nationalistic feelings, and the socialist tradition in Europe? The authors look at what impact these might have on the move toward creation of a Single Market.     

Impact of Auditor Report Changes on Financial Reporting Quality and Audit Costs: Evidence from the United Kingdom

While substantial revisions to auditor reporting requirements are being implemented internationally, the impact of these reforms on financial reporting quality is unknown. We exploit the United Kingdom's recent auditor reporting changes and find that the United Kingdom's new reporting regime is associated with an improvement in financial reporting quality as proxied by significant decreases in absolute abnormal accruals and the propensity to just meet or beat analyst forecasts, and a significant increase in earnings response coefficients. As for audit costs, we do not find a significant change in audit fees or audit delay surrounding the implementation of the new reporting regime. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that new auditor reporting requirements are associated with a significant improvement in financial reporting quality without detecting a significant increase in audit costs.     

Wealth and the capitalist spirit

The wealth distribution in the U.S. is more unequal than either the income or earnings distribution, a fact current models of saving behavior have difficulty explaining. Using Max Weber’s [Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribners’ and Sons (1958 translated edition)] idea that individuals may have a ‘capitalist spirit’, I construct and simulate a model where individuals accumulate wealth for its own sake rather than as deferred consumption. Including capitalist spirit preferences in a simple life cycle model, with no other modifications, generates a skewness of wealth consistent with that observed in the U.S. economy. Furthermore, capitalist spirit preferences provide a way to generate decreasing risk aversion with increases in wealth without resorting to idiosyncratic rates of time preference.     

WORLD OUTLOOK

After six years of steadily rising OECD output, fears of a significant rise in world inflation are now increasing. In the last year there has been a slight pick-up in inflation with producer prices up nearly d per cent. But prompt action by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates before the presidential election appears to have damped inflationary expectations in the US and has given Japan and Germany an opportunity to tighten monetary policy without causing major currency fluctuations. It is also apparent that the other possible source of world inflation, commodity prices, is not a problem. OPEC over-production has ensured that the oil price remains weak and other commodity prices appear to have stopped rising after a brief acceleration at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless the major imbalances in world trade are declining only slowly and without a change in fiscal policy in the major economies it is difficult to believe that minor changes in monetary policy will be sufficient if the process of adjustment begins to falter. Despite these risks, we take a sanguine view of world prospects. Tighter monetary policy should effect a slowdown in world growth next year (already indicated by recent developments, particularly in the US) and this should be sufficient to control inflation which we expect to peak at just under 5 per cent at the beginning of next year. From 1990 onwards we see steady growth accompanied by low inflation.     

Residents' perceptions of the environmental impacts of tourism in the Lake Bosomtwe Basin,Ghana

This study investigates residents' perceptions of tourism's physical impacts in the Lake Bosomtwe Basin in Ghana. Data were based on a resident survey conducted in the basin in January 2006. Residents perceived both positive and negative impacts of tourism development, but were more inclined to the positive side. Based on the findings, it is recommended that the district assemblies in partnership with the Ministry of Tourism should start managing the impacts, and also educate the local population on the dangers of underestimating the negative impacts of tourism on the environment.     

Age of first hunting experience: Results from a nationwide recreation survey

Abstract

Hunting participation, as indicated in the 1983 Nationwide Recreation Survey, is examined to determine the relationship between age of first hunting experience and adult level of participation. A statistically significant association between these two variables is found. In addition, more than 83 percent of those who hunt began their involvement by 18 years of age. The findings have implications for future hunting participation and the provision of programs for hunters.     

Analysis of efficient markets

A simple trading model is presented in which Bayes’ rule is used to aggregate traders’ forecasts about risky assets’ future returns. In this financial market, Bayes’ rule operates like an omnipotent market-maker performing functions that in 1776 Adam Smith attributed to an “invisible hand.” We have analyzed two distinct cases: in the first scenario, the traders’ forecast errors are uncorrelated, and in the second scenario, the traders’ forecast errors are correlated. The contribution of our paper is fourfold: first, we prove that the “efficient market” mean-return can be expressed as a complex linear combination of the traders’ forecasts. The weights depend on the forecast variances, as well as on the correlations among the traders’ forecasts. Second we show that the “efficient” variance is equal to the inverse of the sum of the traders’ precision errors, and is also related to the correlations among the traders’ forecast errors. Third, we prove that the efficient market return is the best linear minimum variance estimator (BLMVE) of the security’s mean return (in the sense that it minimizes the sum of the traders’ mean squared forecast errors). Thus, an efficient market aggregates traders’ heterogeneous information in an optimal way. Fourth, we prove that an efficient market produces a mean return (price) as a Blackwell sufficient (most informative) experiment among all possible aggregated expected return (price) forecasts.     

Accountability as aporia,testimony, and gift

This paper contributes to the understanding of accountability in its relation with responsibility. It applies Derrida's work on responsibility, testimony, and gift to the problematic of accountability. Accountability's entanglement in the tension between, morality and ethics, singular and general responsibilities is examined, and Derrida's analysis of the aporia of responsibility is expressed and explored in terms of an aporia of accountability: It is argued that accountability relies on responsibility but that the rendering of accountability tends to undermine responsibility. In seeking to make a positive contribution to the question of how accountability might contribute to raising levels of responsibility for the other, the wholly other, the paper critically builds on existing Levinasian perspectives on this question, and develops the suggestion, inspired by Derrida's work, that in appropriate circumstances the reconfiguring of accountability as testimony and as gift might help enhance responsibility.     

Accurate environmental bioindication in floodplains in spite of an extreme flood event

The ecological reaction of species on environmental factors can differ both, temporally and geographically. Therefore, bioindicator systems must be shown to remain accurate at different places and points of time. Extreme events pose challenges for testing this robustness, which has not yet been explored systematically. The unique opportunity of the extreme flooding of the river Elbe in August 2002 was used for such a test. The bioindicator system for mean groundwater depth during the vegetation period and annual duration of inundation in floodplains studied here was developed with data collected in 1999. Data from 2003 were used to analyse the dependence of the bioindication results on the humidity of the study plots and taxonomic group (plants, molluscs and carabid beetles). For the duration of inundation, the accuracy of bioindication in 2003 was similar to that in 1999, except for the medium‐humid and dry plots using molluscs as indicators. For groundwater depth, the accuracy of bioindication in 2003 was similar to that of the reference year except in the dry plots with significantly lower accuracy for all species groups. With a few exceptions, the bioindicator system is shown to be robust and to remain accurate in spite of an extreme flood event. In conclusion, the relevance of extreme events for the robustness of bioindicator systems differs between the indicated parameters and taxonomic groups. The results stress the need to take into account the limits of the working range and the occurrence of extreme events, when testing and applying bioindicator systems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Aggregate Demand for Private Health Insurance Coverage in the United States

This article estimates the aggregate demand for private health insurance coverage in the United States using an error correction model for the period 1966–1999. Both short- and long-run price and income elasticities of demand are estimated. The empirical findings indicate that both private insurance enrollment and the completeness of insurance are relatively inelastic with respect to changes in price and income in the short and long run. Moreover, the results suggest that an increase in the number cyclically and frictionally uninsured generates less welfare loss than an increase in the number of structurally uninsured.