Developments in accounting regulation: A synthesis and annotated bibliography of evidence and commentary in the 2016 academic literature

In this paper key regulation-related findings and commentaries in the 2016 academic literature are synthesized in annotated form. This paper is one in a series of previously published annotated bibliographies published in this journal. Papers published in academic outlets including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, Accounting Horizons, The Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Business, Finance & Accounting, The Journal of Financial Reporting, Auditing A Journal of Practice and Theory, and Research in Accounting Regulation were reviewed for potential inclusion. The 2016 literature featured strong regulation-related threads as follows: financial accounting regulation, analysis of individual pronouncements, SEC regulatory activity and its impact, international financial reporting standards, income tax reporting, and auditing.     

Political uncertainty,risk of Frexit and European sovereign spreads

Using data from a prediction market (crowd-based forecasts), we build a daily measure capturing the risk of Frexit related to the 2017 French presidential elections. We study how unexpected changes in this new measure of political uncertainty in France affect European sovereign spreads vis-à-vis Germany. We show that our uncertainty proxy drives not only the French sovereign spread but also the spreads of those EU countries deemed the most vulnerable to the risk of desegregation of the Euro Zone. These results suggest that specific political uncertainty affects short-term investor’s expectations and may outweigh other economic determinants of sovereign spreads shortly prior to high stake elections     

住房自有率与城市蔓延：理论与实证

通过构建一个包含住房租赁市场的封闭、单中心城市一般均衡模型，模型化了住房自有率与城市蔓延之间的关系，理论模型结论显示：首先，与自有住房者相比，租房者倾向于居住在离市中心较近的地方；其次，住房自有率的提高会使城市空间面积扩大，加剧城市蔓延。进一步，利用地级市数据分别对理论命题结论进行了检验，在比较充分地控制内生性问题后，实证结果证实了高住房自有率会加剧城市蔓延。因此，长期以来我国不断升高的住房自有率也是加剧我国城市蔓延的重要原因。     

The impact of macroeconomic factors on income inequality: Evidence from the BRICS

In this paper we investigate how the evolution of income growth, real interest rates, and inflation have driven income inequality across a variety of countries with particular focus on the BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) during the period 2001 to 2015. Our work suggests that, when central banks of the BRICS economies use monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilization, they need to consider the impact monetary policy changes have on the distribution of income in their nations. Our estimates reveal that the unintended consequence of policies that induce economic growth and higher prices is higher income inequality. We find that the positive relationship between the three macroeconomic variables and income inequality for the BRICS economies is stronger during the post-2008 period.     

Time-frequency co-movements between oil prices and interest rates: Evidence from a wavelet-based approach

This paper investigates time–frequency co-movements between crude oil prices and interest rates. To test this relationship, the study applied a continuous wavelet and cross wavelet approaches to data from West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices and interest rates in the United States (U.S.). Results from the sample period revealed significant relationships, in the intermediate term, between WTI crude oil prices and U.S. interest rates. Moreover, co-movements between oil price and interest rate variables were especially sensitive during abnormal political events and periods of financial ‘meltdown’. We further use Partial Wavelet Coherence (PWC) and Multiple Wavelet Coherence (MWC) methods to investigate the impacts of five major control variables namely GDP growth, unemployment, three-month Treasury bill, CPI index and industrial production index. The results show a powerful impact of control variables on oil-interest rates co-movements under different frequencies. Finally, we show evidence of co-integrating long run relationship between oil markets and control variables. These results have important implications for energy investors and policy makers.     

A new multiscale decomposition ensemble approach for forecasting exchange rates

Due to the high complexity and strong nonlinearity nature of foreign exchange rates, how to forecast foreign exchange rate accurately is regarded as a challenging research topic. Therefore, developing highly accurate forecasting method is of great significance to investors and policy makers. A new multiscale decomposition ensemble approach to forecast foreign exchange rates is proposed in this paper. In the approach, the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method is utilized to divide foreign exchange rates into a finite number of subcomponents; the support vector neural network (SVNN) technique is used to model and forecast each subcomponent respectively; another SVNN technique is utilized to integrate the forecasting results of each subcomponent to generate the final forecast results. To verify the superiority of the proposed approach, four major exchange rates were chosen for model comparison and evaluation. The experimental results indicate that our proposed VMD-SVNN-SVNN multiscale decomposition ensemble approach outperforms some other benchmarks in terms of forecasting accuracy and statistical tests. This demonstrates that our proposed VMD-SVNN-SVNN multiscale decomposition ensemble approach is promising for forecasting foreign exchange rates.     

Exchange rate dynamics and US dollar-denominated sovereign bond prices in emerging markets

Using data on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia and Turkey, our empirical results show that the exchange rates of their currencies have adequate explanatory power in explaining their US dollar-denominated sovereign bonds, particularly in the post-global financial crisis period. We develop a two-factor pricing model with closed-form solutions for the sovereign bonds in which the correlated factors are foreign exchange rates and US risk-free interest rates that follow a double square-root process relevant in the low interest rate environment. The numerical results and associated error analysis show that the model credit spreads can broadly track the market credit spreads.     

One size may not fit all: Welfare benefits and cost reductions with optional differentiated household electricity rates

We consider optional time-of-use (TOU) pricing for residential consumers, offered by a publicly regulated electricity supplier, as an alternative to a single TOU or flat rate structure. An equilibrium model explores and quantifies the effects of such pricing on welfare, consumption, and production costs. The supplier offers to each household a menu of possible rate structures obtained by maximizing a collective welfare function subject to three restrictions: Pareto efficiency, incentive compatibility, sufficiency of supplier revenue to cover costs. Simulations based on realistic calibration of the model demonstrate that optional pricing can increase overall consumer welfare and reduce average cost.     

The effect of oil price shocks on asset markets: Evidence from oil inventory news

We quantify the reaction of U.S. equity, bond futures, and exchange rate returns to oil price shocks driven by oil inventory news. Across most sectors, equity prices decrease in response to higher oil prices before the 2007/2008 crisis but increase after it. Positive oil price shocks cause a depreciation of the U.S. dollar against a broad range of currencies but have only a modest effect on bond futures returns. The evidence suggests that changes in risk premia help to explain the time-varying effect of oil price shocks on U.S. equity returns.     

Non-linear exchange rate relationships: An automated model selection approach with indicator saturation

This paper examines whether the explanatory power of exchange rate models can be improved by allowing for cross-country asymmetries and non-linear effects of fundamentals. Both appear to be crucial. The samples include the USD versus pound and yen from 1982:10 to 2013:10, and automated model selection is conducted with indicator saturation. Several non-linear effects are significant at 1%. Further, many of the indicators present in the linear models are eliminated once allowing for non-linearities; suggesting some of the structural breaks found in previous work were an artifact of the misspecified linear functional form. These conclusions are robust to estimation using principal components.