The Announcement Effect of an Airport Expansion on Housing Prices

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of the announcement of a new airport hub on housing prices near the airport. While numerous studies of airport noise have found that high noise levels reduce property values, few have been able to measure the announcement effect on values. The results indicate that after controlling to extraneous influences, housing property prices in a 2.5 mile band from the Greensboro/High Point/Winston Salem metropolitan airport declined approximately 9.2% in the post-announcement period. In the next 1.5-mile band, house prices declined approximately 5.7% in the post-announcement period.     

Social reporting by islamic banks

The last thirty years have witnessed the appearance and rapid expansion of Islamic banking both inside and outside the Islamic world. Islamic banks provide financial products that do not violate Sharia , the Islamic law of human conduct. The Islamic principles upon which the banks claim to operate give an important role to social issues. Applying these principles, we develop a benchmark set of social disclosures appropriate to Islamic banks. These are then compared, using a disclosure index approach, the actual social disclosures contained in the annual reports of twenty-nine Islamic banks (located in sixteen countries) to this benchmark. In addition, content analysis is undertaken to measure the volume of social disclosures. Our analysis suggests that social reporting by Islamic banks falls significantly short of our expectations. The results of the analysis also suggest that banks required to pay the Islamic religious tax Zakah provide more social disclosures than banks not subject to Zakah .     

公允价值的困境解析及其对策

公允价值的运用在国外已成为一种趋势,在我国却并不顺利.文章认为公允价值在理论上是可行的,尽管实际运用中,由于使用者的逐利动机、会计准则制度不完善、相关的法律法规不健全及执法不严等,导致在关联交易、非货币交易、债务重组和资产减值中出现了很多问题,但是通过引入全面收益并且建立良好的实施环境,它也就具有了实务上的可行性.     

The Future of Financial Reporting: Insights from Research

Research offers insights that, if heeded and built upon, could improve financial reporting, thereby contributing to a more prosperous society. In particular, research suggests improvement could stem from greater use of fair value; a performance statement designed to reveal the information embedded in changes in fair value; better information to help investors assess the value of intangible assets; more specific information about risk and uncertainty; information that is unbiased, rather than conservative; acceptance of a degree of earnings management together with a determination of how much earnings management is acceptable; and a financial reporting package designed to convey information users need, which presumably is broader than today's financial statements.     

Genetic risk and value

A conceptual truth about risks is that they involve a possible and future adverse effect or a negative value of some kind. The genetic risks that individuals may face in the health care setting differ in some crucial respects to other kind of risks. The aims of this paper are to analyse the notion of value in the context of genetic risk in the setting of health care, and to suggest a conception of the evaluative aspect of genetic risk that is fruitful for genetic risk information. Two influential and relevant approaches to value, preferentialism and the capability approach, are discussed in the light of certain distinctive features of genetic risk and a third, a sensibility theory of value is suggested. According to this view, the concept of risk is a so-called ‘thick’ evaluative concept that has both a world-guiding function as well as an action-guiding or normative function. It is argued that this provides a more promising way to think about genetic risks in the clinical setting.     

Fair value disclosures and crash risk

In response to the public criticism of the inadequate disclosures mandated by SFAS No. 157, Fair Value Measurements, the FASB issued ASU (Accounting Standards Update) 2010–06, Improving Disclosures about Fair Value Measurements, and ASU 2011–04, Amendments to Achieve Common Fair Value Measurement and Disclosure Requirements, in an effort to increase the reporting transparency. We examine whether the increased fair value disclosures required by these two updates effectively decrease crash risk, defined as the frequency of extreme negative stock returns. In support of the hypothesis, we find that increased transparency from these updates reduces crash risk among U.S. banking firms and that the reduction is greater in banks that have a higher level of Level 3 financial assets.     

Integrated landscape initiatives in Europe: Multi-sector collaboration in multi-functional landscapes

Landscapes are linked to human well-being in a multitude of ways, some of which are challenged by global market forces and traditional management approaches. In response to this situation there has been a rise in local initiatives to sustain the values of landscape. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic analysis of the spectrum of these initiatives in Europe in terms of patterns of organisation, participants, resources, problems, and landscape values addressed. This review collects examples of integrated landscape initiatives from all over Europe through systematic internet key word searches and canvassing of European umbrella organisations; followed by an online survey of representatives from the identified initiatives (n = 71). Our results show that the most relevant characteristics of integrated landscape initiatives in Europe are: a holistic approach to landscape management (acting in multifunctional landscapes and combining different objectives), the involvement and coordination of different sectors and stakeholders at many levels, and the role as agents of awareness raising and learning hubs. Integrated landscape initiatives mainly depend on impulses of local civil society. Identified barriers to their work include a lack of funding and institutional support. Therefore, political and societal action is needed to increase their effectiveness.     

The composite iteration algorithm for finding efficient and financially fair risk-sharing rules

We consider the problem of finding an efficient and fair ex-ante rule for division of an uncertain monetary outcome among a finite number of von Neumann–Morgenstern agents. Efficiency is understood here, as usual, in the sense of Pareto efficiency subject to the feasibility constraint. Fairness is defined as financial fairness with respect to a predetermined pricing functional. We show that efficient and financially fair allocation rules are in one-to-one correspondence with positive eigenvectors of a nonlinear homogeneous and monotone mapping associated to the risk sharing problem. We establish relevant properties of this mapping. On the basis of this, we obtain a proof of existence and uniqueness of solutions via nonlinear Perron–Frobenius theory, as well as a proof of global convergence of the natural iterative algorithm. We argue that this algorithm is computationally attractive, and discuss its rate of convergence.     

Balance sheet conservatism and audit reporting conservatism

Financial reports are prepared on a going‐concern (GC) basis rather than a liquidation basis even when companies are highly distressed. This allows distressed companies to report book values of assets that greatly exceed their liquidation values, implying a lack of conservatism in the balance sheet. We argue that auditors issue going‐concern opinions in order to warn investors about this lack of balance sheet conservatism. This argument leads to two testable hypotheses. First, for companies that are at risk of bankruptcy, auditors are more likely to issue GC opinions when the book values of assets under the GC assumption are high relative to the expected liquidation values of assets (i.e., when the GC assumption causes the balance sheet to lack conservatism). Second, for companies that enter bankruptcy, the issuance of a prior GC opinion has predictive information content with respect to the wedge between the book values of assets and the future liquidation values of those same assets. Our results strongly support both hypotheses. The findings are important because they indicate that conservative audit reporting helps to compensate for a lack of conservatism in the balance sheet, which arises because the GC assumption permits the book values of assets to exceed their liquidation values.     

Fair Value Measurements of Control Premiums

As the overview of the current state of research within this paper shows, the debate around fair value measurements is far from over. This paper analyzes fair value measurement requirements in a controversial scenario, namely when a control premium exists. The analyses of the paper show that, while measurement rules around control premiums could have a material impact on fair value measurements and the financial statements as a whole, significant fair value measurement issues remain unresolved. The conclusion is that fair value measurements should include or exclude control premiums consistently. It is argued that including control premiums for all fair value measurements is the most faithful representation of the underlying economic phenomenon. This paper contributes to the fair value measurement debate by comparing the merits of alternative fair value measurements for control premiums and highlights an area where researchers, investors, and other users should exercise caution when evaluating financial statements.