Ex Ante Incentives for Earnings Management and the Informativeness of Earnings

This study examines the relation between ex ante incentives of insurance managers to engage in earnings management to meet regulatory standards and the informativeness of earnings. This study extends prior research by simultaneously examining the effects of earnings management and uncertainty about earnings as suggested by Collins and DeAngelo (1990) and Imhoff and Lobo (1992). Results from a sample of 375 quarterly earnings announcements of 41 property and liability insurers during the period 1989 to 1992 support the hypothesis that when managers' incentives for earnings management are high, earnings announcements are less informative to investors (even after controlling for uncertainty associated with exposure to large-scale catastrophes). Robustness tests suggest that our results are not attributable to firm size, time period effects, firm effects, accounting estimation error, or financial distress risk. These results are consistent with investors using publicly available information to predict P-L insurance managers' ex ante incentives to manage earnings to meet regulatory standards, and that they use this information in forming their beliefs about earnings quality.     

中国农村贫困与反贫困制度研究

文章认为,新形势下农村贫困问题复杂：绝对贫困大有改善,相对贫困日益突出,返贫现象凸显严重,追根溯源权利贫困是导致农村贫困的根源。文章透过制度分析,通过重塑农村组织,深化市场体制,完善制度创新,强化运行机制,厉行执行监督系统化措施,构建农村反贫困长效治理机制,强化制度之间的联动效应,将农村贫困治理融入区域和整体社会、政治、经济、文化以及环境协调与可持续发展框架内,实现农村扶贫工作的良性发展。     

股权激励对上市公司的影响及投资策略分析

本文探讨了我国上市公司实施股权激励的环境条件，分析了股权激励对管理层、股东影响的内在机制，分析了实施股权激励对上市公司价值和业绩的影响。对股权激励类上市公司上涨因素的定量化分析显示，其上涨与公司现有的各项财务指标没有必然联系，而与公司的市场地位、行业发展趋势和关联交易之间存在明显的关系。本文认为，我国上市公司已基本具备实施股权激励的环境条件，实施股权激励有利于解决管理层和股东利益一致性问题，通过价值转移和价值创造，持续、有效地促进上市公司价值和业绩的提高，从而有效推动上市公司股价的上升，给投资者以强有力的信心和巨大的投资机会。     

Increasing Charitable Giving: What Can We Learn from Economics?*

There is growing policy interest in charitable giving in the UK. As part of its Big Society agenda, the current government is keen to encourage a higher level of donations, highlighting new technologies, new social norms and tax incentives as potential mechanisms for raising giving. In the 2012 Budget, however, the Chancellor also proposed limiting tax relief on donations to £50,000, sparking an intense discussion about the effectiveness and desirability of tax incentives for major donors. This paper brings together recent evidence relevant to the ongoing policy debates.     

Financial crises: reducing pro-cyclicality

The swing in favour of markets weakened regulation, created incentives for excessive risk-taking, and reduced transparency and diversity. As a result, financial markets became more pro-cyclical. The right combination of regulation and markets is required to reverse this. Principle-based reform should aim to change behaviour rather than forbid activity. Central Bank accommodation has been blamed for the crisis, but excessive leverage due to lax regulation was of a much greater magnitude than any monetary imbalance. Capital's mobility and arbitrage in response to regulation, implies changes must be adopted globally. A diversity of voice and power is essential to enable implementation of the core set of proposals that can make financial markets more robust.     

IFRS adoption,reporting incentives and financial reporting quality in private firms

This study examines financial reporting quality (FRQ) effects around voluntary International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoptions by German private firms across two important dimensions, earnings quality and disclosure practices. To capture differences in the motivations for IFRS adoptions, we identify four different types of IFRS adopting firms based on a comprehensive set of firm characteristics. We observe earnings quality improvements around IFRS adoptions primarily for one type of firm, which is young, fast growing and seeking access to public equity markets. Using a matched sample of private German GAAP and IFRS reporting firms, we find some evidence suggesting that IFRS also contribute to higher earnings quality. Recognizing that our earnings quality metrics are only incomplete measures of FRQ, we also compare the disclosure practices of IFRS and German GAAP firms. We find that all IFRS firm types disclose significantly more information in their financial reports and show a higher propensity to publish their financial reports voluntarily on the corporate website. Our findings indicate that failure to identify earnings quality changes around IFRS adoption cannot be automatically interpreted as IFRS adoption having no effect on the FRQ of (private) firms. Collectively, our results suggest that both incentives and accounting standards shape private firms’ FRQ.     

Can incentives mitigate student overconfidence at grade forecasts?

Research shows that college students exhibit bias in their forecasts of exam performance. Most students are overconfident in their forecasts, academically weaker students are the most overconfident, and top-performing students are underconfident. The literature identifies negative repercussions of these biases, including inadequate preparation for exams. A recurring attribute of this literature is the absence of meaningful incentives for students to forecast accurately. We implement an extra credit scheme to incentivize accurate forecasts. Depending on how forecast bias is measured, the scheme mitigates bias by top-performing students and marginally mitigates bias by other students. Our results have several implications. First, we illustrate an extra credit tool instructors can use to incentivize students to make more thoughtful assessments of their future exam performance. Second, we show how the association between incentives and forecast bias differs across student groups. Finally, we show that results in this literature are sensitive to how bias is measured.     

Not all high-alexithymia individuals are risk-takers: private self-consciousness moderates the relationship between alexithymia and risk-taking behaviours

This article concerns the influence which alexithymia exerts on risk-taking. In particular, alexithymia is seen as a factor which encourages risk-taking as it allows high-alexithymia individuals to feel emotions which are sufficiently intense to compensate for their deficit of emotional awareness. In this connection, we make the hypothesis that alexithymia’s influence is moderated by private self-consciousness (SC). This is because private SC increases the likelihood that high-alexithymia individuals become aware of their risk-taking tendency and that this tendency is discrepant with their pro-safety standards (‘putting someone in danger is bad’) or self-schemas (‘I am a responsible person’). Thus, private SC is likely to enable and motivate them to consciously regulate their behaviour in a safer direction. This hypothesis was empirically tested by a questionnaire amongst 372 French drivers, whose SC, alexithymia, as well as their current adoption of eight risky behaviours (with a more detailed analysis of speeding). The use of conditional process analyses reveal no main effects of alexithymia and private SC but strong interaction effects, while controlling for other predictors. More precisely, when private SC is low high-alexithymia individuals break more the speed limits and adopt more frequently risky behaviours than low-alexithymia drivers. Conversely, when private SC is high, they are less risk-prone. As practical implication, we recommend the use of techniques increasing private SC amongst high-alexithymia persons.     

Chair-CEO generation gap and bank risk-taking

Poor bank governance has disastrous consequences for economies as the 2007–2009 financial crisis has shown. In the aftermath, board diversity is identified as an effective mechanism to enhance bank governance. Diversity, creating cognitive conflict between board members, is expected to enhance board's independence of thought to better perform monitoring and advising functions. Age is a key demographic measure and age dissimilarity between the chair and the CEO in non-financial firms leads to better economic outcomes (Goergen, Limbach, & Scholz, 2015). In this paper, we examine whether chair-CEO age dissimilarity can mitigate banks' excessive risk-taking behaviour. Using a unique sample of 100 listed banks in Europe between 2005 and 2014, we find that age difference between the chair and the CEO reduces bank risk-taking. A chair-CEO generational gap –defined as a minimum of 20 years' age difference– has a larger impact in reducing risk-taking.     

新形势下会计变更为上市公司带来了什么

本文列举了从2001～2004年以来发生会计变更的上市公司.对上市公司的会计变更与会计报表收益之间的关系进行了描述以及对变更方式进行了归纳,并对会计变更的动机进行了详细的解析.最后浅谈了对上市公司会计变更的启示.