Public Debt,Terms of Trade and Welfare: The Role of Capital Production Shares,External Balances,and Dynamic (In)efficiency

In view of still large external imbalances across the world economy and dramatically risen public debts in major advanced economies, this paper reconsiders the relationship between public debt, the terms of trade and welfare in a two-good, two-country overlapping generations model with technological differences across countries. We find that the terms of trade effect of a public debt shock depends only on international differences in capital production shares and the dynamic (in)efficiency of the world economy. As in a model with similar capital production shares, domestic welfare rises and foreign welfare decreases when Home has a positive external balance and the Golden Rule holds. Under dynamic efficiency, welfare decreases in the debt-expanding, net foreign creditor country if she has a relatively smaller capital production share, and if the welfare effect through the accumulation channel is negative. In contrast, under dynamic inefficiency she can increase her welfare by debt expansion.     

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.     

Measuring the external benefits of homeownership

The subsidization of homeownership is justified on efficiency grounds only to the extent that it provides benefits to people other than the homeowner. We use the clustered neighborhoods subsample in the American Housing Survey to measure that benefit in the form of higher housing prices in neighborhoods with higher ownership rates (and lower vacancies). We attempt to account for unobservable neighborhood and house attributes that may be correlated with occupancy and ownership through instrumental variables, switching regressions and panel methods. Estimates indicate that a housing transition from renting to owning creates approximately $1300 in measured benefits.     

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DECENTRALIZED PLANNING PROCEDURES

Abstract. The paper surveys the theory of decentralized planning procedures, dealing with price-guided, quantity-guided and mixed procedures. Informational and incentive properties of the various procedures are dealt with, as is the problem of public goods. The practice of planning in the USSR, Hungary and India is also discussed.     

The supply of and demand for accounting information

The article analyzes the use of accounting information in Russia. We assess reporting behaviour in the lending process for a sample of Russian companies in the years 1999–2004 and postulate that Russian companies manage their earnings in order to avoid showing losses when applying for bank financing. Once a credit has been granted, companies are predicted to manage earnings because of the bank's monitoring activities. By means of univariate and multivariate analysis we are able to attribute the discontinuity around a zero target in the earnings distribution with firms’ response to the banks’ assessment of accounting performance. This implies that financing considerations affect the reporting incentives of Russian companies.     

The Research about Earnings Management Incentives of Listed Companies in China

This paper overviews earnings management incentive of listed companies and finds the incentives of cost in transactions with stockholders, a comparative performance advantage and a rational response to that market behavior which is anticipated. This paper tells us that even if there were no agency problems, earnings management should exist all the time.     

The Emergence of Corporate Governance from Wall St. to Main St.: Outside Directors, Board Diversity, Earnings Management, and Managerial Incentives to Bear Risk

Recent corporate events have brought a heightened public awareness to corporate governance issues. Much work has been accomplished to date, but it is clear that much more remains to be done. This paper provides a review of empirical research in four relevant areas of corporate governance. Specifically, the paper provides an overview of (a) the role that outside directors play in monitoring managers, (b) the emerging literature on the impact of board diversity, (c) the existence of and incentives for corporate executives to manage firm earnings, and (d) managerial incentives to bear risk.     

新疆对外贸易与经济增长的实证分析

本文根据新疆1990年-2005年的统计数据,利用协整理论和格兰杰(Granger)因果关系检验对新疆国内生产总值、投资和进出口贸易之间的关系进行分析。结果表明新疆国内生产总值与投资及进出口之间存在长期稳定的关系,投资和出口增长是拉动经济增长的原因,而经济增长却不是拉动投资、进出口增长的原因。     

Proxy-quality thresholds: Theory and applications

We consider alternative models of a regression containing a proxy for an unobserved regressor. For each model at most two pieces of prior information are necessary to determine the sign of any regressor coefficient: the sign of the partial correlation between the proxy and the unobserved regressor, and a lower bound on the partial or simple correlation between the proxy and the unobserved regressor. We apply our technique to investment and leverage regressions that contain a proxy for the incentive to invest. In both cases proxy quality must be high for the coefficient of interest to be non-zero.     

The effect of stock-based incentives and governance mechanisms on voluntary disclosure of intangibles

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of stock-based incentives in encouraging more voluntary disclosures about firm-specific intangibles. I also examine whether corporate governance, previously found to be related to voluntary disclosures, is a complement to or substitute for stock-based incentives. Using content analysis of annual reports of a sample of high-tech firms, I find that stock-based incentives are positively associated with firms' voluntary disclosures about intangibles. With regard to the effect of governance mechanisms, I find that corporate governance does not have a relationship with disclosures when stock-based incentives are low. On the other hand, better governance will strengthen the positive effect of stock-based incentives on disclosures, suggesting that governance and incentives mechanisms are complements instead of substitutes. The results also show that this complementary effect primarily results from the internal monitoring provided by the board of directors.