How CEO narcissism affects earnings management behaviors

This study examined whether chief executive officers’ (CEOs) with narcissistic tendencies are more likely to execute earnings management behavior because of pressure to fulfill earnings thresholds. The results revealed that a CEO who exhibits high narcissism is more likely to be involved in earnings management to compensate for her/his performance. Our findings suggest that CEO narcissism directly influences financial decisions. Considering the earnings thresholds, firms with a more narcissistic CEO experience a regulatory effect on real earnings management behavior. Studies have indicated that CEOs manipulate earnings to satisfy three primary earnings thresholds: prior year’s reported earnings, zero earnings, and analysts’ forecasts. Our empirical results provide further evidence that CEOs engage in earnings management to fulfill positive earnings thresholds and analysts’ forecasts. We infer that CEOs use the abnormal production cost method as an underlying mechanism to increase reported earnings. Our findings help clarify the relationship between CEO personality traits and earnings manipulation to assist investors with decision-making.     

The behavior of commodity prices in Ethiopia

In an attempt to identify price stabilization strategies and rationalize public intervention in buffering markets, this article investigates the intertemporal dynamics of commodity prices in Ethiopia. A classical rational expectation model is modified to account for seasonal correlation of shocks. Model predictions are reduced to computable periodic threshold autoregression. Several nonlinearity tests are applied to detect threshold effects. A regime‐switching normalized maximum likelihood method is formulated to estimate thresholds and threshold autoregression parameters using monthly data from Ethiopia for the period 1996–2006. The result indicates the presence of periodic price thresholds that could be formed as a result of speculative storage. Comparison of price movements below and above thresholds indicates that prices are more correlated below the thresholds than above them. However, the effect on error variance is not very strong. Temporal arbitrage, which is the gross return from speculative storage, appears to be modest. The long‐ and short‐term implications of the findings are discussed within the context of ongoing policy debates.     

Green Agriculture: foundations for biodiverse,resilient and productive agricultural systems

There are many visions on how to achieve a sustainable agriculture that provides enough food and ecosystem services for present and future generations in an era of climate change, increasing costs of energy, social unrest, financial instability and increasing environmental degradation. New agricultural systems that are able to confront the challenges of a rapidly changing world require a minimum of ten attributes that constitute the defining elements of a Green Agriculture. A major challenge is to identify a set of thresholds that any agricultural production strategy must meet, beyond which unsustainable trends caused by the farming technologies would lead to tipping-point phenomena. Only those styles of agriculture that meet the established threshold criteria while advancing rural communities towards food, energy and technological sovereignty would be considered viable forms of Green Agriculture. Considering the diversity of ecological, socio-economic, historical and political contexts in which agricultural systems have developed and are evolving in, it is only wise to define a set of flexible and locally adaptable principles and boundaries of sustainability and resiliency for the agroecosystems of the immediate future.     

Satisficing with a variable threshold

We axiomatize a model of satisficing which features random thresholds and the possibility of choice abstention. Given a menu, the decision maker first randomly draws a threshold. Next, using a list order, she searches the menu for alternatives which are at least as good as the threshold. She chooses the first such alternative she finds, and if no such alternative exists, she abstains. Since the threshold is random, so is the resulting behavior. We characterize this model using two simple axioms. In general the revelation of the model’s primitives is incomplete. We characterize a specialization of the model for which the underlying preference and list ordering are uniquely identified by choice frequencies. We also show that our model is a special Random Utility Model.     

Emission Taxes and Tradeable Permits A Comparison of Views on Long-Run Efficiency

We compare three different views on the long runefficiencies of emission taxes which includethresholds (inframarginalexemptions), and of tradeable emission permitswhere some permits areinitially free. The differences are caused bydifferent assumptions aboutwhether thresholds and free permits should besubsidies given only to firmsthat produce, or full property rights. Treatingtax thresholds, as well asfree permits, as property rights would departfrom the conventional view,but would allow greater flexibility in makingeconomic instruments bothefficient and acceptable. Such flexibilitycould be very important inachieving efficient control of greenhouse gasemissions.     

Earnings management at rights issues thresholds—Evidence from China

Burgstahler and Dichev (BD) (Burgstahler, David, Ilia, Dichev, 1997. Earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses. Journal of Accounting and Economics 23(1), 99–126.) and Degorge, Patel, and Zeckhauser (DPZ) (Degeorge, Franscois, Patel, Jayendu, Zeckhauser, Richard, 1999. Earnings management to exceed thresholds. Journal of Business 72(1), 1–33.) examine earnings management among American firms by looking at actual distributions around critical thresholds. Chinese firms must meet minimal ROE requirements if they are to have rights issues. Using a distribution approach, we examine whether Chinese firms manipulate their earnings to meet the regulatory requirements. Our empirical findings indicate that Chinese firms indeed heavily engaged in earnings management to meet the rights issue thresholds during the period 1994–2002. In addition, we show that these firms changed their behavior in response to changes in regulatory requirements. Furthermore, we analyse the pervasiveness of this practice and the means used in earnings management at the relevant ROE thresholds. Our findings have direct policy implications for the China Securities Regulatory Committee (CSRC).     

融资约束与资本结构的非对称调整——基于动态门限模型的经验证据

以1999—2009年中国上市公司面板数据为研究对象,围绕融资约束对资本结构调整行为的影响,以公司规模和现金持有水平作为衡量融资约束的指标,采用动态面板门限模型展开研究。结果表明,大规模和高现金持有的公司会表现出更快的调整速度,非融资约束公司比融资约束公司的调整速度要快30%以上。本文解决了以往研究中存在的分组模糊性及忽视个体异质性缺陷的问题,实证发现融资约束程度的降低能有效提高公司的资本结构调整速度。     

Efficiency thresholds and cost structure in Senegal airports

This paper assesses airport efficiency levels in Senegal under a stochastic environment where the satisficing concept for different performance thresholds is applied. A two-stage satisficing DEA-Support Vector Machine approach is used here to compute the impacts of cost structure on these thresholds. In the first stage, within the ambit of the satisficing DEA model, the probabilities of achieving a minimal performance threshold are computed in a stochastic fashion. In the second stage, Support Vector Machine regression is used to discriminate between high/low efficiency groups within a given performance threshold. This methodology was sufficiently robust to handle small samples. The results reveal that the cost of capital and the cost of labor are the cost structure variables that have the greatest impact on efficiency levels, besides cargo operations.     

‘Entry Thresholds and Actual Entry and Exit in Local Markets’

Bresnahan and Reiss (1991) derive entry thresholds for local markets but do not investigate actual entry and exit flows. This paper investigates for thirteen Belgian retail and consumer service industries whether markets with actual numbers of firms higher (lower) than the thresholds display exit (entry) in subsequent periods. The results confirm that over a three-year period the rate of (net) entry is positively affected by the presence of ‘market room’. The exit rate, however, does not show a negative relation with ‘market room’.      

Determination of the international maize price: What is the growing role of Brazil and Ukraine?

This paper examines the relationships among maize prices for four countries to determine if newly emerging exporters, Brazil and Ukraine, influence the international price of maize. Our work focuses on each market's participation in the price discovery process rather than trying to determine a price leader. We find that the United States plays the largest role in price discovery, followed by Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine. We also search for export thresholds and find that Ukraine's contribution to price discovery rises slightly when an export threshold of 2.3 million tons is reached. No export thresholds were found for Brazil. Export thresholds for Argentina were found but only have a minor impact on price relationships. We also found that price relationships vary considerably across seasons of the year.