Independent directors and earnings management: The moderating effects of controlling shareholders and the divergence of cash-flow and control rights

The research results on the suppressing effect of independent directors on earnings management are not consistent in existing literature. In addition, it has been argued that using financial statements provided by top management to investigate top management's earnings management is not appropriate. Therefore, the purpose of this study is twofold. First, we used external auditors (including the auditors of Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation and the auditors of two Big Four accounting firms – Deloitte & Touche and KPMG in Taiwan) as respondents in order to obtain less biased data. Second, we investigate the moderating effects of controlling shareholders and the divergence of cash-flow and control rights on the relationship between independent directors and earnings management. The results show that both the existence of controlling shareholders and the divergence of cash-flow and control rights have significant suppressing effects on the relationship between independent directors and earnings management. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.     

Institutions,moral hazard and expected government support of banks

We model the expected support of banks with credit ratings from Moody's and Fitch, taking explicitly into account the capacity and willingness of governments to provide support in case of need, as well as their concerns about moral hazard (i.e., that the expected support may induce banks to assume bigger risks). Our results suggest that moral hazard concerns are relatively weak. In addition, a substantial part of the expected support can be attributed to the quality of a country's institutions. These findings have important implications for the dynamics of banking crises, the value of the ‘fair’ insurance premium banks might be called upon to pay for the expected support, as well as for ways to reduce the resulting negative externalities.     

‘Agents-in-focus’ and ‘Agents-in-context’: The strong structuration analysis of central government accounting practices and reforms in Nepal

Drawing on Stones’ (2005) strong structuration theory, the paper unfolds why and how the key stakeholders of central government accounting in Nepal are involved in the reproduction of routinised accounting practices, resisting the externally-propagated changes. Government accountants (the agents-in-focus) through their capability to control the budget routines have enjoyed a powerful social position in their position–practice relations with the agents-in-context, i.e. professional accountants and international consultants, higher-level officers and administrators, auditors, and politicians. Social position along with historically-imbued dispositions and their conduct and context analysis have enabled government accountants to strategically exercise their agency. Government accountants have articulated duality and a dialectic relation with the agents-in-context, which have resulted in the reproduction of everyday accounting practice and the resistance to the World Bank-led reforms, such as accrual accounting and, more recently, the Cash-Basis IPSAS.     

Sustainability of macroeconomic policies in selected MENA countries: Post financial and debt crises

In the wake of the recent financial and debt crises, the conduct of macroeconomic policies in the emerging MENA economies has recently become critical in determining those countries future economic situation, due to the accumulation since the early 1990s of a sizable level of external debt, and the pursuit by some countries of a fixed exchange rate regime. Using time series econometric models, this study assesses the sustainability of macroeconomic policies in a selected sample of 4 MENA countries. The empirical results point to sustainable fiscal and exchange rate policies in Tunisia and Morocco, and unsustainable external debt and exchange rate policies in Egypt and Jordan. While Egypt has recently moved to a flexible exchange rate regime, if Jordan still opts for maintaining a fixed exchange rate arrangement, it will have to implement crisis-prevention measures, namely by exercising fiscal discipline, and managing properly its external debt and foreign reserves.     

A new look at variation in employment growth in Canada: The role of industry,provincial, national and external factors

We examine fluctuations in employment growth using Canadian data from 1976 to 2010. We consider a wide range of models and examine the sensitivity of our findings to modelling assumptions. The results from our most preferred model, which we selected using the Bayesian Information Criteria, indicate that most of the variance in employment growth that is not due to the idiosyncratic error comes from domestic sources, with most of this coming from industry and provincial factors. Overall, we find that external and national factors play a much smaller role in employment fluctuations than in earlier research. We provide some possible explanations for these differences and discuss the implications of our findings for public policy and theory.     

The role of dairy company policies in support of farm green infrastructure in the absence of government stewardship payments

Intensive dairy farming has substantial impacts on freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. Determining how to mitigate them while increasing production is driving the quest for sustainable milk production internationally. Green infrastructure (G.I.) provides private and public ecosystem services, including mitigation of farming environmental impacts. However, there are implementation barriers among farmers. New Zealand government supports farmer self-regulation as long as farmers meet environmental targets. Farmers are neither compensated for reducing environmental impacts, nor for setting aside G.I. in support of nature conservation. Dairy companies are under increasing pressure to ensure socially acceptable milk production practices among farmer suppliers. They may play a role in encouraging farmers to implement G.I. as a way of helping farmers meet regulatory compliance, and best farming practice. Using a content analysis of company policies, the role of dairy companies in encouraging G.I. among farmers is explored. Results indicate companies are concerned about the effects, and perception, of poor environmental farming practices on their profitability, and have developed some riparian G.I. policies, with government and farmer support. However, policies are farm-focused and are limited to one year, and thus lack the capacity to encourage G.I. in support of key ecosystem services, such as water cleansing and support for indigenous biodiversity that require landscape scaled networks and longer periods. Even at the farm scale, a majority of companies lack policies that encourage significant G.I. networks. Policies suggest companies, and by extension farmers, lack sufficient motivation to protect or restore them voluntarily. Under these conditions, significant G.I. is unlikely to develop under self-regulation, unless supplemented through motivating government stewardship payments.     

Sources of business fluctuations: Financial or technology shocks?

Despite the widespread belief that technology shocks are the main source of business fluctuations, recent empirical studies indicate that in the absence of financial frictions, a shock to the marginal efficiency of investment is the main source and is closely related to financial conditions for investment. We incorporate a financial accelerator mechanism and two types of financial shocks to the external finance premium and net worth in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment, the investment-good price markup, and the rates of neutral and investment-specific technological changes. This model is estimated using eleven US time series that include data on loan, net worth, the loan rate, and the relative price of investment. Our estimation results show that the (non-stationary) neutral and investment-specific technology shocks primarily drive output and investment fluctuations, while the external finance premium shock plays an important role for investment fluctuations. This financial shock induced substantial falls and subsequent sharp hikes in the external finance premium and caused boom–bust cycles over the past two decades.     

Household indebtedness in Korea: Its causes and sustainability

This paper investigates why household debt in Korea has increased so rapidly over the past decade and whether it is sustainable, adopting a multi-faceted approach which includes a time series analysis, a quantitative analysis based on household panel data, and an analysis using a debt dynamics equation derived from the household budget constraint. A regression analysis reveals that household debt growth has been significantly related to house price increases, banks’ lax attitudes toward household lending, and financial institutions’ favorable funding conditions. Also 70–80% of the total debt increase has been accounted for by high income or newly indebted households. The debt dynamics equation analysis shows that the rapid rise in the ratio of household debt to disposable income is attributable not only to the increase in household asset purchases but also to the dampened growth in disposable income and the reduced savings rate. The sustainability analyses indicate that Korean households’ debt sustainability is unlikely to deteriorate sharply within a short period of time unless two extreme scenarios, under which house prices decline by 5% a year over the next five years, or a significantly large macroeconomic shock similar to the 1997 crisis hits the economy, would be realized.     

Asymmetric effects of fiscal policy in EU and OECD countries

In this article, we take account of an evaluation of the short- and medium-term effects of the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy in EU and OECD countries and their dependence on the state of the economy and fiscal behaviour. Our findings indicate that (i) across EU member states the impact of government spending on economic performance is larger in the accession than in core member states, (ii) since the onset of the economic/financial crisis the government spending multipliers have become larger in both core and accession EU member states, and (iii) a comparison with fiscal responses in the OECD countries shows robustness of our estimates. The conclusion implies that the austerity measures present a substantial drag for economic activity in accession EU countries. Thus, we may state that not considering the fiscal behaviour and state of the economy gives misleading fiscal multiplier effects, which in turn lead to the adoption of inappropriate fiscal measures that even worsen a country's economic situation.     

Industrial land price between China’s Pearl River Delta and Southeast Asian regions: Competition or Coopetition?

The planned economy system’s previous form of industrial land market control in China has led to current market failure because of a large amount of industrial land being sold at a very low price, causing extensive overuse of land and negative effects on land management. As the “World Factory”, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) is well known for its rapid urbanization largely driven by Foreign Direct Investment in labor-intensive industries. A low-land price strategy has been commonly adopted by the local government in order to attract industrial investment. In the past decade, the PRD has increasingly faced the increasing competition from its neighboring competition from its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia that have established preference policies to attract FDI and foreign enterprises. Despite a growing body of literature on the internal forces of industrial land in China, little is known of the external forces involved except for the importance of FDI and the intensity of interregional competition between China and other countries in attempting to attract foreign investment. This research fills the knowledge gap by modeling the situation in the form of an international cooperative game model aimed at revealing the industrial land price formation mechanism between the PRD region and Southeast Asian regions. The conditions of industrial land in the area and several Southeast Asian countries are first analyzed for their industrial land price movements in recent years. A game theoretic model is then built that exhibits similar characteristics. The result indicates that the governments’ low land price strategy and the competition between the PRD and its neighboring countries have created unnecessarily high social and environmental costs. Policy suggestions are made to encourage a more appropriate use of industrial land in China, and the most important being the need for a mindset shift from competition towards coopetition between the PRD and Southeast Asian regions.