CEO internal experience and voluntary disclosure quality: Evidence from management forecasts

Internally‐promoted CEOs should have a deep understanding of their firm's products, supply chain, operations, business climate, corporate culture, and how to navigate among employees to get the information they need. Thus, we argue that internally‐promoted CEOs are likely to produce higher quality disclosure than outsider CEOs. Using a sample of US firms from the S&P1500 index from 2001 to 2011, we hand‐collect whether a CEO is hired from inside the firm and, if so, the number of years they worked at the firm before becoming CEO. We then examine whether managers with more internal experience issue higher quality disclosures and offer three main findings. First, CEOs with more internal experience are more likely to issue voluntary earnings forecasts than those managers with less internal experience as well as those managers hired from outside the firm. Second, CEOs with more internal experience issue more accurate earnings forecasts than those managers with less internal experience as well as those managers hired from outside the firm. Finally, investors react more strongly to forecasts issued by insider CEOs than to those issued by outsider CEOs. In additional analysis, we find no evidence that these results extend to mandatory reporting quality (i.e., accruals quality, restatements, or internal control weaknesses), perhaps because mandatory disclosure is subjected to heavy oversight by the board of directors, auditors, and regulators. Overall, our findings suggest that when managers have work experience with the firm prior to becoming the CEO, the firm's voluntary disclosure is of higher quality.     

Marx‐biased technical change and income distribution: A panel data analysis

This paper provides a further empirical evaluation of the Neoclassical theory of distribution as opposed to Marx‐biased technical change (MBTC) using a series of panel estimators. We argue that a panel data analysis is instrumental in increasing the efficiency and validity of the test. Our results generalize previous findings in providing support for MBTC and against the Neoclassical theory of income distribution.     

Equity Volatility and Corporate Bond Yields

This paper explores the effect of equity volatility on corporate bond yields. Panel data for the late 1990s show that idiosyncratic firm‐level volatility can explain as much cross‐sectional variation in yields as can credit ratings. This finding, together with the upward trend in idiosyncratic equity volatility documented by Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001), helps to explain recent increases in corporate bond yields.     

Duration and the price behavior of fixed-rate level payment mortgages: An analytical investigation

In this research we use a continuous payment formula for duration to examine the price behavior of a fixed-rate level payment mortgage. In the case where the mortgage is held to maturity, duration increases monotonically as term-to-maturity increases, regardless of changes in the market rate of interest. In the case where the mortgage is prepaid prior to maturity, there exists a unique market interest rate below which duration is a monotonically increasing function of time of prepayment, but above which duration has a global maximum at some time of prepayment prior to the term-to-maturity.     

Using technology to improve the management of development impacts on biodiversity

The mitigation hierarchy (MH) is a prominent tool to help businesses achieve no net loss or net gain outcomes for biodiversity. Technological innovations offer benefits for business biodiversity management, yet the range and continued evolution of technologies creates a complex landscape that can be difficult to navigate. Using literature review, online surveys, and semi-structured interviews, we assess technologies that can improve application of the MH. We identify six categories (mobile survey, fixed survey, remote sensing, blockchain, data analysis, and enabling technologies) with high feasibility and/or relevance to (i) aid direct implementation of mitigation measures and (ii) enhance biodiversity surveys and monitoring, which feed into the design of interventions including avoidance and minimization measures. At the interface between development and biodiversity impacts, opportunities lie in businesses investing in technologies, capitalizing on synergies between technology groups, collaborating with conservation organizations to enhance institutional capacity, and developing practical solutions suited for widespread use.     

Dimensions of quality upgrading

The impact of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies’ trade integration with European markets on CEE trade structures has been studied extensively. These studies frequently observe a quality upgrading of CEE exports. In this paper we consider three dimensions of quality upgrading: upgrading across industries, upgrading across different quality segments within industries and, finally, product upgrading within quality segments inside industries. For the analysis we partition industries into quality segments based on EU‐15 import unit values. The results for ten CEE countries (comprising the CEE‐5, the Baltics and South East Europe) and thirteen industries suggest fundamental differences, both across country groups and across the three different notions of quality upgrading. The CEE‐5 show no evidence of entering a ‘low‐quality trap’ in all three dimensions. By contrast, while there is a general catching‐up process across industries and inside quality segments, the second notion of low‐quality specialization may be applicable within the high‐tech industries to the performance for the Baltics and South East Europe as a group.     

Perpetual youth and endogenous labor supply: A problem and a possible solution

In the “perpetual youth” overlapping-generations model of Blanchard and Yaari, if leisure is a “normal” good then some agents will have negative labor supply. We suggest a solution to this problem by using a modified version of Greenwood, Hercowitz and Huffman’s utility function. The modification incorporates real money balances, so that the model may be used to analyze monetary as well as fiscal policy. In a Walrasian version of the economy, we show that increased government debt and increased government spending raise the interest rate and lower output, while an open-market operation to increase the money supply lowers the interest rate and raises output.