What do interest rates reveal about the functioning of real business cycle models?

This paper begins by documenting the extent to which the predictions of standard Real Business Cycle (RBC) models are incompatible with observed movements in real interest rates. The main finding of the paper is that extending the baseline model to include habit persistence in consumption and adjustment costs to capital significantly improves the model's empirical performance. In our evaluation of the model's performance, we take special care of estimating and testing predictions of the model using both moments drawn directly from the data and moments calculated after identifying shocks to the stochastic trend.     

Non-Governmental Organizations, Shareholder Activism, and Socially Responsible Investments: Ethical, Strategic, and Governance Implications

In this article, we document the growing influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the realm of socially responsible investing (SRI). Drawing from ethical and economic perspectives on stakeholder management and agency theory, we develop a framework to understand how and when NGOs will be most influential in shaping the ethical and social responsibility orientations of business using the emergence of SRI as the primary influencing vehicle. We find that NGOs have opportunities to influence corporate conduct via direct, indirect, and interactive influences on the investment community, and that the overall influence of NGOs as major actors in socially responsible investment is growing, with attendant consequences for corporate strategy, governance, and social performance.     

Modelling the Interaction of Fundamental and Portfolio Exchange Rate Behaviour: An Application to Australia and the ASEAN3

This paper explores the interaction of fundamental and portfolio factors in the determination of the exchange rate. The weights on the factors evolve endogenously as a function of relative fundamental and portfolio errors. The model also generates exchange rate mixture distributions that may be skewed, leptokurtic or bimodal and as such can explain small and large changes endogenously. The model is applied to the exchange rates of Australia and the ASEAN3 to examine the role of fundamental and portfolio behaviour, especially over the 1997/98 currency crisis period.     

Stock Market Anomalies: What Can We Learn from Repurchases and Insider Trading?

We examine whether managers’ trading decisions (both at a firm and personal level) are correlated with trading strategies suggested by the operating accruals and the post-earnings announcement drift (SUE) anomalies. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the use of managerial trading activity to infer managers’ private valuation about their own securities. Our results provide corroborative evidence for the accruals anomaly, i.e., managers’ repurchase and insider trading behavior varies consistently with the information underlying the operating accruals trading strategy. On the other hand, we do not find corroborative evidence for the SUE anomaly.

Robust adaptive rate-optimal testing for the white noise hypothesis

A new test is proposed for the weak white noise null hypothesis. The test is based on a new automatic selection of the order for a Box–Pierce (1970) test statistic or the test statistic of Hong (1996). The heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) critical values from Lee (2007) are used, allowing for estimation of the error term. The data-driven order selection is tailored to detect a new class of alternatives with autocorrelation coefficients which can be o(n^−1/2)$o\left(n^{-1/2}\right)$ provided there are sufficiently many of such coefficients. A simulation experiment illustrates the good statistical properties of the test both under the weak white noise null and the alternative.     

The Usefulness of Long-Term Accruals

Though empirical evidence strongly supports the role of short-term operating accruals in improving operating cash flows as a measure of performance, there is little support or consensus with respect to the effect of long-term accruals. We provide evidence that long-term accruals do reduce timing and matching problems in cash flows. In return-earnings regressions, long-term accruals are found to improve earnings as a measure of firm performance, although not to the same extent as short-term accruals. Further, our analysis highlights differences in economic and statistical properties between short-term and long-term accruals and demonstrates how these differences impede the ability of long-term accruals to improve earnings as a performance measure in a return-earnings context. The incremental explanatory power of long-term accruals is shown to be hampered by the lack of present-value considerations in the existing accounting model, timeliness problems, and measurement error in the indirect method of computing cash flows and accruals.     

Conservative financial reporting, debt covenants, and the agency costs of debt

Considerable research has documented the role of debt covenants and conservative financial accounting in addressing agency conflicts between lenders and borrowers. Beatty, A., Weber, J., and Yu, J. [2008. Conservatism and debt. Journal of Accounting and Economics, forthcoming] document interesting, but mixed, findings on the relation between debt covenants and conservative accounting, and the extent to which the two contracting mechanisms act as substitutes or complements. In this paper, I discuss the economic roles of financial reporting, debt covenants, and conservatism within the debt contracting environment, and attempt to fit BWY's findings within this context.