Non-GAAP reporting following debt covenant violations

Review of Accounting Studies - We investigate whether firms change their non-GAAP reporting practices after debt covenant violations. We find that the likelihood that a firm will disclose non-GAAP...     

A conceptual model and research agenda for bidding,planning and delivering Major sport events that lever human rights

In this conceptual article, the authors propose a framework for how progressive human rights outcomes may be obtained in the context of bidding, planning and implementing major sport events (MSEs) through the implementation of four pathways, including good governance, the democratic participation of stakeholders, the formalisation of human rights agendas and the deployment of sensitive urban development. The authors argue that there is a need for adherence to internationally recognised standards, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights if rhetorical statements from MSE awarding bodies and host organisers are to be accountable to a wider set of actors. If researchers and practitioners want to address some of the critical issues related to human rights and MSEs, it is imperative that key actors working in the rights sphere are involved in shaping the research agenda and monitoring its implementation. Academics need to take a proactive approach aimed at achieving both theoretically grounded and practically relevant solutions, with engagement occurring over an extended period of time. This approach, avowedly political and concerned with genuine action, is a key way in which MSE stakeholders can be held to account for their actions in regard to human rights.     

Real Incentive Effects of Soft Information

Both soft, noncontractible, and hard, contractible, information are informative about managerial ability and future firm performance. If a manager's future compensation depends on expectations of ability or future performance, then the manager has implicit incentives to affect the information. We examine the real incentive effects of soft information in a dynamic agency with limited commitment. When long-term contracts are renegotiated, the rewards for future performance inherent in long-term contracts allow the principal partial control over the implicit incentives. This is because the soft information affects the basis for contract renegotiation. With short-term contracts, the principal has no control over the basis for contract negotiation, and thus long-term contracts generally dominate short-term contracts. With long-term contracts, the principal's control over implicit incentives is characterized in terms of effective contracting on an implicit aggregation of the soft information that arises from predicting (forming expectations of) future performance. We provide sufficient conditions for soft information to have no real incentive effects. In general, implicit incentives not controllable by the principal include fixed effects, such as career concerns driven by labor markets external to the agency. When controllable incentives span the fixed effects of career concerns, the latter have no real effects with regard to total managerial incentives—they would optimally be the same with or without career concerns. Our analysis suggests empirical tests for estimating career concerns that should explicitly incorporate noncontractible information.     

Protection for maturing industries: Evidence from Canadian trade patterns and trade policy, 1870–1913

As industries mature, experience is accumulated, productivity increases, trade performance improves on domestic and international markets and learning potential dissipates. Using theory‐consistent empirical specifications, I find a strong, robust negative relationship linking tariff rates to trade performance for manufactured products that matured during the first decade after Canada prioritized protectionist policy objectives in 1879. This relationship also holds at a more aggregate industry level, where I can use other measures of maturity, control for import penetration, use historically contemporaneous trade elasticity estimates, link trade performance to trade restrictiveness and effective rates of protection and where I can instrument for import penetration and trade performance using a two‐stage IV–GMM estimation approach. The results suggest that after 1890 the Canadian government carefully cut tariffs on products produced by maturing Canadian producers and this retreat from protectionism significantly lowered the static deadweight losses resulting from Canadian trade policy during the post‐1890 period.     

Development and the Environment in Asia

Economic growth and environmental damage are associated, but the relationship is neither linear nor even monotonic. This is clearly seen in the diverse experiences of tropical Asian economies over recent decades. The nature of the growth–environment link depends on the changing composition of production and on growth-related changes in techniques and environmental policies; the enforcement of property rights over natural resources and over air and water quality is another important element. Moreover, environmental and economic policies interact: in effect, every economic policy that affects resource allocation is a de facto environmental measure. One important implication is that the environmental consequences of major policy shifts, such as the 'globalisation' of many tropical Asian economies since about 1980, have been profound. The analytical literature on growth and the environment in Asia tends to agree that environmental damage is costly to regional economies, and has begun to identify and quantify some of the many causal linkages now recognised between economic development and the valuation and use of environmental and natural resource assets.     

A theoretical analysis of institutional investors' trading costs in auction and dealer markets

This paper compares trading costs for institutional investors subject to liquidity shocks, in auction and dealer markets. The batch auction restricts the institutions' ability to exploit informational advantages because of competition between institutions when they simultaneously submit orders. This competition lowers aggregate trading costs. In the dealership market, competition between traders is absent but private information is revealed by observing the flow of successive orders and so reduces aggregate trading costs. We analyse the relative effects on trading costs of competition and information revelation in the two systems and derive a parameter inequality which determines which system has lower costs.     

The Law and Economics of Marriage Contracts

Growth in property ownership has raised the stakes in the distribution of financial assets on divorce. Given high risks of marital failure, this has stimulated the demand for private ordering through enforceable marriage contracts. This paper surveys the existing law and economics literature and legal practice to consider the state of knowledge on the economic theory, scope and limits of written nuptial agreements.     

Without `Reinventing the Wheel': Business Accounting Applied to the Public Sector

This article considers why a business accounting model was applied in an early adoption of public-sector accrual accounting. The history of that change shows that large private-sector consulting firms were active in the promotion and implementation of a commercial model of public-sector accrual accounting. It is argued here that the consulting firms' actions are best understood using concepts of mimetic isomorphism and the interplay between self-interest and perceived public interest. They formed an epistemic community in which self-interest was present but with a zealous belief that private-sector accounting was an inherently righteous objective for the public sector.     

Accounting Policies in Agencies with Moral Hazard and Renegotiation

We emphasize the role of accounting policies, and their audit, in an earnings management setting. We use a two–period agency in which three frictions interact: the agent privately observes action (or effort) supply and output, and the initial contract is subject to renegotiation. This creates a setting in which both players' behavior is of concern, and, importantly, information rationing is efficient. Moreover, this information rationing is directly interpretable as being produced by an accounting policy whose application is ensured by an auditor.     

Replacement Investment: Optimal Economic Life Under Uncertainty

Replacement investment is essentially a regenerative optimal stopping problem; that is, the key decision concerns when to terminate the life of existing plant – and hence when to start over again. This paper examines this optimisation problem within a continuous time framework and studies the qualitative and quantitative impact of uncertainty on the timing of new investment (and the criteria that should be used for terminating the life of existing plant).