Both management bias and measurement imprecision threaten the accurate reporting of complex accounting estimates, yet audit policymakers and practitioners often place a strong emphasis on bias. I examine whether directing auditors’ attention towards management bias can come at the expense of insufficient auditor sensitivity to measurement imprecision, potentially threatening overall audit quality. My primary investigation, Study 1, finds that when managers’ explicit incentives to bias financial reports are relatively weaker, an imbalanced emphasis on bias causes auditor-like participants in a stylized setting to “lower their guard” to a greater extent than when environmental factors place a more balanced emphasis on bias and imprecision. Study 2 indicates that an imbalanced emphasis on imprecision does not similarly distract auditors from bias. Study 3 utilizes a more contextually rich setting and demonstrates that an imbalanced emphasis on bias prompts even professional auditors to neglect imprecision. Accordingly, this paper suggests that a balanced emphasis on both management bias and measurement imprecision can mitigate negative consequences of auditors focusing on the former and neglecting the latter.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World, by Paul Morland, argues for the importance of demography in both historical events and our current situation. Intended for a general audience, the book traces demographic developments from the late eighteenth century, arguing that the timing and pace of demographic change helps to explain why some countries became powerful and others did not. The author continues the story into the twentieth century, discussing the changes in age structure and internal ethno-religious balances that are consequences of demographic patterns. Many readers will find the questions and themes in The Human Tide interesting. Unfortunately, the book misrepresents some research findings and is confused about important demographic concepts. The Human Tide deals with fundamental changes in human society over the past two centuries, but for a clear account of those changes, readers will have to go elsewhere. (JEL I12, J11, J13, J15, K37, N30)

This paper uses issuance-level data to study how equity capital inflows that enter emerging market economies affect equity issuance and corporate investment. It shows that foreign inflows are strongly correlated with country-level issuance. The relation especially reflects the behavior of large firms. To identify supply-side shocks, capital inflows into each country are instrumented with exogenous changes in other countries’ attractiveness to foreign investors. Shifts in the supply of foreign capital are important drivers of increased equity inflows. Instrumented contemporaneous and lagged capital inflows lead large firms to raise new equity, which they use to fund investment.

We use a matching method that constructs synthetic counterfactual states to identify the channels that link bank deregulation to financial integration, and thereby to economic growth. We document a positive, but conditional, effect of financial integration on economic growth. We explore the heterogeneous effects of financial integration across states depending on the capital mobility in each state. Our results reveal a correlation between financial integration and subsequent banking sector changes related to an expansion in loan recipients. We show that financial integration democratizes lending and spurs economic growth.

We examine the impact on firm cash holdings of uncertainty of uncertainty, measured as the ex post volatility of economic policy uncertainty. Using the news-based index developed by Baker et al. (2016) for twenty-two countries, we find that, when there is greater volatility of economic uncertainty, firms hold more cash. Our results are robust to controlling for a host of firm-level and country-level factors. Consistent with Baker et al. (2016), we consider that less economic policy uncertainty is associated with more investment; and so the real-option value of cash is sensitive to the possibility of a future desirability of investment. Therefore, when there is greater expected volatility of uncertainty, measured under rational expectations as the recent ex post volatility of uncertainty, firms will hold more cash. We also find that the volatility of economic policy uncertainty is much more economically significant in determining firm cash holdings than economic policy uncertainty itself. Therefore, our paper not only adds to the literature on uncertainty and cash holdings, but also, importantly, to the limited literature in finance on the impact of uncertainty of uncertainty.

We study the cross-section of returns on FX options sorting currencies based on implied volatilities (IVs). Long straddle positions in currencies with low (high) IVs perform well (poorly). A long low IV-short high IV strategy produces large average returns after transaction costs. Total volatility matters rather than any component or transformation of volatility. The returns are distinct from those in the literature on foreign exchange returns or equity option returns and cannot be explained convincingly by standard risk factors. We argue cross-sectional differences in hedging demand combined with limits to arbitrage contribute to mispricing in FX options.

Scholars have long suspected that people behave differently when their actions will be observed by or revealed to others. We hypothesize that financial reporting that reveals managers' actions will lead managers to take actions that better align with investor interests. We test this hypothesis with an experiment in which we manipulate the availability of a financial report that reveals managerial actions. Our evidence shows that financial reporting leads a manager to choose reinvestment and resource-sharing actions that better align with investor interests, even when the investor can impose no cost or confer no reward on the manager. This effect holds when the investor can shut down the firm and take a sizable portion of the assets. Our evidence suggests that financial reporting's economic value comes not only from its traditional contracting function, but also because managers care about investors' moral evaluations of them that are enabled by reporting.

We assume executives managing corporate financial policy consider the firm's current and target leverage, investment plans, anticipated cash flows, and consequences of alternative sequences of financing transactions, operating within efficient markets. Our analysis yields time-series and cross-sectional predictions for management of investment spending and leverage; use of maturity, priority, and convertibility covenants; and management of dividends, share repurchases, cash balances, and credit lines. Our evidence from 8608 SEOs covering 1970–2015 is consistent with implications of our theory, helps to resolve an array of issues in corporate finance, and offers a step toward a more unified analysis of rational corporate financial management.

I examine the effect of house price declines on voter participation using a novel person-level panel data set. Contrary to what the “angry voter hypothesis” predicts, I find that a 10% decline in local house prices decreases the participation rate of the average mortgaged homeowner by 1.6 percentage points. Consistent with a financial distress channel, house price declines have no effects on renters and particularly severe effects on highly leveraged households. My findings are consistent with the existence of a feedback loop between financial distress and inequality operating through voter participation.

We examine how gender differences in investment risk tolerance, knowledge, confidence and portfolio cash allocations relate to the gender mix of investors and financial advisors among a sample of wealthy individuals in the UK. Our results demonstrate that gender effects are more nuanced than previously assumed. First, while even wealthy women consider themselves more conservative and allocate a higher proportion of their investable assets to cash than men, previous findings of lower investment knowledge and confidence do not extend to our sample. Second, having an advisor matters. Advised investors perceive themselves to have a higher risk tolerance and invest 10.6%-points more than self-directed investors. Finally, the investor-advisor gender combination matters, but only for female investors. Women with male advisors are more risk averse, feel less knowledgeable and less confident about their investment decisions. They also invest 11%-points less than women with female advisors. Indeed, female investors advised by women report the highest risk tolerance and make the lowest portfolio allocation to risk-free assets across the full sample, including men.