Knowledge that Transforms

International audience

We develop and test a model that links internal control over financial reporting (ICOFR) disclosures to users’ confidence in the standard audit report (SAR) on the financial statements. The model suggests that users’ confidence in the SAR is determined by the consistency of the message conveyed by the two audit reports. Based on this model, we hypothesize that users’ confidence in the SAR is lower in the presence of an entity level material weakness compared to an account specific material weakness and both confidence assessments are lower than the confidence assessments associated with the unqualified ICOFR report. We also propose that SAR confidence assessments affect investment judgments. We tested these hypotheses in two experiments. In Experiment 1, 65 equity analysts indicated their confidence in the SAR, assessed the risk of a stock price decline, and provided a stock recommendation on a public company that had received a SAR and an adverse ICOFR report (describing either an entity level or an account specific material weakness). In Experiment 2, 70 average investors evaluated the same company but were randomly assigned to three conditions (same adverse control conditions as in experiment 1 and an unqualified ICOFR condition). In addition, they provided assessments of information and verification risks, which allowed us to directly test our model. The findings are as hypothesized and support the notion that the apparent inconsistency between an adverse ICOFR report and the SAR undermines confidence in the SAR. Finally, confidence in the SAR affects investment judgments (risk of stock price decline) and decisions (stock recommendations).

This short paper examines the effect of exporting on within-plant wage distributions in employer-employee data on Mexican manufacturing plants. Using the late-1994 peso devaluation interacted with initial plant size as a source of exogenous variation in exporting and focusing on wages at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles within each plant, we document three patterns: (1) there is no evidence of an effect of exporting on wages at the 10th percentile; (2) the wage effects of exporting are larger at higher percentiles, up to the 75th; and (3) there is no evidence of an increase in dispersion within the top quartile.

Using a micro-founded model and a likelihood-based inference method, we show that while a passive monetary and passive fiscal policy regime prevailed in the U.S. before Paul Volcker's chairmanship at the Federal Reserve, an active monetary and passive fiscal policy regime prevailed after his appointment. Since both monetary and fiscal policies were passive pre-Volcker, equilibrium indeterminacy was a feature of the economy. Finally, pre-Volcker, the effects of unanticipated policy shifts were substantially different from those predicted by conventional monetary models: unanticipated increases in interest rates increased inflation and output, while unanticipated increases in lump-sum taxes decreased inflation and output.

The article develops a new theory of pricing to market driven by dynamic frictions of building market shares. Our key innovation is a capital theoretic model of marketing in which relations with customers are valuable. We discipline the introduced friction using data on differences between short-run and long-run price elasticity of international trade flows. We show that the model accounts for several pricing “puzzles” of international macroeconomics.

In the microdata underlying US trade price indexes, 40 percent of products are replaced before a single price change is observed and 70 percent are replaced after two price changes or fewer. A price index that focuses on price changes for identical items may, therefore, miss an important component of price adjustment occurring at the time of product replacements. We provide a model of this “product replacement bias” and quantify its importance using US data. Accounting for product replacement bias, long-run exchange rate “pass-through” is substantially higher than conventional estimates suggest, and the terms of trade are substantially more volatile.

We propose a model of delegated portfolio management with career concerns. Investors hire fund managers to invest their capital either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on default risk. Based on past performance, investors update beliefs on managers and make firing decisions. This leads to career concerns that affect managers' investment decisions, generating a countercyclical “reputational premium.” When default risk is high, return on bonds is high to compensate uninformed managers for the high risk of being fired. As default risk changes over time, the reputational premium amplifies price volatility.