This study reports an experiment conducted to examine auditors' materiality judgments for nonfinancial performance information (NFPI) in the context of Integrated Reporting; a setting where auditors do not have well-established guidelines or benchmarks. We examine two fundamental factors underlying Integrated Reporting that are predicted to influence auditors' NFPI materiality judgments, namely, the level of strategic relevance associated with the NFPI being assessed, and the provision of a strategy map (a visual representation of linkages between the firm's strategic objectives) to auditors. Our study provides evidence that while auditors judge misstated NFPI of low strategic relevance to be less material than misstated NFPI with high strategic relevance, they only make this distinction when a strategy map is present. As integrating a client's strategy in the process of evaluating materiality is important, our result suggests that the presence of a strategy map potentially improves the efficient allocation of assurance resources. The importance of understanding how qualitative factors affect materiality judgments in nonfinancial assurance engagements is reflected in the fact that accounting firms view such assurance as mainstream. Our findings not only have implications for standard setters developing further guidance for determining audit materiality under Integrated Reporting, but also more generally for auditors who are providing assurance services for NFPI.

There is mixed evidence on whether the marginal dollar spent on corporate social responsibility is due to agency problems. We propose an approach by modeling how the 2003 dividend tax cut, which increased after-tax insider ownership and better aligned managerial and shareholder interests, affected the marginal dollar spent on firm responsibility. We confirm key predictions of our agency model: following the tax cut, moderate insider-ownership firms experience larger declines in their responsibility ratings and increases in their valuations relative to other firms. We also confirm another implication regarding managerial misalignment using a regression-discontinuity design of close votes on shareholder-governance proposals.

[In this paper, the authors develop a simultaneous equation model of birth rates composed of four estimated equations. This work differs from past research in that it considers the simultaneous relationship between birth rates and income and includes the cost of fertility as an explanatory factor. This cost is measured by the female labor participation rate under the assumption that income foregone due to fertility is a significant opportunity cost.]

Optimal trade and industrial policies are derived for a home market that is supplied by a domestic firm and a foreign firm. The optimal policy combination can be quite sensitive to the nature of the duopoly's competition. For example, for some cost and demand s tructures, the optimal policy under Cournot competition consists of a domestic production tax and a tariff, but that under Bertrand compet ition consists of a production subsidy and free trade.

The Social Security system has played an important role in the economic life of American families. It not only provides security for the elderly, but is a device for automatic stabilization, a method of income redistribution, as well as an important factor affecting capital accumulation and the supply of labor. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the long-run effects of the Social Security system in a growing economy. The model employed here extends and generalizes the neoclassical life cycle growth models of Peter A. Diamond and Paul A. Samuelson by explicitly allowing for an endogenous retirement decision and bequest motive. I consider an economy in which the population grows at a constant rate. Each individual lives for two periods. In the first period, he works full time, earning an income of w and paying a Social Security tax of T. In the second period, he works a fraction of time and then retires, receiving from the government a pension of z. He is to choose a consumption path, a retirement age, and an amount of bequest so as to maximize his lifetime utility. From these individual decisions and the assumption that the government budget is balanced each period, we derive the aggregate capital and labor supply functions and analyze the effects of changes in Social Security on capital accumulation and the equilibrium wage and interest rates. The present model is similar to that of Martin S. Feldstein in that retirement decisions are assumed endogenous. The main difference is that his is a partial equilibrium analysis while the model presented here is a general equilibrium model capable of analyzing long-run effects. I show that the short-run effects of Social Security depend primarily on the elasticities of the demand and supply of labor, and its long-run effects are influenced as well by the elasticities of savings and bequest. It is further shown that an appropriate Social Security system can increase the long-run well-being of the economy by causing the rate of return on capital to converge to the Golden Rule level. If, however, the tax and pension levels are tied to the individual workingretirement decisions, the system causes distortions in the labor market. Because of this distortional effect, the optimal Social Security does not necessarily lead to the Golden Rule.

Answering a major demand in modern credit risk management, we propose a nonparametric survival approach for the modeling of the recovery rate and the recovery time of a defaulted counterparty, by introducing what we call the Recovery Reinforced Urn Process, a special type of combinatorial stochastic process. The new model allows for the elicitation and exploitation of prior knowledge and experts’ judgements, and for the constant update of this information over time, as soon as new data become available. We show how to use it to perform Bayesian nonparametric prediction about the recovered amounts and the (total) recovery time of a series of defaulted exposures. An application to real data is provided using the Single Family Loan-Level Dataset by Freddie Mac.

We examine the investment behavior of market participants within different international markets (i.e., US, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), specifically with regard to their tendency to exhibit herd behavior. We find no evidence of herding on the part of market participants in the US and Hong Kong and partial evidence of herding in Japan. However, for South Korea and Taiwan, the two emerging markets in our sample, we document significant evidence of herding. The results are robust across various size-based portfolios and over time. Furthermore, macroeconomic information rather than firm-specific information tends to have a more significant impact on investor behavior in markets which exhibit herding. In all five markets, the rate of increase in security return dispersion as a function of the aggregate market return is higher in up market, relative to down market days. This is consistent with the directional asymmetry documented by McQueen et al. (1996) (McQueen, G., Pinegar, M.A., Thorley, S., 1996. Journal of Finance 51, 889–919).

We find that firms are less likely to report an internal control material weakness (as mandated by the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act) in a given year if one of their audit committee members is concurrently on the board of a firm that disclosed a material weakness within the prior three years. We find a similar spillover effect for financial restatement disclosures. The spillover from material weakness disclosures is evident only if a shared director has more experience with the disclosing firm or can channel more information about the disclosed material weakness. Our findings suggest that prior director experiences outside the firm influence the work of audit committees inside the firm. One rationale is that a director's prior experience with an adverse disclosure helps diffuse important insights and serves as a catalyst for improvements in a firm's internal control and financial reporting practices. An alternative explanation, which we cannot dismiss, holds that a director's prior experience helps a firm to underreport material weaknesses and financial restatements without any attendant improvements in the underlying practices.

We demonstrate that a persistent pattern exists in the evolution of the MTB ratio from 1999 to 2023, wherein firms with high (low) MTB ratios tend to maintain those levels over time. The persistence of the MTB ratio is independent of industry effects and cannot be well explained by accounting performance. Intangible investment plays a crucial role in determining the MTB ratio, and its persistence is primarily maintained through continued internal intangible investment rather than external mergers and acquisitions. Moreover, although U.S. firms have increased their investment in intangible assets over the past 25 years, the gap between high- and low-MTB firms in intangible investment has widened. Our results suggest that the basis of stock value has shifted from tangible to intangible investments over time.

A key aspect of Chinese-style institutions is that the growth of the economy can be severely restricted by the adjustment and implementation of policy, leading to serious uncertainty in business practices. This paper investigates whether political connections help private firms obtain policy information ahead of public disclosure that would allow them to hedge against policy uncertainty. Using the quarterly data on non-financial private listed companies over 2007:Q1–2017:Q4, we find that the negative effect of policy uncertainty on fixed-asset investment is lower in politically connected firms than in non-connected firms, especially in industries with low asset reversibility and regions with a high degree of marketization. Further, a positive mitigation of policy uncertainty exists in firms whose top executives served as officials rather than deputies, and higher administrative as well as finance-related political connections show more information advantage. In addition, robust evidence is provided that controls the impacts of political connections on financing constraints, business performance and policy burdens, overcoming potential endogeneity, and the cash-holdings perspective. Our findings suggest that political connections are conducive to mitigate information asymmetry between private firms and policymakers in China.