We investigate the relationships between the severity of operational loss events reported in the banking sector and various regulatory, legal, geographical, and economic indicators. Based on a data sample of over 57,000 losses incurred in more than 130 countries reported by the Operational Riskdata eXchange (ORX) consortium, we identify the most relevant exposure indicators for losses in four Basel II event categories: Internal Fraud; External Fraud; Employment Practices and Workplace Safety; and Clients, Products and Business Practices. We find evidence of significant correlations between Internal Fraud and constraints on executive power and the prevalence of insider trading. Clients, Products and Business Practices losses are significantly related to securities and shareholder protection laws, restrictions on banking activity, supervisory power, and the prevalence of insider trading. Other event types are sensitive to per-capita GDP and a governance index.

In this paper, we propose a new family of multivariate loss functions to test the rationality of vector forecasts without assuming independence across variables. When only one variable is of interest, the loss function reduces to the flexible asymmetric family proposed by Elliott, Komunjer, and Timmerman (2008). Following their methodology, we derive~a GMM test for multivariate forecast rationality that allows the forecaster's loss to be nonseparable across variables and takes into account forecast estimation uncertainty. We use our test to study the joint rationality of macroeconomic forecasts in the growth rate of nominal output, CPI inflation rate, and short-term interest rate.

This article analyzes the heterogeneous reaction of exporters to real exchange rate changes using a very rich French firm-level data set with destination-specific export values and volumes on the period 1995–2005. We find that high–performance firms react to a depreciation by increasing significantly more their markup and by increasing less their export volume. This heterogeneity in pricing-to-market is robust to different measures of performance, samples, and econometric specifications. It is consistent with models where the demand elasticity decreases with firm performance. Since aggregate exports are concentrated on high-productivity firms, precisely those that absorb more exchange rate movements in their markups, heterogeneous pricing-to-market may partly explain the weak impact of exchange rate movements on aggregate exports.

We examine whether the composition of top management with General Counsel (GC) affects properties of management earnings forecasts disclosures. After controlling for corporate governance and litigation risk, we find that firms with a GC in top management are more likely to issue forecasts, particularly bad news forecasts, than other firms. Further, their forecasts are less optimistic and more accurate than those issued by others. Consistently, the stock price reaction to their forecast news is stronger. These effects are more pronounced when the GC's managerial status is higher. Overall, our results suggest that GCs play an important role in corporate disclosures.

One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard. To obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of UI in booms and recessions, this article exploits the fact that in Germany, potential UI benefit duration is a function of exact age which is itself invariant over the business cycle. We implement a regression discontinuity design separately for 20 years and correlate our estimates with measures of the business cycle. We find that the nonemployment effects of a month of additional UI benefits are, at best, somewhat declining in recessions. Yet the UI exhaustion rate, and therefore the additional coverage provided by UI extensions, rises substantially during a downturn. The ratio of these two effects represents the nonemployment response of workers weighted by the probability of being affected by UI extensions. Hence, our results imply that the effective moral hazard effect of UI extensions is significantly lower in recessions than in booms. Using a model of job search with liquidity constraints, we also find that in the absence of market-wide effects, the net social benefits from UI extensions can be expressed either directly in terms of the exhaustion rate and the nonemployment effect of UI durations, or as a declining function of our measure of effective moral hazard.

Empirical investigation of the quality interpretation of the Melitz (2003) model of firm heterogeneity and trade has been limited by the lack of direct data on quality. This paper matches firm-level export data with expert assessments of the quality of champagne producers to estimate the key parameters of that model. Quality monotonically increases firm-level prices, the probability of market entry, and export values. The estimated model—which calibrates the relative importance of firm-level quality and idiosyncratic demand—accurately predicts the average quality exported to each country. Simulations show that the data reject the polar alternatives where outcomes are based entirely on either quality or randomness.

Using a sample of 231 firms in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, we examine the changes in firms' accounting practice around leadership successions-the turnovers of chairmen. We find that the successions are associated with reduction in the firms' unsigned discretionary accruals and an increase in timely loss recognition. We argue that the incumbent chairmen cannot transfer most of their unique assets, such as reputation and political/social networks, to their successors, resulting in reduced relationship-based contracting post succession. This change from relationship-based to market-based contracting also shifts the firms to a less insider-based accounting system. Moreover, we find that the extent of the shift in accounting is larger in founder successions ( turnovers of chairmen that are founders) than in subsequent ( non-founder) successions, possibly because the loss of unique assets is more pronounced in the first succession than in subsequent successions.

This paper investigates why Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with strong political connections (i.e., politically connected firms) are more likely to list overseas than non-politically connected firms. We find that connected firms' post-overseas listing performance is worse than that of non-connected firms. This evidence suggests that connected firms' managers list their firms overseas for private (political) benefits. Consistent with this private benefits explanation, we further find that connected firms' managers are more likely to receive political media coverage or a promotion to a senior government position subsequent to overseas listing than domestic listing.