We assess whether welfare reform affects earnings only through mean impacts that are constant within but vary across subgroups. This is important because researchers interested in treatment effect heterogeneity typically focus on estimating mean impacts that only vary across subgroups. Using a novel approach to simulating treatment group earnings under the constant mean impacts within subgroup model, we find this model does a poor job of capturing treatment effect heterogeneity for Connecticut's Jobs First welfare reform experiment. Notably, ignoring within-group heterogeneitywould lead one to miss evidence that treatment effects are consistent with basic labor supply theory.

We investigate the information content of stock correlation based network measures for systemic risk rankings, such as SIFIRank (based on Google’s PageRank). Using European banking data, we show that SIFIRank is empirically equivalent to a ranking based on average pairwise stock correlations as developed in this paper. The correlation based network measures complement currently available alternative systemic risk ranking methods based on book or market values. A further analytical investigation shows that the value-added appears to be mainly attributable to pairwise cross-sectional heterogeneity rather than to more subtle network relations and feedback loops.

ABSTRACT We report the results of four experiments investigating the relationship between (1) the quality of an audit, (2) jurors' assessments of the standard of prudent care (SOC) against which audit quality is compared, and (3) jurors' negligence verdicts. Experiment 1 operationalizes audit quality by varying the sample size used in audit testing, and provides evidence that jurors anchor their assessment of SOC on audit quality, producing a “competitive mediation” in which audit quality reduces the potential for a negligence verdict directly, but increases that potential indirectly by increasing SOC. Experiment 2 generalizes this finding to a setting that operationalizes audit quality by varying the size of adjustment the auditor required. Experiments 3 and 4 extend these results to a setting in which SOC is elicited after jurors make negligence verdicts. Overall, these experiments provide insight into the role of SOC in constraining and justifying negligence verdicts. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

This paper discusses recent trends in the use of replications in economics. We include the results of recent replication studies that have attempted to identify replication rates within the discipline. These studies generally find that replication rates are relatively low. We then consider obstacles to undertaking replication studies and highlight replication initiatives in psychology and political science, behind which economics appears to lag.

ABSTRACT Prior literature suggests that investors react less strongly to information in less readable disclosures. We extend this literature by considering how disclosure readability affects the sensitivity of investors' valuation judgments to the information contained in outside (i.e., non-firm) sources of information. Using an experiment, we present investors with a disclosure containing mixed news about the valence of firm performance, and this disclosure varies in readability. We find that investors who initially view a less readable firm disclosure provide valuation judgments that incorporate the outside information to a greater extent, such that their valuation judgments are more sensitive to whether outside information is relatively more or less supportive of management's positive forward-looking statements. We find evidence that this occurs primarily because investors who view a less readable initial disclosure feel less comfortable evaluating the firm and, in turn, rely more on the outside information. We also find that viewing a less readable firm disclosure indirectly increases the extent to which participants search outside information. Combined, our results suggest that investors' valuation judgments may be more influenced by outside sources of information when managers provide less readable firm disclosures, potentially limiting the extent to which managers can benefit from strategically issuing less readable disclosures to obfuscate poor performance. These findings also imply that investors might over-rely on more readable disclosures while discounting outside sources of information about the firm. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

ABSTRACT Commonly used Jones-type discretionary accrual models applied in quarterly settings do not adequately control for nondiscretionary accruals that naturally occur due to firm growth. We show that the relation between quarterly accruals and backward-looking sales growth (measured over a rolling four-quarter window) and forward-looking firm growth (market-to-book ratio) is non-linear. Failure to control for the effects of firm growth and performance on innate accruals leads to excessive Type I error rates in tests of earnings management. We propose simple refinements to Jones-type models that deal with non-linear growth and performance effects and show that the expanded models are well-specified and exhibit high power in quarterly settings where one is testing for earnings management. The expanded models are able to identify the presence of earnings management in a sample of restatement firms. Our findings have important implications for the use of discretionary accrual models in earnings management research. JEL Classifications: C15; M40; M41.

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine how information foraging by auditors affects audit evidence collection in two distinct contexts, and show how a small change to audit methodology mitigates the potentially harmful effects of foraging. Information Foraging Theory explains how, while navigating an information environment, individuals learn to acquire information through personally experiencing the costs incurred and the values obtained from information. Consistent with the theory, we find that auditors react to the immediately felt costs of information collection (e.g., time and effort) at the expense of a more global consideration of information value (i.e., auditors collect lower-quality audit evidence). However, foraging behavior is moderated by removing the personal cost to the individual auditor (identifying audit evidence for another member of the audit team to collect), further demonstrating that these personally felt costs influence auditor choices in a way that reduces the quality of information collected. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating how information foraging can influence evidence quality and, thus, audit quality, and how a slight alteration of audit methodology can mitigate this behavior.

There is a large literature on semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignment in settings with a fixed number of covariates. More recently attention has focused on settings with a large number of covariates. In this paper we extend lessons from the earlier literature to this new setting. We propose that in addition to reporting point estimates and standard errors, researchers report results from a number of supplementary analyses to assist in assessing the credibility of their estimates.

Views on the role played by banks in the economy have evolved greatly over the last 125 years, as have arguments on the need, as well as the best way, to regulate them. Some of the key insights in the debate have been published in the Journal of Political Economy. In what follows, we will outline the main contributions to the debate in recent years, with an emphasis on work done at the University of Chicago or published in the JPE. We want to emphasize work that has relevance today, but despite this caveat, we will probably end up doing injustice to work published long ago. We begin with a framework for organizing the theories of intermediation. We then draw out the implications for what the theories say about regulation and note that in many respects the motivation for regulation has been only loosely tied to the theory of intermediation. We close with some open questions for regulators and economists interested in banking. We do not survey the research that has followed up on work published in the JPE, nor will we attempt to provide a detailed overview of the entire academic literature on banking. For that, we refer the reader to the excellent work by Gorton and Winton (2003) and Freixas and Rochet (2008).