This paper considers the potential for public information disclosures to complement the existing private information of financial analysts. In such a setting, analysts allowed to participate during earnings conference calls by asking questions receive public signals that can facilitate the generation of new and valuable private information for the asking analyst. Realizing these public signals are valuable for the asking analyst, managers can use their discretion to discriminate among analysts by granting more participation to more favorable analysts. I use post–Regulation Fair Disclosure conference call transcripts to document that the probability of an analyst asking a question during an earnings conference call is increasing in the favorableness of the analyst's outstanding stock recommendation. I also find that downgrades are associated with decreases in access to management during the conference call relative to other recommendation change activity. Analyst prestige moderates these effects. Favorable and prestigious analysts have higher participation probabilities than favorable and unprestigious analysts. Further, downgrades result in participation decreases only for unprestigious analysts. These findings are consistent with practitioner and regulatory concerns that managers discriminate among analysts by allowing more management access to more favorable analysts

The expansion of the State-as-insurer has played a major role in the long-term growth of the public sector, but we are probably reaching the turning point. Because of its manifold failures, the State-as-insurer is facing crisis all around the world, with exploding expenditures. This will probably induce a shift in the private–public frontier, which makes it much more important than in the past to regulate the insurance industry efficiently. Coming back to the failures of the State-as-insurer, we should underline the role played by this flawed hypothesis that sets market logic and private interest against public interest

This paper analyzes the association between ownership, top management incentives, and expenditures on accounting information. We argue that organizations with privately appointed boards of directors such as for-profit and non-governmental nonprofit organizations use incentive pay practices which encourage managers to use accounting information to improve performance. In contrast, government organizations are publicly governed and are constrained in their compensation practices because hospital CEOs are administrators of government provided services. However, these hospitals must prove their efficiency to continue to receive adequate budgetary funding. Therefore government hospitals are more likely to use accounting information to gain legitimacy with stakeholders and regulators. Accordingly, we predict a positive relationship between expenditures on accounting information and contracting intensity in privately governed organizations, whereas we expect no such association for publicly governed organizations. We analyze data from California hospitals to determine differences in these roles across ownership types. We find a positive association between contracting intensity and expenditures on accounting information in privately governed hospitals, but no relation in publicly governed hospitals. Finally, we find differences in the use of accounting information within the privately governed hospitals, based on ownership. While for-profit hospitals expend resources on accounting information that helps improve their revenue positions, nonprofit hospitals expend resources on accounting information that facilitates decision-making related to operating efficiency and cost containment

This paper studies the determinants of income smoothing by management of loan-loss provisions in banks around the world. Using a panel database of 3221 bank-year observations from 40 countries and controlling for unobservable bank effects and for the endogeneity of explanatory variables, we find that bank income smoothing depends on investor protection, disclosure, regulation and supervision, financial structure, and financial development. Results suggest there is less bank income smoothing not only with the strength of investor protection, but also with the extent of accounting disclosure, restrictions on bank activities, and official and private supervision, while there is more income smoothing with market orientation and development of a country’s financial system

What conditions cause major policy changes under representative government? This article addresses that question by providing a theoretically grounded analysis of a massive policy change: the New Deal. It explains how the economic problems of the early 1930s initiated changes on several dimensions of policy: federal spending, labor market regulation, and civil rights. The article concludes by considering the broader lessons learned from the political economy of the New Deal

This study forwards an explanation and empirical investigation of price clustering in retail banking markets. It is proposed that price or interest rate clustering forms in retail markets as firms wish to maximise returns from customers, some of whom have difficulties in recalling and processing price information. This theory is developed and tested using a dataset of retail interest rates from the UK which enables interest rate clustering to be viewed in both lending and investment markets, and at different levels of financial involvement. It is found that interest rate clustering occurs in a manner consistent with firms maximising returns from customers. These findings are viewed to be a key policy concern for financial regulators and firms concerned with consumer protection

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the use of foreign currencies in the lending activities of banks in transition economies. The impact of bank and firm variables on credit dollarization is studied in an optimal portfolio allocation model and estimated using new aggregate data for 21 transition economies for the period 1990–2003. Empirical results provide evidence that credit dollarization is the combined outcome of domestic deposit dollarization and banks’ desire for currency-matched portfolios beyond regulatory requirements. The effects of international financial factors and natural hedges are less robust across alternative specifications. The paper further discusses the role of regulations in affecting the impact of these factors on credit dollarization and calls for more developed domestic forward foreign exchange markets

Robert E. Wright of New York University reviews “Political Institutions and Financial Development” by Stephen Haber, Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast,. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Nine papers examine why some countries develop better financial systems than others, focusing on the importance of a country's political institutions in this development. Papers discuss political institutions and financial development--evidence from the political economy of bank regulation in Mexico and the United States (Stephen Haber); the political economy of early U.S. financial development (Richard Sylla); what the World Bank can learn from American history (John Joseph Wallis); the move beyond legal origin and checks and balances--political credibility, citizen information, and financial sector development (Philip Keefer); the microeconomic effects of different approaches to bank supervision (James R. Barth, Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine); political drivers of diverging corporate governance patterns (Peter Gourevitch and James Shinn); credible commitment and sovereign default risk--two bond markets and imperial Brazil (William R. Summerhill); legal origin versus the politics of creditor rights--bond markets in Brazil, 1850-2002 (Aldo Musacchio); and economics, political institutions, and financial markets (Douglass C. North and Mary M. Shirley). Haber is A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities at Stanford University and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. North is Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. Weingast… Index

[As the number of bank failures increases, the set of assets available for acquisition by surviving banks enlarges but the total liquidity available with surviving banks falls. This results in "cash-in-the-market" pricing for liquidation of banking assets. At a sufficiently large number of bank failures, and in turn, at a sufficiently low level of asset prices, there are too many banks to liquidate and inefficient users of assets who are liquidity-endowed may end up owning the liquidated assets. In order to avoid this allocation inefficiency, it may be ex-post optimal for the regulator to bail out some failed banks. We show, however, that there exists a policy that involves granting liquidity to surviving banks in the purchase of failed banks, which is equivalent to the bailout policy from an ex-post standpoint. Crucially, this liquidity provision policy gives banks incentives to differentiate, rather than to herd, makes aggregate banking crises less likely, and thereby dominates the bailout policy from an ex-ante standpoint

A well-known theorem by Herfindahl states that the low-cost nonrenewable resource must be exploited first. Consider resources that are differentiated only by their pollution content. For instance, both coal and natural gas are used to generate electricity, yet coal is more polluting. We show that the ordering of extraction need not be driven by whether a resource is clean or dirty. Coal may be used first, followed by natural gas, and again by coal. Such “vacillation” does not occur under cost heterogeneity. A perverse policy implication is that regulating pollution may accelerate use of the polluting resource