an equilibrium debt option pricing model in discrete time abstract in this paper we develop a discrete time binomial model for pricing options on default free debt securities the model is a single factor or spot rate model in which an arbitrage free term structure is developed and used to price any interest rate contingent claim the model differs from other work in this area in that the model is straightforward to program and use and is not bound by a restrictive equilibrium concept such as the expectations hypothesis the paper demonstrates various properties of the model and demonstrates how information from the existing term structure can be used to parameterize the model

the changing time series properties of earnings cash flows and accruals has financial reporting become more conservative abstract this paper documents changes in the patterns of earnings cash flows and accruals over the last four decades in the absence of a generally accepted definition of conservatism a number of measures of reporting conservatism are identified and examined these measures rely on the accumulation of nonoperating accruals the timeliness of earnings with respect to bad and good news characteristics of the earnings distribution and the market to book ratio the patterns are consistent with an increase in conservative financial reporting over time the findings have implications for accounting standard setting regulation of financial information and financial statement analysis

an unintended consequence of book tax conformity a loss of earnings informativeness increasing the conformity between accounting earnings and taxable income has been proposed to improve financial reporting and curtail aggressive tax planning we find however that increasing conformity results in earnings that are less informative our inquiry exploits a unique sample of firms forced to change from the cash method to the accrual method for tax purposes thereby increasing their book tax conformity we find that these firms experienced a decrease in earnings informativeness compared to control firms unaffected by the change to our knowledge this is the first evidence of tax law changes affecting the informativeness of accounting earnings

simple mechanisms and preferences for honesty we consider full implementation in complete information environments when agents have an arbitrarily small preference for honesty we offer a condition called separable punishment and show that when it holds and there are at least two agents any social choice function can be implemented by a simple mechanism in two rounds of iterated deletion of strictly dominated strategies

an analysis of the relation between the stewardship and valuation roles of earnings in this paper we seek a deeper understanding of how accounting information is used for valuation and incentive contracting purposes we explore linkages between weights on earnings in compensation contracts and in stock price formation a distinction between the valuation and incentive contracting roles of earnings in paul 1992 produces the null hypothesis that valuation earnings coefficients vecs and compensation earnings coefficients cecs are unrelated our empirical analyses of the relations between earnings and both stock prices and executive compensation data at the firm and industry levels over the period 1971 2000 rejects paul s 1992 hypothesis of no relation we also document an increasing weight over time on other public performance information captured by stock returns in the determination of cash compensation specifically we find that the incentive coefficient on returns is significantly higher in the second of two equal sample subperiods relative to the incentive coefficient on earnings

the changing landscape of accrual accounting a fundamental property of accrual accounting is to smooth temporary timing fluctuations in operating cash flows indicating an inherent negative correlation between accruals and cash flows we show that the overall correlation between accruals and cash flows has dramatically declined in magnitude over the past half century and has largely disappeared in more recent years the adjusted r 2 from regressing changes in accruals on changes in cash flows drops from about 70 90 in the 1960s to near zero under 20 in more recent years in exploring potential reasons for the observed attenuation we find that increases in non timing related accrual recognition as proxied by one time and nonoperating items and the frequency of loss firm years explain the majority of the overall decline on the other hand temporal changes in the matching between revenues and expenses and the growth of intangible intensive industries play only a limited role in explaining the observed attenuation finally the relative decline of the timing role of accruals does not appear to be associated with an increase in the asymmetrically timely loss recognition role

the role of bounded rationality and imperfect information in subgame perfect implementation an empirical investigation in this paper we conduct a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which moore and repullo s subgame perfect implementation mechanism induces truth telling in practice both in a setting with perfect information and in a setting where buyers and sellers face a small amount of uncertainty regarding the good s value we nd that moore repullo mechanisms fail to implement truth telling in a substantial number of cases even under perfect information about the valuation of the good this failure to implement truthtelling is due to beliefs about the irrationality of one s trading partner therefore although the mechanism should in theory provide incentives for truth telling many buyers in fact believe that they can increase their expected monetary payo by lying the deviations from truth telling become signicantly more frequent and more persistent when agents face small amounts of uncertainty regarding the good s value our results thus suggest that both beliefs about irrational play and small amounts of uncertainty about valuations may constitute important reasons for the absence of moore repullo mechanisms in practice

information asymmetry and competitive bidding in auditing this article finds that clients with greater risk of fraud are less likely to engage prospective auditors in competitive bidding consistent with the theory that these companies seek to limit access to information that might reveal their high risk status in contrast we find no support for the expectation that companies with higher agency costs will seek competitive auditor bids due to the need for better monitoring our results also show that bidding competition is more likely when the bidding firm is not an industry specialist when clients have more active corporate governance and when there are difficulties with the predecessor auditor jel d44 d82 m42 recent events in the financial markets have focusedattentiononthenatureofcontractsbetween auditors and their clients the auditorclient relationship has profound consequences for the financial markets as a whole as amply demonstrated by the failures of large public companies such as enron and the subsequent demiseof arthurandersen one ofthe premier auditingfirms onceformed theauditor client relationship for public companies usually extends many years as those companies rarely switch auditors thus study of factors that influence the market for initial audit engagements is of theoretical and practical importance however in the past there has been little empirical evidence about how contracts between auditors and clients are made and structured the purpose of this article is to investigate company managers decisions to engage competitive bids from prospective auditors or to privately negotiate with a single firm to obtain audit services private negotiation in this market is fairly prevalent rarely providedempiricaldatafromalargefirmshow thatduringoursampleperiod onlyhalfoftheir bids for public and soon to be public companies were faced with competition from other

market valuation and deregulation of electric utilities abstract this study examines the effect of ongoing deregulation in the electric utility industry on the relation between market value book value and earnings we predict that deregulation decreases increases the relative importance of book value earnings in explaining price we test this prediction by examining changes in the value relevance of book value and earnings during the 1988 1996 time period for a sample of large investor owned electric utilities we find that the regression coefficients and incremental explanatory power related to book value earnings have decreased increased over this time period these results are generally robust in sensitivity analysis

two little treasure games driven by unconditional regret for traveler s dilemma and minimal effort coordination games the unconditional regret matching urm procedure predicts outcomes close to the experimental ones this supports a claim that the urm procedure can be well suited to predict the behavior of experimental subjects in repeated games

optimal taxation in the presence of tax evasion expected utility versus prospect theory abstract it is now well known that the predictions of expected utility theory eut applied to tax evasion are quantitatively and qualitatively at variance with the evidence while prospect theory pt makes the correct predictions in this literature the tax rate is exogenous we endogenize the tax rate and require that a successful theory should explain jointly the facts on the tax rate tax gap and the level of government expenditure we find that the data is best described by taxpayers using pt and the government using standard utility theory eut the results are robust to several possible alternative specifications we discuss how our results have a bearing on the debate between liberalism versus paternalism in behavioral economics we also propose an alternative explanation based on the notion of context dependent preferences

the value relevance of taxes international evidence on the proxy for profitability role of tax surprise abstract despite evidence that tax surprise is incrementally value relevant the literature has done little to broaden the investigation beyond the united states or examine circumstances that affect informativeness after extending to the international setting i examine the impact of tax enforcement i report strong results of greater value relevance when tax enforcement is high and that the value relevance of tax surprise is mostly contained within its interaction with tax enforcement these findings highlight the importance of tax enforcement in determining the information content of tax surprise and suggest that extant and future discussions should be broadened to include it

evidence for the possible information loss of conforming book income and taxable income abstract recent corporate accounting reporting scandals and aggressive corporate tax shelters have led for calls for regulatory reform one such call is to conform or reduce the gap between the calculation of book and taxable income proponents of conformity focus on perceived benefits while ignoring possible costs we examine one possible cost the loss in information content to investors if one measure is removed from the information set we provide evidence for this possible loss by examining the relative and incremental information content over the past 20 years of book and estimated taxable income for a large sample of firms we find that book income exhibits significantly greater relative explanatory power while both exhibit significant incremental explanatory power conforming the two measures at a minimum results in the loss of incremental explanatory power and if book income is conformed to the tax rules a 50 percent loss in the explanatory power of earnings

relating supply network structure to productive efficiency a multi stage empirical investigation abstract the potential of social network analysis sna to characterize supply network structure is of growing interest in supply chain management although the related literature provides few empirical investigations this study identifies those sna measures most closely associated with supply chain efficiency using archival inter firm relationship data collected from u s public companies in multiple industries in a three stage procedure a dea model is applied to measure firm and chain level efficiencies followed by a correlation analysis to group sna variables into clusters of high correlation these clusters are used in a step wise regression algorithm to identify those variables most relevant to productive efficiency while accounting for multicollinearity the supply network structural characteristics that emerge as significant are consistent with many hypothesized relationships in the literature although not without exceptions such as an interesting tradeoff between the benefit of connectedness and a penalty for closeness

the logit equilibrium a perspective on intuitive behavioural anomalies costs associated with deviations from the nash equilibrium these payoff asymmetry effects are incorporated in an approach that introduces noisy behavior via a logit probabilistic choice function in the resulting logit equilibrium behavior is characterized by a probability distribution that satisfies a rational expectations consistency condition the beliefs that determine players expected payoffs match the decision distributions that arise from applying the logit rule to those expected payoffs we prove existence of a unique symmetric logit equilibrium and derive comparative statics results the paper provides a unified perspective on many recent laboratory studies of games in which nash equilibrium predictions are inconsistent with both intuition and experimental evidence

on the optimal relation between the properties of managerial and financial reporting systems we develop a theoretical model of the firm that links properties stewardship vs valuation focus of financial reporting regimes with the informational properties of optimal managerial accounting systems we show that contrary to the standard textbook proposition properties of management and financial accounting systems are not independent significantly we provide an explicit connection between exogenous and observable properties of a firm s financial reporting system and the quality of the managerial accounting system on which manager s base real economic decisions as the quality of those economic decisions can also be inferred from publicly available data our theory generates new opportunities for empirical managerial accounting research on large nonproprietary samples further by being able to identify enhanced performance due to improved managerial accounting information our theory provides opportunities to gain a better understanding of the link between particular managerial accounting practices and the quality of the information produced

accounting information capital investment decisions and equity valuation theory and empirical implications this paper develops a theoretical model to reexamine the roles of earnings and book value for equity valuation and to explore cross sectional differences in the properties of the valuation function ohlson 1995 and feltham and ohlson 1995 1996 show that assuming the clean surplus relation and a specific linear information dynamic equity value can be represented as a linear function of earnings and book value however recent empirical evidence indicates linear valuation functions do not fully capture the effects of earnings and book value on equity value for instance burgstahler and dichev 1997 find the valuation impact of either earnings or book value depends on the levels of these two variables and the valuation function is convex not linear similarly hayn 1995 and collins pincus and xie 1999 report that the valuation effect of earnings is asymmetric between positive and negative earnings also as collins pincus and xie 1999 show the relative and the incremental importance of earnings versus book value in explaining equity

economic science an experimental approach for teaching and research economics experiments have been used to study theories and policies that are often difficult to evaluate with data from naturally occurring markets this paper is a selective summary of my work in the main areas of experimental economics markets individual decisions games and public choice the discussion pertains both to scientific discoveries and teaching innovations

accounting for changing prices the value relevance of historical cost price level and replacement cost accounting in mexico this paper investigates the value relevance of historical cost price level and replacement cost accounting using a sample of mexican firms from 1989 to 1995 it contributes to prior research by distinguishing between two distinct aspects of changing prices 1 the change in the general price level and 2 the change in the value of specific non monetary assets i select mexico to examine because it is unique in requiring and disclosing separately price level and replacement cost adjustments a sample of mexican firms also addresses a key reason cited for mixed results in previous assessments of the usefulness of price level and replacement cost accounting using united states data the effects of inflation are too weak to detect high rates of inflation in mexico ranging between 7 and 52 during the sample period mitigate that potential problem results indicate that replacement cost adjustments are relatively and incrementally relevant beyond historical cost and price level measures while price level adjustments are incrementally value relevant beyond historical measures

a note on an equilibrium debt option pricing model in discrete time abstract in this note the maloney and byrne 1989 discrete time model of the term structure of interest rates for the pricing of interest rate contingent claims is corrected so that the term structures generated by the model satisfy arbitrage free restrictions

term structure movements and pricing interest rate contingent claims this paper derives an arbitrage free interest rate movements model ar model this model takes the complete term structure as given and derives the subsequent stochastic movement of the term structure such that the movement is arbitrage free we then show that the ar model can be used to price interest rate contingent claims relative to the observed complete term structure of interest rates this paper also studies the behavior and the economics of the model our approach can be used to price a broad range of interest rate contingent claims including bond options and callable bonds

gaap versus the street an empirical assessment of two alternative definitions of earnings managers security analysts investors and the press rely increasingly on modified definitions of gaap net income known by such names as operating and pro forma earnings we document this phenomenon and discuss competing explanations for the recent rise in the use of such modified earnings numbers and implications for the interpretation of related accounting research our results show that over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and magnitude of cases where gaap and street earnings differ further there is a very strong bias toward the reporting of a street earnings number that exceeds the gaap earnings number we also show that the market response to the street earnings number has displaced gaap earnings as a primary determinant of stock prices finally through an analysis of earnings releases we show that management has taken a proactive role in defining and emphasizing the street number when communicating to analysts and investors

corporate board composition protocols and voting behavior experimental evidence we examine voting by a board designed to mitigate conflicts of interest between privately informed insiders and owners our model demonstrates that as argued by researchers and the business press boards with a majority of trustworthy but uninformed watchdog agents can implement institutionally preferred policies our laboratory experiments strongly support this conclusion our model also highlights the necessity of penalties on insiders when there is dissension among board members however penalties for dissent appeared to have little impact on the experimental outcomes

strategic risk and coordination failure in blame games within a class of games that we call blame games we discuss how strategic risk may discourage play of a unique and efficient strictly dominance solvable equilibrium

conservative accounting and equity valuation abstract this paper examines how conservative accounting affects the relation between accounting data and firm value the analysis shows that conservative accounting can be characterized equivalently in terms of book value earnings or book rate of return furthermore capitalized earnings generally provide a less biased estimate of equity value than book value does in addition firm growth affects the way earnings and book value are combined in valuation a weighted average of book value and capitalized earnings with the weight on earnings being an increasing and convex function of growth yields an asymptotically unbiased estimate of equity value when growth is positive the weight on book value is negative

time series coefficient variation in value relevance regressions a discussion of core guay and van buskirk and new evidence abstract many claim that gaap financial information has become largely irrelevant to explaining valuations core et al compare financial information s value relevance for the new economy stocks with other stocks we supplement their analysis with new evidence on the economic determinants of the time series variation in the coefficients mapping financial information into prices we document significant variation in the coefficients related to proxies for changing market growth expectations and discount rates and additional variation consistent with time varying correlated omitted variables such findings make it difficult to draw unambiguous inferences about the relevance and reliability of financial information from value relevance regressions

why have measures of earnings quality changed over time the properties of earnings have changed dramatically over the past 40 years prior studies interpret this trend as a decline in earnings quality but disagree on whether it results from changes in the real economy or changes in accounting standards i find that each new cohort of listed firms exhibits lower earnings quality than its predecessors mainly because of higher intangible intensity i conclude that the trend of decline in earnings quality is due more to changes in the sample of firms than to changes in generally accepted accounting principles gaap or in the earnings quality of previously listed firms

games of perfect information predatory pricing and the chain store paradox the thesis of this paper is that finite noncooperative games possessing both complete and perfect information ought to be treated like one player decision problems that is players ought to assign at every move subjective probabilities to every subsequent choice in the game and ought to make decisions via backward induction this view is in contrast with the gametheoretic approach of nash equilibrium after expanding on this view for games in the abstract in sections 2 and 3 attention is turned in section 4 to an example due to reinhard selten called the chain store paradox which possesses the flavor of a situation involving a predatory pricing monopolist it is argued that for the chain store game the decision analytic approach leads under certain assumptions to more realistic outcomes than the standard nash equilibrium approach

modeling the psychology of consumer and firm behavior with behavioral economics abstract marketing is an applied science that tries to explain and influence how firms and consumers behave in markets marketing models are usually applications of standard economic theories which rely on strong assumptions of rationality of consumers and firms behavioral economics explores the implications of the limits of rationality with the goal of making economic theories more plausible by explaining and predicting behavior more accurately while maintaining formal power this article reviews six behavioral economics models that are useful to marketing three models generalize standard preference structures to allow for sensitivity to reference points and loss aversion social preferences toward outcomes of others and preference for instant gratification the other three models generalize the concept of game theoretic equilibrium allowing decision makers to make mistakes encounter limits on the depth of strategic thinking and equilibrate by learning from feedback the authors also discuss a sp

has the information content of quarterly earnings announcements declined in the past three decades this paper examines changes in the information content of earnings over the past three decades using the two metrics from beaver 1968 abnormal trading volume and abnormal return volatility we find no evidence of a decline in the information content of earnings announcements over the past three decades as measured by both abnormal trading volume and return volatility around quarterly earnings announcements if anything our results suggest an increase over time in the informativeness of quarterly earnings announcements variables reflecting changes in firm specific factors account for a portion of the observed increase

determinants of the informativeness of analyst research abstract we examine cross sectional determinants of the informativeness of analyst research i e their effect on security prices controlling for endogeneity among the factors affecting informativeness analyst reports are more informative when the potential brokerage profits are higher e g high trading volume high volatility and high institutional ownership and lower when information processing costs e g more business segments are high we also find that the informativeness of analyst research and informativeness of financial statements are complements

introduction to experimental game theory the title experimental game theory refers to experiments whose goal is to learn about general principles of strategic behavior as opposed to the performance of specific institutions twenty five years ago it would have been startling to see experimental modifying game theory in this way or to find an entire issue of an economics journal devoted to game experiments if this now seems natural it is a tribute to the increasingly

a response to glazer and rosenthal we are most grateful to glazer and rosenthal for the attention they have paid to our work abreu and matsushima 1992a b c in the process of criticizing our mechanism they have provided an elegant exposition of it which usefully supplements our own efforts the criticisms themselves we feel are misplaced and based on a close reading but narrow interpretation of our results glazer and rosenthal seek to show that in our mechanisms the iterative removal of strictly dominated strategies is or indeed ought to be controversial in terms of conventional decision theory the iterative logic is impeccable when iterative deletion leads to a unique profile that profile is the unique rationalizable profile the unique nash equilibrium and so on of course the logic of iterative dominance entails common knowledge of rationality the theoretical coherence of this assumption has been questioned in the context of backward programming in extensive form games see luce and raiffa 1957 pp 80 81 rosenthal 1981 basu 1988 reny 1992a 1992b bonanno 1991 binmore 1987a 1987b and gul 1989 among others these paradoxes of common knowledge of rationality have been highlighted in stylized examples such as the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma and rosenthal s centipede game which in fact has been a seminal inspiration for this recent literature 2 but our mechanisms are simultaneous there is no opportunity to demonstrate irrationality strategic or otherwise and therefore no scope to rationalize iteratively dominated behavior from a decision theory perspective the glazer and rosenthal critique might therefore be viewed as an elaborate revival of the indefensible claim that players in a one short prisoners dilemma will choose not to confess because they are both better off doing so than by both playing their dominant strategies within the standard game theory paradigm there is really nothing more to be said before turning to issues of bounded rationality we note that the glazer and rosenthal critique is essentially premised on the existence of a countervailing focal point but what is a focal point the notion is notoriously vague and we are aware of no widely accepted definition 3 this is not to deny that in very simple and particular games certain behavior may be focal frequently focalness is identified with a pareto dominating equilibrium and this is the point of view glazer and rosenthal seem to adopt 4 this is implicit in their acknowledgement that when the social choice function does satisfy pareto optimality our objection loses much of its immediate

abreu matsushima mechanisms experimental evidence abstract abreu matsushima mechanisms can be applied to a broad class of games to induce any desired outcome as the unique rationalizable outcome we conduct experiments investigating the performance of such mechanisms in two simple coordination games in these games one pure strategy equilibrium is focal we assess the efficacy of abreu matsushima mechanisms for implementing the other pure strategy equilibrium outcome abreu matsushima mechanisms induce some choices consistent with the desired outcome but more choices reflect the focal outcome moreover strengthening the mechanism has a perverse effect when the desired outcome is a pareto dominated risk dominated equilibrium journal of economic literature classification number c7

a new look at the classical bertrand duopoly abstract the paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of pure strategy nash equilibrium in the standard bertrand duopoly with a homogeneous product the main condition is elementary easy to interpret and nests all known sufficient conditions in the literature

changes in corporate effective tax rates over the past 25 years abstract we investigate systematic changes in corporate effective tax rates over the past 25 years and find that effective tax rates have decreased significantly contrary to conventional wisdom the decline in effective tax rates is not concentrated in multinational firms effective tax rates have declined at approximately the same rate for both multinational and domestic firms moreover within multinational firms both foreign and domestic effective rates have decreased finally changes in firm characteristics and declining foreign statutory tax rates explain little of the overall decrease in effective rates

the allowance for uncollectible accounts conservatism and earnings management we study the interrelation between conservatism and earnings management by examining the allowance for uncollectible accounts and its income statement counterpart bad debt expense we find that the allowance is conservative and that it has become more conservative over time conservatism may however facilitate earnings management we find that firms manage bad debt expense downward and even record income increasing bad debt expense to meet or beat analysts earnings forecasts and that conservatism accentuates the extent to which firms manage bad debt expense further we find that firms manage bad debt expense downward by drawing down previously recorded over accruals of bad debt expense that have accumulated on the balance sheet an implication of our study is that tighter limits on the amount by which firms are permitted to understate net assets may reduce their ability to manage earnings

does the bonding effect matter in a more integrated capital market world abstract this paper examines the bonding effect of cross listing before and after the stock market liberalization reforms in china consistent with the bonding hypothesis we find that chinese firms with foreign listings attain higher valuations than firms without foreign listings we also find that they manage earnings less than comparable purely domestic listed firms and have more informative stock prices further investigation indicates that the divergence in earnings quality between cross listed and non cross listed firms shrinks dramatically after the chinese stock market liberalization reforms in 2001 and 2002 overall the results suggest that the bonding effect is mitigated in an increasingly integrated capital market world

endogenous outside options in coordination games experimental evidence abstract in this experiment traders choose between an outside option offered by an intermediary and playing a coordination game with each other the intermediary is either a broker or a dealer we find that intermediaries manage to attract traders even to offer levels lower than the payoff that traders could have obtained had they rejected the intermediary s offer for any given offer traders are more likely to accept a dealer s offer than a broker s offer the introduction of either intermediary type reduces average trader s earnings on the other hand intermediaries have a coordination role as predicted by the forward induction argument when traders reject the intermediary s offer and play the coordination sub game they achieve a significantly greater level of coordination

common belief and the theory of games with perfect information abstract the statement it is common belief that player i is bayesian rational where bayesian rational means an expected utility maximizer is defined for two person games with perfect information it is shown that in most such games it is not possible for a theory so postulate the bayesian rationality of all players and to be common belief this bears directly upon the salience of standard solution concepts such as subgame perfect and sequential equilibria as well as upon the extensive form rationalizability theories of d bernheim econometrica 52 1984 1009 1028 and d pearce econometrica 52 1984 1029 1050 which rely heavily on the common belief of bayesian rationality journal of economic literature classification number c72

cooperating over losses and competing over gains a social dilemma experiment evidence from studies in international relations the politics of reform collective action and price competition suggests that economic agents in social dilemma situations cooperate more to avoid losses than in the pursuit of gains to test whether the prospect of losses can induce cooperation we let experimental subjects play the traveler s dilemma in the gain and loss domain subjects cooperate substantially more over losses furthermore our results suggest that this treatment effect is best explained by reference dependent risk preferences and reference dependent strategic sophistication we discuss the implications of our results and relate our findings to other experimental games played in the loss domain

earnings announcements and competing information abstract we investigate whether competing information primarily analyst reports reduces the usefulness of earnings announcements inconsistent with the view that information in analyst reports substitutes for earnings announcements we find a positive relation between absolute abnormal returns to the two types of disclosures this positive relation also characterizes subsequent period analyst reports relative to current period earnings announcements we also find that aggregate absolute reactions to both types of disclosures increased over 1986 1995 as a whole these results provide little support for the view that the informativeness of earnings announcements is eroded by competing information in the form of analyst reports

herding behaviour and the declining value relevance of accounting information evidence from an emerging stock market abstractthis article sheds light on the underlying mechanisms behind the changes in the value relevance of accounting information in the karachi stock exchange kse during the 1999 2010 period we find that neither changes in earnings quality nor the earnings lack of timeliness hypothesis can explain the decline in the value relevance of accounting information in the kse based on the stylized facts associated with the growth of the kse and the broader economics literature we argue that the reduction in the explanatory power of accounting information vis a vis stock returns was caused by herding behaviour empirical estimates from state space model of herding behaviour confirm the existence of herding and we find that the value relevance of accounting information is significantly lower in periods characterized by herding behaviour this article is also amongst the first attempts to empirically demonstrate that an expansionary monetary policy and increases in foreign portfolio investment lead to increas

an experiment on nash implementation we perform an experimental test of a modification of the controversial canonical mechanism for nash implementation using three subjects in non repeated groups as well as three outcomes states of nature and integer choices we find that this mechanism successfully implements the desired outcome a large majority of the time providing empirical evidence for the feasibility of such implementation in addition the performance is further improved by imposing a fine on a dissident so that the mechanism implements strict nash equilibria while our environment is stylized our results offer hope that experiments can identify reasonable features for practical implementation mechanisms

relative valuation roles of equity book value and net income as a function of financial health abstract this study tests predictions that pricing multiples on and incremental explanatory power of equity book value net income increase decrease as financial health decreases tests using a sample of 396 bankrupt firms and tests using a larger pooled sample both yield inferences consistent with predictions findings are robust to inclusion of controls for industry size return on equity and volatility of equity returns equity book value and net income multiples and incremental explanatory power vary predictably across three illustrative industries selected based on the likely extent of unrecognized intangible assets

have financial statements lost their relevance the authors explore the concern that financial statements no longer have the same relevance to investors that they had in the past they test for value relevance by measuring the total return that could have been earned from prior knowledge of financial statement information and by examining the explanatory power of accounting information on market values and annual market adjusted returns both analyses are applied to a broad sample of exchange listed and nasdaq firms for the 1952 94 period the authors find mixed evidence on value relevance of financial statement reporting during the test period

ethical commitment financial performance and valuation an empirical investigation of korean companies a variety of stakeholders including investors corporate managers customers suppliers employees researchers and government policy makers have long been interested in the relationship between the financial performance of a corporation and its commitment to business ethics as a subject of research the relations between business ethics and corporate valuation has yet to be thoroughly quantified and investigated this article is an effort to amend this inadequacy by demonstrating a statistically significant association between ethical commitment and corporate valuation measures consistent with anecdotal evidence we have found a significant association between the ethical commitment of korean companies and their valuation on the korean stock market however the result reveals that the association between ethical commitment and financial performance is not significantly supported

endogenous depth of reasoning we introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response unlike standard models of strategic thinking in this framework the player s depth of reasoning is endogenously determined and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent s cognitive bound in our approach individuals act as if they follow a cost benet analysis the depth of reasoning is a function of the player s cognitive abilities and his payos the costs are exogenous and represent the game theoretical sophistication of the player the benet instead is related to the game payos behavior is in turn determined by the individual s depth of reasoning and his beliefs about the reasoning process of the opponent thus in our framework payos not only aect individual choices in the traditional sense but they also shape the cognitive process itself our model delivers testable implications on players chosen actions as incentives and opponents change we then test the model s predictions with an experiment we administer dierent treatments that vary beliefs over payos and opponents as well as beliefs over opponents beliefs the results of this experiment which are not accounted for by current models of reasoning in games strongly support our theory we also show that the predictions of our model are highly consistent both qualitatively and quantitatively with well known unresolved empirical puzzles our approach therefore serves as a novel unifying framework of strategic thinking that allows for predictions across games

the ability of earnings to predict future operating cash flows has been increasing not decreasing we investigate the relationship between earnings and one year ahead operating cash flows from 1973 to 2000 although the extant research indicates a weakening relationship between contemporaneous earnings and stock prices over time we find that the relationship between current earnings and future operating cash flows has increased over time this result holds for numerous divisions of our sample out of sample predictions of operating cash flows generally show increasing forecast accuracy over time increasing accounting conservatism appears to play a role in this phenomenon