the use of unsigned earnings quality measures in tests of earnings management this paper examines the implications of using the absolute value of discretionary accruals when testing for earnings management first we analytically develop the mean and variance of the distribution of absolute discretionary accruals and show that the expected value is an increasing function of the variance in the underlying error term from the first stage discretionary accrual estimation model second we highlight several firm characteristics that are related to the error variance in discretionary accrual estimation models using simulations we show that correlation between the earnings management partitioning variable and these firm characteristics leads to an overrejection of the null hypothesis of no earnings management third we provide research design suggestions to help researchers mitigate the potential bias arising from the use of unsigned measures of earnings management using these suggestions we replicate a recent study and demonstrate that the inferences change after controlling for operating volatility

the inflation tax in a real business cycle model money is incorporated into a real business cycle model using a cash in advance constraint the model economy is used to analyze whether the business cycle is different in high inflation and low inflation economies and to analyze the impact of variability in the growth rate of money in addition the welfare cost of the inflation tax is measured and the steady state properties of high and low inflation economies are compared

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

women s discrimination in developing countries a new data set for better policies summary based on a new data set this paper develops two innovative indicators to measure gender inequalities in developing countries the indicators measure different aspects of constraints imposed on women by social institutions that is laws norms traditions and codes of conduct that exist in societies for centuries the paper finds that social institutions are the most important single factor determining women s participation in economic activities outside the household

for better or for worse till the human development index do us part abstract this paper describes the results of research intended to explore the volatility inherent in the united nations development programme s undp human development index hdi the hdi is intended to be a simple and transparent device for comparing progress in human development and is an aggregate of life expectancy education and gdp per capita values of the hdi for each country are presented in the human development reports hdrs the first being published in 1990 however while the methodology is consistent for all countries in each year there are notable differences between years that make temporal comparisons of progress difficult the paper presents the results of recalculating the hdi for a simplified sample of 114 countries using various methodologies employed by the undp the results are a set of deviations of recalculated hdi ranks compared to the original ranks given in the hdrs the volatility that can result from such recalculation is shown to be substantial 10 15 ranks yet reports in the popular press are frequently sensitive to movements of only a few ranks such movement can easily be accounted for by changes in the hdi methodology rather than genuine progress in human development while the hdrs often carry warnings about the inadvisability of such year on year comparisons it is argued that the existence of such a high profile index and the overt presentation within league tables do encourage such comparison assuming that the hdi will be retained as a focal point within the hdrs then it is suggested that greater focus be upon more meaningful and robust categories of human development e g low medium and high rather than league tables where shifts of a few places perhaps as a result of nothing more than a methodological or data artefact may be highlighted in the press and by policy makers

social indicators and comparisons of living standards abstract construction of an international index of standards of living incorporating social indicators and economic output typically involves scaling and weighting procedures that lack welfare economic foundations revealed preference axioms can be used to make quality of life comparisons if we can estimate the representative household s production technology for the social indicators this method is applied to comparisons of gross domestic product gdp and life expectancy for 58 countries neither gdp rankings nor the rankings of the human development index hdi are consistent with the partial ordering of revealed preference a method of constructing a utility consistent index incorporating both consumption and life expectancy is suggested

changes in the value relevance of earnings and book values over the past forty years this paper investigates systematic changes in the value relevance of earnings and book values over time we report three primary findings first contrary to claims in the professional literature the combined value relevance of earnings and book values has not declined over the past forty years and in fact appears to have increased slightly second while the incremental value relevance of bottom line earnings has declined it has been replaced by increasing value relevance of book values finally much of the shift in value relevance fiom earnings to book values can be explained by the increasing frequency and magnitude of one time items the increasing frequency of negative earnings and changes in average firm size and intangible intensity across time

a human development index by income groups summary one of the most frequent critiques of the hdi is that it does not take into account inequality within countries we suggest a methodology which allows to compute the three components and the overall hdi for quintiles of the income distribution this allows comparisons of the level in human development of the poor and non poor within and across countries an empirical illustration shows large discrepancies in human development within the countries especially in africa these discrepancies are lower the higher the hdi is but only weakly so inequality in income is generally higher than inequality in education and life expectancy

measurement of social well being alternatives to gross domestic product abstract gross domestic product gdp is widely acknowledged to be a poor measure of social well being this paper surveys several substitutes for and modifications of gdp which have been offered as measures of society s welfare the index of sustainable economic welfare a measure endorsed by many ecological economists is found to possess a variety of virtues but also several imperfections the search for a social welfare measure has not yet ended

the probable foundations of sustainabilism information energy and entropy based definition of capital homo sustainabiliticus and the need for a new gold abstract this conceptual interdisciplinary paper will start with an introduction to the new networked knowledge based global economy and the importance of intellectual and specifically human capital next an advanced definition of human and other forms of capital using information energy and entropy will be introduced this will be followed by a discussion of the premises framing the study of economics and will focus on the role of law in the economy afterwards the paper will suggest the addition of a new model of humans that should serve as the base for the concept of law the homo sustainabiliticus ensuing this discussion and consistent with the newly proposed definition of capital a proposal for a new currency new gold will be offered this proposal suggests viewing usable renewable energy knowledge and data as the most important assets for the 21st century and is seen as the building block for the new sustainabilistic economy

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 costs of missing the millennium development goal on gender equity abstract at the millennium summit the world community pledged to promote gender equality and chose as a specific target the achievement of gender equity in primary and secondary education by the year 2005 in every country of the world based on the findings from a growing empirical literature that suggests that gender equity in education promotes economic growth reduced fertility child mortality and undernutrition we estimate what the costs in terms of growth and forgone fertility mortality and undernutrition reduction will be for the 45 countries that are on current projections unlikely to meet the target our estimates suggest that by 2005 the countries that are off track are likely to suffer 0 1 0 3 percentage points lower per capita growth rates as a result will have 0 1 0 4 more children per woman and by 2015 an average of 15 per 1 000 higher rates of under five mortality and 2 5 percentage points higher prevalence of underweight children under five sensitivity analyses suggest that the results are quite robust to using different specifications and approaches to estimating these losses

undp s gender related indices a critical review abstract this paper critically reviews the two gender related indices proposed by undp in the 1995 human development report the gender related development index gdi and the gender empowerment measure gem while supporting the need to develop indicators that reliably track women s empowerment gem as well as the impact of gender inequality on overall human development gdi we argue that the particular ways in which these indices were constructed and the assumptions made to overcome data gaps severely limit their usefulness and result in very misleading international comparisons wherever appropriate we suggest remedies for some of the shortcomings identified

money and the business cycle with one period nominal contracts a modified version of the nominal contract developed by j a gray 1976 and s fischer 1977 is introduced in a general equilibrium model with money which has been used in the real business cycle literature money is introduced in the model through cash in advance constraint two kinds of contracts are examined namely a nominal wage contract and a nominal price contract the nominal wage contract improves the fit of the model in many respects the nominal price contract increases the output volatility enormously but it has some unrealistic features

multidimensional measures of well being standard of living and quality of life across countries summary using sen s capability approach we propose to measure two components of well being standard of living and quality of life unlike the undp human development index the two indices do not mix measures of resource availability and of functioning and capability the empirical results for 170 countries are based on two multidimensional analyses the totally fuzzy analysis and the factorial analysis of correspondences the paper also compares our results with the hdi and gdp per capita it focuses on africa presents policy implications and discusses aggregation and redundancy in multidimensional indices

testing for trends in the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactured goods abstract this paper joins the statistical debate on the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactured goods by contributing to the methodological discussion and presenting new evidence using data series covering almost the whole of the 20th century using statistical tests that take into account breaks in the series it is found that over the 20th century the relative prices of primary commodities dropped to nearly one third of their level at the beginning of the century in two installments when random shocks led to structural breaks and not in a gradual way as implied by either a deterministic or stochastic trend possible reasons for the structural breaks and their policy implications are discussed

making development simple the genetic deterministic hypothesis for economic development abstract this paper discusses the dangers inherent in attempting to simplify something as complex as development it does this by exploring the lynn and vanhanen theory of deterministic development which asserts that varying levels of economic development seen between countries can be explained by differences in national intelligence national iq assuming that intelligence is genetically determined and as different races have been shown to have different iq then they argue that economic development measured as gdp capita is largely a function of race and interventions to address imbalances can only have a limited impact the paper presents the lynne and vanhanen case and critically discusses the data and analyses linear regression upon which it is based it also extends the cause effect basis of lynne and vanhanen s theory for economic development into human development by using the human development index hdi it is argued that while there is nothing mathematically incorrect with their calculations there are concerns over the data they employ even more fundamentally it is argued that statistically significant correlations between the various components of the hdi and national iq can occur via a host of cause effect pathways and hence the genetic determinism theory is far from proven the paper ends by discussing the dangers involved in the use of over simplistic measures of development as a means of exploring cause effect relationships while the creators of development indices such as the hdi have good intentions simplistic indices can encourage simplistic explanations of under development

the welfare cost of nominal wage contracting we use a dynamic general equilibrium model to obtain quantitative estimates of the welfare cost of nominal wage contracting we find that the welfare cost of such contracts can vary quite a lot depending on the degree of indexation the size and persistence of monetary shocks and the contract length the size and persistence of technology shocks do not affect the welfare cost significantly the elasticity of labour supply is important for the welfare cost if the labour supply elasticity is small the welfare cost of nominal wage contracts can be substantial

the effect of audit adjustments on earnings quality evidence from china we examine how adjustments to earnings during year end audits affect measures of earnings quality there are four key findings first audit adjustments cause earnings to become smoother and more persistent second the adjustments result in higher accrual quality third audit adjustments have a larger negative effect on signed accruals than absolute accruals fourth the adjustments do not reduce the discontinuity in the earnings distribution around zero these findings are of interest to researchers who use earnings properties as proxies for earnings quality and audit quality however we caution that our findings for china may not generalize to other countries

a modified human development index abstract this paper discusses a modified index for measuring human development the suggested index is based on the components of the human development index hdi developed by the united nations development programme undp since 1990 it discusses two categories of technical issues related to the hdi for 1995 those related to the components and those relevant to the structure of the index the data from the human development report 1995 for 174 countries are used to test the robustness of the suggested index and the results are compared to those of the hdi the new index is then used to delineate with some justification different groups of countries at various levels of human development

earnings volatility and earnings predictability abstract survey evidence indicates widely held managerial beliefs that earnings volatility is negatively related to earnings predictability in addition existing research suggests that earnings volatility is determined by economic and accounting factors and both of these factors reduce earnings predictability we find that the consideration of earnings volatility brings substantial improvements in the prediction of both short and long term earnings conditioning on volatility information also allows one to identify systematic errors in analyst forecasts which implies that analysts do not fully understand the implications of earnings volatility for earnings predictability

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

are declining effective tax rates indicative of tax avoidance insight from effective tax rate reconciliations abstract effective tax rates etrs are often used to compare tax avoidance across firms and time using firms detailed tax footnote data we find that the effect of valuation allowances va related to prior period losses biases gaap etrs this downward bias explains almost all of the downward trend in domestic firms etrs over the last 20 years we also find that vas explain cross sectional differences in etrs for both domestic and multinational firms we show this bias extends to cash etrs and the henry and sansing 2018 tax avoidance measure we develop a methodology for substantially reducing the bias in both time series and cross sectional analyses of cash and gaap etrs overall our results suggest firms loss histories and gaap rules influence inferences from tax avoidance proxies

management by the numbers a formal approach to deriving informational and distributional properties of unmanaged earnings we explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings truthfully with the market pricing the firm based on those reported earnings we generate benchmarks against which empirically observed earnings returns relations and aggregate earnings distributions can be evaluated this parsimonious model shows a coherent set of results reported losses are less persistent than reported gains decision making diminishes the s shaped market response to earnings and earnings relate to returns asymmetrically in the way documented by basu 1997 furthermore the implied frequency distribution of aggregate earnings is neither symmetric nor necessarily single peaked instead it may exhibit a kink at zero and look similar to the plots reported by burgstahler and dichev 1997 however within our model none of these phenomena are due to reporting noise bias or some undesirable strategic managerial behavior they are the natural consequences of using past earnings as the basis for value increasing managerial decision making that in turn generates the future earnings on which future decisions will be based

an assessment of how well we account for intangibles estimates of intangible capital stock are of prime importance for accurate measurement of productivity growth aggregate intangible capital stock is usually estimated using the so called corrado hulten sichel chs new growth accounting framework yet this framework has not received much academic scrutiny to date this article proposes a validity test of two intangible investment series in the chs framework namely brand equity and architectural and engineering designs the test involves assessing the extent to which these intangible investment series explain the demand for trademarks and design rights the econometric analysis is performed on an unbalanced panel of 32 countries from 1980 to 2010 the results suggest that brand equity investment is a powerful predictor of trademark applications however investment in design activity is not correlated with the count of design rights which i take as evidence that current methodologies do not account well for design activities

improving human development a long run view abstract the pessimistic flavour of the human development reports appears to be in contradiction with their own numbers as developing countries fare comparatively better in human development than in per capita gdp terms this paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a new improved human development index ihdi informed by welfare economics the ihdi is presented here alongside the united nations development programme s undp hdi for the world and its main regions since the late 19th century social dimensions in the ihdi are derived following kakwani journal of development economics 41 1993 pp 307 336 with a convex achievement function whereas a geometric average is employed to combine its dimensions longevity knowledge and income thus the ihdi does not conceal the gap between rich and poor countries and casts a much less optimistic view than the conventional undp index while it fits with the undp concern for international differences the paper s findings highlight main weaknesses in human development dimensions of present day developing countries

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

changes in accrual properties and operating environment implications for cash flow predictability abstract this paper reconciles conflicting evidence in prior literature on the relative ability of earnings and cash flows in predicting future cash flows further we investigate the implications of temporal shifts in accrual properties and operating environment for cash flow predictability three key insights emerge first cash flows consistently outperform earnings in predicting future cash flows second accruals and its components including those capturing non articulating events have incremental albeit small predictive ability over cash flows third earnings ability to predict future cash flows has increased over the period 1989 2015 due to changes in operating environment rather than accrual properties

nominal wage contracts and the monetary transmission mechanism i introduction in their papers kydland and prescott 1982 and long and plosser 1983 show that a one sector real business cycle model subject to technology shocks closely matches the business cycle properties of real variables to those found in postwar u s data however as found by cooley and hansen 1989 in order to match the business cycle properties of nominal variables a propagation mechanism for monetary shocks is needed subsequent work by cho 1993 cho and cooley 1995 cho cooley and phaneuf 1997 etc indicates that incorporating nominal rigidity can solve the propagation problem in this paper we analyze the monetary transmission mechanism introduced in these papers synchronized wage setting as well as staggered wage setting while empirical evidence suggests the use of staggered wage setting in modeling the u s economy as compared to the synchronized setting we nevertheless explore the latter to better understand the monetary propagation mechanism created by nominal wage rigidity 1 in a model with synchronized wage contracting all agents agree to set a nominal wage for j successive periods simultaneously in contrast under staggering at any given time period there is a fraction of agents setting a nominal wage for j consecutive periods where this fraction is 1 j irrespective of contract type when the nominal wage is agreed to households cede to the firm the right to determine labor hours once the nominal wage is adopted households supply labor hours as determined by the firm except for the different wage contract formulations our assumptions are identical across both models we find the economy with nominal wage contracts to be much more volatile than the economy without wage contracts specifically the volatility of real variables rises sharply when nominal wage rigidity is introduced however nominal wage contracts do help in matching the volatility of nominal variables as compared to a model without contracts in addition we find that the correlation between output and inflation and interest rate is improved upon in a model with contracts however nominal wage contracts fail in matching the correlation of output with productivity as well as in improving persistence overall a comparison between contract types shows that the monetary transmission mechanism generated via staggered contracting does better in matching the u s data our impulse response functions reinforce the statistical findings the impact of monetary shocks is strongest given a synchronized nominal wage setting lastly we obtain welfare costs of contracts measured in terms of consumption 2 we find that welfare costs are slightly higher under synchronized contracting as compared to staggered hence in terms of welfare staggered contracts are more desirable the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii gives the features of the economy while section ill discusses the two contract types and shows how labor hours are determined in each economy in section iv we define the recursive competitive equilibrium and discuss the solution method used to solve the dynamic programming problem the model is calibrated in section v we present our simulation results which include standard deviations correlations impulse response function and welfare costs in section vi section vii concludes the paper ii the economy firms firms produce output using a cobb douglas production function 1 mathematical expression not reproducible in ascii where y k and h are aggregate output capital stock and labor respectively 3 the parameter alpha represents capital s share in total income the production function exhibits constant returns to scale thus it can be assumed without loss of generality that there is only one competitive firm the production function is subject to a technology shock z

earnings as an explanatory variable for returns in this paper we investigate whether the level of earnings divided by price at the beginning of the stock return period is relevant for evaluating earnings returns associations the primary model motivating this research relies on the idea that book value owners equity and market value are both stock variables indicating the wealth of the firm s equity holders the related flow variables after adjusting for dividends are respectively earnings divided by price at the beginning of the return period a p 1 and market returns it then follows that earnings divided by beginning of period price should be associated with stock returns although models based on a relation between market value and book value are used occasionally in the accounting research literature see for example landsman 1986 harris and ohlson 1987 and barth

measuring sustainable development some empirical evidence for france from eight alternative indicators abstract this paper presents results from a time series analysis of eight measures of development and or sustainability for france the measures chosen are green national net product genuine savings ecological footprint indicator of sustainable economic welfare genuine progress indicator pollution sensitive human development indicator sustainable human development indicator and french dashboard on sustainable development a theoretical description of each index highlights their advantages and drawbacks underlining the fact that no indicator is perfect and no one can give an exhaustive view of sustainable development therefore the analysis of various indicators is necessary to evaluate sustainable development with accuracy empirical results of measures of well being show that french development was improving between 1990 and 2000 concerning sustainability indicators support different conclusions it seems that french development was weakly sustainable but unsustainable in the strong sense over the period examined

what are the most promising conduits for foreign knowledge inflows innovation networks in the chinese pharmaceutical industry we study innovation networks in emerging markets where foreign actors have been identified as key sources of knowledge spillovers as well as progenitors of industry clusters focusing on connectivity as a channel for international knowledge sourcing we widen our lens beyond mnes to include critical innovative actors such as research institutions i e universities and research centers we examine the geographic dispersion of co inventor networks generated by us patents associated with the chinese pharmaceutical industry previous research has highlighted the role of organizationally driven mne networks as enablers of foreign knowledge inflows to less developed countries however our results emphasize the critical role of individually motivated networks arising from advanced economy research institutions in connecting china to global knowledge networks

idiosyncratic return volatility cash flows and product market competition over the past 40 years the volatility of the average stock return has drastically outpaced total market volatility thus idiosyncratic return volatility has dramatically increased we estimate this increase to be 6 per year consistent with an efficient market this result is mirrored by an increase in the idiosyncratic volatility of fundamental cash flows we argue that these findings are attributable to the more intense economy wide competition various cross sectional and time series tests support this idea economic competitiveness facilitates reinterpretation of the results from the cross country r2 literature as well as the us idiosyncratic risk literature jel g12 g14

intangible capital and the rise in wage and hours volatility in a standard real business cycle model extended to include intangible capital ic i show that a rise in the income share of ic in the production function in line with data can account for a significant share of the increase in real wage volatility both absolute and relative to income and labor input volatility relative to income observed in the u s since the mid 1980 s even as volatility of output declined intangible capital accumulates stochastically and similar to final goods requires physical capital intangible capital and labor to produce under these conditions an increase in the share of ic in production increases the propagation of the ic specific shock which raises absolute and relative wage and labor input volatility the higher propagation of the ic shock also accounts for the large decline in the pro cyclicality of labor productivity relative to both output and labor observed during this period

good and bad growth the human development reports abstract the 1996 human development report undp 1996 is about economic growth and human development in keeping with past reports in the series it emphasizes the diversity of country performance in improving human development indicators at given rates of growth this article reviews what the human development reports have said on this topic looking at how well the main messages have been supported by data and analysis and how compelling they are as a basis for public action

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

data base for development analysis data base for development analysis an overview the paper provides an overview of the situation with respect to the quality and comparability of data commonly used in development analysis a section each is devoted to a discussion of macroeconomic i e national income and its components savings and investment exports and imports data demography population life expectancy fertility and mortality nutrition and health labour force employment and unemployment poverty and income distribution validation and cross checking of data from different sources the discussion is illustrated with examples drawn mainly from india the paper concludes with a set of recommendations for the improvement of data

time to change your investment model we demonstrate empirically that the gains from predicting corporate earnings or consensus hits and misses an activity at the core of most investment methodologies have been shrinking fast over the past 30 years we identify the main reasons for this loss of earnings relevance and propose an improved alternative to current investment methodologies one that focuses on the strategic assets of the enterprise and their contribution to maintaining the company s competitive edge we demonstrate this investment methodology using subscription based companies

global social tolerance index and multi method country rankings sensitivity social tolerance refers to the extent of recognition and acceptance of differences willingness to grant equal rights and refraining from openly intolerant attitudes utilizing world value survey wvs data 56 countries 83 000 usable respondents we develop a global social tolerance index gsti that incorporates gender minority immigrant and religion tolerance dimensions we develop this index using a multi step data driven procedure involving five data standardizations seven weighting approaches and five aggregation methods they generate 124 replications for each country s index and rank yielding a median overall position and several measures of rank sensitivity robustness to different weighting standardization and aggregation approaches it builds on prior social tolerance indexes in terms of scope and dimensionality and avoids problems associated with equal or subjective weighting the gsti index rankings provide a tool for ib scholars to examine nations overall tolerance or tolerance regarding each dimension relative to other external criteria our procedure can be used to develop other indexes and rankings of nations or organizations within a country or region in practice any such non participatory method should always serve as a starting point to facilitate deliberations of experts and or decision makers for policy recommendations

asymmetric timeliness of earnings market to book and conservatism in financial reporting abstract using an accounting conservatism theory that reflects accounting s role in practice we investigate the relation between two extensively used measures of conservatism asymmetric timeliness of earnings and the market to book ratio mtb we predict and observe that when asymmetric timeliness is measured cumulatively over long periods its relation with end of period mtb is positive when asymmetric timeliness is measured over short periods its dependence on beginning of period composition of equity value ev is responsible for its negative association with mtb further asymmetric timeliness appears to measure conservatism more efficiently when it is estimated cumulatively over multiple periods

cash holdings and labor heterogeneity the role of skilled labor firms differ in their dependence on skilled labor and face labor adjustment costs that increase with their workers skill level we show that firms with a higher share of skilled workers and thus less flexibility to adjust their labor demand in response to cash flow shocks hold more precautionary cash the effect of labor skills on cash holdings is more pronounced for financially constrained firms and varies with exogenous differences in firing and hiring costs we address endogeneity concerns by using subsamples of firms with reasonably similar characteristics propensity score matching and a quasi experimental shock to labor markets

managerial attention and worker performance we present a novel theory of the employment relationship a manager can invest in attention technology to recognize good worker performance the technology may break and is costly to replace we show that as time passes without recognition the worker s belief about the manager s technology worsens and his effort declines the manager responds by investing but this investment is insufficient to stop the decline in effort and eventually becomes decreasing the relationship therefore continues deteriorating and a return to high performance becomes increasingly unlikely these deteriorating dynamics do not arise when recognition is of bad performance or independent of effort

the inequality adjusted human development index a constructive proposal abstract this paper proposes a method to incorporate a concern for distributional inequalities of income education and longevity into the framework of the human development index hdi as it is presently designed by the united nations development programme the paper constructs gini coefficients for a set of 20 developing countries measuring inequalities in annual income educational attainment and life span attainment these calculations are combined with data from the hdi to produce an inequality adjusted human development index iahdi the implications of this proposed index for evaluating and promoting development are considered

association between accounting performance measures and stock prices a test of the life cycle hypothesis abstract this paper posits that stock market response to two accounting performance measures sales growth and capital investment is a function of firm life cycle stage firms are grouped into various life cycle portfolios using dividend payout sales growth and age as predicted the empirical results indicate a monotonic decline in the response coefficients of unexpected sales growth and unexpected capital investment from the growth to the stagnant stages additional analysis suggests that this relation is not driven by a firm size effect risk differences or measurement error in the proxies for performance measures

poverty human development and growth an emerging consensus this paper considers several issues relevant to the debate on the extent to which poverty or development progress in general should be measured by income or by a broader set of objectives issues covered here are practical implications of the two approaches for poverty reduction efforts the impact of growth on basic social indicators and how national achievement on social indicators is best measured sri lanka and pakistan countries often cited in this debate are used as examples

the life cycle of a competitive industry firm numbers first rise then later fall as an industry evolves this nonmonotonicity is explained using a competitive model in which innovation opportunities fuel entry and relative failure to innovate prompts exit equilibrium time paths for price and quantity also share features of the data the model is estimated using data from the u s automobile tire industry a particularly dramatic example of the nonmonotonicity in firm numbers

women food security and development in less industrialized societies contributions and challenges for the new century summary in this paper i examine the links between women food security and development from a crossnational perspective i find that the proximity to gender equality constructed from the united nations human development and gender related development indices improves development in the form of both child hunger and child mortality extending these results other forms of female empowerment including female contraceptive prevalence significantly improve development outcomes in less industrialized societies findings are net of theoretical controls for economic development population pressure globalization democratization and region further strengthening the importance of gender considerations countries that incorporate gender into policy and program considerations benefit from such inclusion in the form of social and economic development outcomes findings are an important crossnational extension of existing research utilizing new measures that capture the important development dynamic

how do you measure a technological revolution it is hardly news that we are in the midst of rapid economic change the advances in infor mation and communication technology ict in the life and other sciences and their profusion of innovative products from the newest electronic devices to the latest drugs and treatments are ample evidence equally pervasive are new busi ness models in services big box retail online banking on demand media and the explosion in social networking and new business practices ushered in by the internet telework virtual meetings job boards given the magnitude of the changes brought on by these innovations it is useful to step back and ask what does eco nomic analysis have to say about the sources and mechanisms of these shifts and revolutions and what economic metrics are available to measure their overall size and impact the received theory of economic growth is the natural candidate for this job it came of age in the 1950s and 1960s with the neoclassi cal models and emergence of aggregate growth accounting the latter has become the work horse of empirical macroeconomic growth analysis and the basis for official productiv ity statistics put out by the bureau of labor statistics bls since 1983 a technological revolution appears in this framework as an increase in the fruits of innovation as measured by the shift in an aggregate production function termed multifactor productivity or mfp and possibly as an increase in the aggregate saving rate as reflected in an increased rate of capital formation mfp is an exogenous phenomenon

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

high profit strategies in mature capital goods industries a contingency approach high profit and low profit strategic gestalts in two different types of mature capital goods industries are examined multiple avenues to high profits are found within both types but they differ

real business cycles in this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles our explanation is entirely consistent with i rational expectations ii complete current information iii stable preferences iv no technological change v no long lived commodities vi no frictions or adjustment costs vii no government viii no money and ix no serial dependence in the stochastic elements of the environment we also provide a completely worked out example of the type of artificial economy we have in mind the time series properties of the example exhibit some major features of observed business cycles although this type of model may not be capable of explaining all of the regularities in actual business cycles we believe that it provides a useful well defined benchmark for assessing the relative importance of factors e g monetary disturbances

financing human development some lessons from advanced asian countries abstract this paper brings together the main conclusions of a study which has analyzed public expenditure policies pursued by today s advanced asian economies aae and their policies for financing the provision of education and health services during the high growth phase the aaes combined prudent low deficit fiscal policies with large allocations for social services this was combined with efficient public resource allocation within the social sectors for basic education and health services and reliance on the private sector for higher levels of education and expensive curative health care aae experiences with health insurance also hold useful lessons for today s developing countries

pluralism and well being indices abstract this paper advocates a variation on james griffin s prudential value theory of well being prudential value theory is consistent with various forms of pluralism it also helps us understand how we do intra and interpersonal comparisons of well being if we start from this view of well being i suggest we do not have a problem analogous to arrow s impossibility result for a social welfare function the analogous conditions are not appropiate constraints on a well being function the account of well being is brought to bear on attempts made by some particularly dasgupta and weale to make international comparisons of well being it is argued that difficulties with such attempts occur chiefly because of disanalogies between interpersonal and international comparisons of well being