In this paper, we examine how retail store managers reduce their sales activity in response to target ratcheting. We find that managers with favorable sales performance in the first three quarters reduce their sales activity in the final quarter. We also document that managers who engage in...

This report reviews recent as well as planned changes to accounting and solvency regulations affecting insurers and pension funds and how they may impact long-term investing by these institutions. The review of existing evidence focuses mainly on the impact of risk-based solvency requirements,...

Three essential goals of pension plan funding are the long-term viability, stability and security of member benefits. Reform of funding regulations for defined benefit (DB) pension schemes to make them more counter-cyclical in nature can help achieve these goals as well as make DB schemes more...

This report reviews recent as well as planned changes to accounting and solvency regulations affecting insurers and pension funds and how they may impact long-term investing by these institutions. The review of existing evidence focuses mainly on the impact of risk-based solvency requirements,...

Using an experimental design that exploits exogenous reductions in coverage resulting from brokerage house mergers, we find that a reduction in coverage causes a deterioration in financial reporting quality. The effect of coverage on disclosure is more pronounced for firms with weak shareholder...

This paper provides a simple, quantitative, net-worth-based approach to assessing the need for central bank capital. It derives a concept of "core capital" (a function of the central bank's operating expenditures and the carrying cost of its international reserves) as the minimum capital needed...

Parties needing to monitor the financial performance of not-for-profit (NFP) organizations have traditionally relied upon financial ratios of accounting data. This practice can lead to misleading inferences about profitability in relation to organizational needs, since accounting rates of return...

We provide among the first empirical evidence, consistent with recent macro global game crisis models, that shows that the precision of public signals can coordinate crises. In these models, self-fulfilling crises independent of fundamentals can occur only when publicly disclosed signals of...

We identify a new channel – market makers' attention constraints – through which earnings announcements for one stock affect the liquidity of other stocks. When some stocks handled by a designated market maker have earnings announcements, liquidity is lower for non-announcement stocks...

We examine whether variation in the separation of ownership and control influences the tax practices of private firms with different ownership structures. Fama and Jensen (1983) assert that when equity ownership and corporate decision-making are concentrated in just a small number of...