Search results for "Dependence"
showing 10 items of 2462 documents
Audit quality and the going-concern decision-making process: Spanish evidence
2004
In this study, we attempt empirically to investigate the relationship between audit quality and the probability that a financially distressed company would receive a going-concern opinion. Auditor decision-making in the presence of going-concern uncertainties may be characterized as a two-stage process. The first stage is the identification of a potential going-concern problem and the second stage is to determine whether the particular company should receive a qualified going-concern opinion. A sample of 1,199 non-financial Spanish company-years has been obtained from the database issued by the Stock Exchange National Commission for the fiscal years ending between December 1991 and December…
Can Auditors Be Independent? – Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Client Type
2012
Recent regulatory initiatives stress that an independent oversight board, rather than the management board, should be the client of the auditor. In an experiment, we test whether the type of client affects auditors’ independence. Unique features of the German institutional setting enable us to realistically vary the type of auditors’ client as our treatment variable: we portray the client either as the management preferring aggressive accounting or the oversight board preferring conservative accounting. We measure auditors’ perceived client retention incentives and accountability pressure in a post-experiment questionnaire to capture potential threats to independence. We find that the type …
Determinants of Board Structure in Microfinance Institutions: Evidence from East Africa
2013
This study investigates the association between the unique characteristics of microfinance institutions and board structure. The agency and resource dependence theories provided theoretical guidance for this study. Using a panel dataset of 63 microfinance institutions in East Africa, we found that the presence of regulations and international influence is associated with larger boards, while the presence of founders is associated with small boards and less board independence. There is a higher level of board gender diversity in microfinance institutions managed by founders. There is greater diversity of nationalities in microfinance institutions that are internationally influenced. The imp…
Institutions and geography: Empirical test of spatial growth models for European regions
2010
Abstract This article provides an empirical assessment of the growth experiences of European regions, during the period 1991–2004, by taking into account the spatial effects due to both institutions and geography. These effects have been modelled by means of specific controls and by using a non-conventional spatial weight matrix. Results favour a model dealing with substantive spatial externalities. Within this framework, the country-specific institutions are strongly and positively related to the regional productivity's growth rate. In addition, the geo-institutional proximity increases the spatial dependence of the regional output per worker and raises the speed of convergence. By contras…
Industrial development in thin regions: trapped in path extension?
2014
Recent theorizing of path dependence supplements the traditional view of regional path-dependent industrial development characterized by lock-in effects with paths dealing with change, that is, path renewal and path creation. Few studies, however, examine why different types of regions experience diverse path-dependent development. This article examines why organizationally thin regions are much less likely to achieve path renewal and path creation than core regions. By use of a case study of industrial development in an organizationally thin and rather peripheral region in Norway the article contends that thin regions often need external investments to avoid being trapped in path extension.
Time-varying dependence between stock and government bond returns: International evidence with dynamic copulas
2015
Abstract This paper investigates the dependence pattern between stock and long-term government bond returns for a wide range of developed countries over the last two decades by using a dynamic DCC-GARCH-copula model. This approach allows obtaining a flexible and comprehensive description of the time variation in the linkage between stock and bond markets. The empirical results show that the dependence structure between stock and 10-year government bond returns varies significantly over time for most countries. In particular, a positive stock–bond association is observed during the 1990s, while the relationship becomes negative from the early 2000s, supporting the presence of flight-to-quali…
The Legacy and the Tyranny of Time: Exit and Re-Entry of Sovereigns to International Capital Markets
2018
We use a novel continuous-time Weibull model (without and) with a change-point in the duration dependence parameter to investigate the duration of the exit and re-entry of sovereigns to international capital markets. Relying on annual data for a large panel of countries over the period 1970-2011, we find that, as the reputation of debtor countries as good (bad) borrowers solidifies over time, those episodes are more likely to end - i.e. the "legacy of time". Debtor countries can take advantage of the "benefit of doubt" of creditors during short exit spells. However, when exits are long and the reputation as a bad borrower emerges, no more "complacency" makes it more difficult for them to bo…
Inequality and education in pre-industrial economies: Evidence from Spain
2018
Abstract This article contributes to the debate on institutions and economic development by examining the historical link between land access inequality and education. Using information from the 464 districts existent in mid-19th century Spain, this paper confirms that there is a negative relationship between the fraction of farm labourers and male literacy rates. This result does not disappear when a large set of potential confounding factors are included in the analysis. The use of the Reconquest as a quasi-natural experiment allows us to rule out further concerns about potential endogeneity. In addition, controlling for different sources of spatial dependence does not explain away this r…
The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a path-dependent index of longitudinal poverty
2011
In this paper we propose a new index of individual poverty in the longitudinal perspective, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The Poverty Persistence Index (PPI) is based on all the pairwise distances between the waves of poverty. The PPI is normalized and it assigns a higher degree of (longitudinal) poverty to people who experience poverty in consecutive, rather than separated, periods, for whom the distances from the poverty line are larger along time and moreover, when the worst years are consecutive and/or recent. We also propose an aggregate index of persistence in poverty (APPI) in order to measure the distribu…
Decentralization and growth: what if the cross-jurisdiction approach had met a dead end?
2013
International audience; The relationship between decentralization and economic growth is generally studied from a perspective stressing universal or quasi-universal regularities across jurisdictions. That approach has generated many insights but seems to reach its limits. The paper explains why it allows contrasting positions with regard to the benefits of decentralization even among proponents of free and competitive markets. And it seems from the empirical literature that no robust and economically significant cross-jurisdiction relation between decentralization and economic performance or growth, except perhaps their independence, has been found. The absence of a relation valid across ju…