Accounting for income distribution trends: A density function decomposition approach

This paper develops methods for decomposing changes in the income distribution using subgroup decompositions of the income density function. Overall changes are related to changes in subgroup shares and changes in subgroup densities, where the latter are broken down further using elementary transformations of individual incomes. These density decompositions are analogous to the widely-used decompositions of inequality indices by population subgroup, except that they summarize multiple features of the income distribution (using graphs), rather than focusing on a specific feature such as dispersion, and are not dependent on the choice of a specific summary index. Nonetheless, since inequality and poverty indices can be expressed as PDF functionals, our density-based methods can also be used to provide numerical decompositions of these. An application of the methods reveals the multi-faceted nature of UK income distribution trends during the 1980s.     

A noise estimation method for corrupted correlated data

Data acquisition, both in time and in spatial domains, in many cases yields observations with a measurement error. The identification of such a component, that masks the phenomenon under study (signal), must be carried out before the model of interest is specified. The objective of the paper is to propose an estimator for the parameters of an additive noise and compare it with existing methods by applications to both simulated and real data sets.     

薪酬激励、董事会监管与上市公司盈余管理

本文以2002-2004年间沪深两地上市公司为研究样本,分行业采用修正的截面Jones模型对上市公司的可操控性应计利润进行计算,以此作为衡量盈余管理程度的代理变量;在此基础上,考察了高管人员薪酬激励、董事会监管与盈余管理之间的关系.在控制了上市公司资产规模和债务水平之后,研究发现,管理层薪酬水平与调高的操控性应计利润高度正相关,表明薪酬激励构成了中国上市公司盈余管理的一个基本诱因;董事会监管机制对于盈余管理的制约作用并不明显,但本文研究发现董事会规模与调高的操控性应计利润显著负相关,规模较大的董事会能够降低盈余管理的程度.     

企业银行借款融资中的盈余管理研究——来自中国A股上市公司的经验证据

银行借款是我国上市公司重要的融资途径,企业有没有为了自身利益而围绕借款过程进行盈余管理？研究将盈余管理的借款动机从其他动机中分离出来,并针对两组变量：银行借款与当期盈余、银行借款与当期盈余增量分别使用分布检验,以揭示企业在借款过程中是否存在盈余管理并探究其盈余管理的表现形式。从而发现企业基于借款融资动机进行了盈余管理,且其表现形式为制造正盈余以避免亏损。另外,企业并没有刻意制造盈余上升的趋势。使用Probit回归进行补充验证,进一步证实企业围绕银行借款过程进行了盈余管理。对盈余管理的频率进行分析,发现约有4．74％到14．15％的企业存在避免亏损的盈余管理行为,且存在借款融资动机时,盈余管理频率将更高。     

财务分析师盈余预测乐观倾向成因研究综述

财务分析师报告的盈余预测是其向市场传递信息的重要途径,同时也是向客户提供服务的主要内容,得到了理论界和实务届的广泛关注。然而,大量国内外实证研究表明,分析师提供的盈余预测带有乐观倾向。本文采用文献调查的研究方法,回顾了国外关于分析师盈余预测乐观倾向成因的相关研究。该研究对加强我国财务分析师行业建设,提高资本市场投资者的投资效率,以及资本市场相关理论研究都有一定的参考价值。     

Staying in STEM or changing course: Do natives and immigrants pursue the path of least resistance?

This paper examines why Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields are becoming “immigrant” fields of study as native students shift from STEM fields to law, medicine and business. Using data from the 2010 National Survey of College Graduates, the analyses find that foreign college-educated immigrants with STEM degrees tend to remain in STEM fields, while natives are more likely to shift from STEM fields to law, medicine and business in graduate school. Among those who moved into law, medicine and business, the gains in earnings are larger for natives than for foreign educated immigrants. These results have important implications for the social mobility of highly educated natives and immigrants.     

Varying weekly work hours and earnings instability in the Great Recession

Unstable work schedules are increasingly a prominent stratification outcome, particularly for low-wage workers. Nationally representative and longitudinal research on the topic is limited, however. This article examines varying numbers of weekly work hours among hourly workers, their increase during the Great Recession of the late 2000s, and their impact on growing earnings instability. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the cumulative probability of ever reporting varying hours among hourly workers increased from 36 percent between 2004 and 2007 to 46 percent between 2008 and 2012. Changes in state-level economic conditions, particularly state-level unemployment rates and economic growth, largely explain the increase in varying hours, consistent with arguments that employers pass the costs of volatile demand onto workers. Finally, variance function regressions show the growth of varying hours accounts for the significant increase in earnings instability from 2004–7 to 2008–12.     

Priors and component structures in autoregressive time series models

New approaches to prior specification and structuring in autoregressive time series models are introduced and developed. We focus on defining classes of prior distributions for parameters and latent variables related to latent components of an autoregressive model for an observed time series. These new priors naturally permit the incorporation of both qualitative and quantitative prior information about the number and relative importance of physically meaningful components that represent low frequency trends, quasi-periodic subprocesses and high frequency residual noise components of observed series. The class of priors also naturally incorporates uncertainty about model order and hence leads in posterior analysis to model order assessment and resulting posterior and predictive inferences that incorporate full uncertainties about model order as well as model parameters. Analysis also formally incorporates uncertainty and leads to inferences about unknown initial values of the time series, as it does for predictions of future values. Posterior analysis involves easily implemented iterative simulation methods, developed and described here. One motivating field of application is climatology, where the evaluation of latent structure, especially quasi-periodic structure, is of critical importance in connection with issues of global climatic variability. We explore the analysis of data from the southern oscillation index, one of several series that has been central in recent high profile debates in the atmospheric sciences about recent apparent trends in climatic indicators.     

Immigrant wage differentials, ethnicity and occupational segregation

Summary.  We investigate occupational attainment as well as estimating earnings differentials for non-white migrants and non-white natives, including occupational effects. We control for the occupational selection of immigrants and compare across native and immigrant groups. Relative to white natives, we find no evidence of an ethnic pay disadvantage for white and South Asian professional workers. Although occupational segregation and other human capital and socio-economic factors provide a partial explanation for the raw earnings differential, evidence of ethnic-based disadvantage in most occupations persists.