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- Blicharska, Malgorzata, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Steps to overcome the North-South divide in research relevant to climate-change policy and practice
- 2017
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Ingår i: Nature Climate Change. - 1758-678X .- 1758-6798. ; 7, s. 21-27
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A global North-South divide in research, and its negative consequences, has been highlighted in various scientific disciplines. Northern domination of science relevant to climate change policy and practice, and limited research led by Southern researchers in Southern countries, may hinder further development and implementation of global climate change agreements and nationally appropriate actions. Despite efforts to address the North-South divide, progress has been slow. In this Perspective, we illustrate the extent of the divide, review underlying issues and analyse their consequences for climate change policy development and implementation. We propose a set of practical steps in both Northern and Southern countries that a wide range of actors should take at global, regional and national scales to span the North-South divide, with examples of some actions already being implemented.
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- Huq, Asif M, et al.
(författare)
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Do audited firms have lower cost of debt?
- 2018
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this study is to investigate if audited financial statements add value for firms in the private debt market. Using an instrumental variable method, we find that firms with audited financial statements, on average, save 0.47 percentage points on the cost of debt compared to firms with unaudited financial statements. We also find that using the big, well-known auditing firms does not yield any additional cost of debt benefits. Lastly, we investigate if there are industries where alternative sources of information make auditing less valuable in reducing the cost of debt. Here we find that auditing is less important in lowering cost in one industry, agriculture, where one lender has a 74% market share and a 100-year history of lending to firms within that industry. As such, it seems that lenders having high exposure to a certain industry might act as an alternative to auditing in reducing the information asymmetry between the firm and the lender.
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- Huq, Asif M, et al.
(författare)
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Free to choose : Do voluntary audit reforms increase employment growth?
- 2018
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Rapport (refereegranskat)abstract
- Many European countries have abolished mandatory audits for small firms to reduce the regulatory and administrative burden for these firms. However, we still lack knowledge on whether such legislative changes affect employment growth for those firms that become free to choose to have external audits. We investigate this question using a Swedish reform that made audits voluntary for small firms fulfilling certain requirements. The reform created an almost ideal natural experiment, which we use to evaluate the effects of voluntary audits on employment growth for small firms using a difference-in-difference estimator. We find that firms which fulfilled the requirements for voluntary auditing, compared to a control group of similar firms that did not, increased their employment growth rate by 0.39%. This corresponds to 1,830 jobs being created in the year following the reform, suggesting that mandatory audits act as a growth barrier for small firms.
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- Huq, Asif M
(författare)
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How does accounting and auditing regulations affect firm growth and cost of capital?
- 2018
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis provides an understanding of how new audit regulation affect firm growth and how audits affect the cost of capital. To investigate the effect of audit reforms on employment growth, we exploited a Swedish reform made in November 2010 that gave certain firms the option to opt out of previously imposed statutory audits. We find that firms which fulfilled the requirements for voluntary auditing, compared to a control group of similar firms that did not, increased their employment growth rate by 0.39%. Furthermore, the reform was also exploited to investigate if audited financial statements add value for firms in the private debt market. We find that firms with audited financial statements, on average, save 1.26 percentage points on cost of debt compared to firms with unaudited financial statements. Thus, the reform creates a possibility for firms that have the ambition to grow in employment to do so by not auditing, and those who want to grow by investments in capital to do so by reducing the cost of such investments by auditing. However, the current ceiling of the reform is also likely to force some firms to operate at sub-optimal levels, those without having the option to opt out of audit even though they might not accrue any benefit from auditing, at least in the short-run. One can argue that is partly due to how institutions evolve, generally slower than other actors in the society do.
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