We examine the impact of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and the global economic crisis of 2008 on revenue generation patterns of public accounting and law firms. Using a sample of firm-year ...observations from both industries, we show that since the enactment of SOX, public accounting firms have significantly increased leveraging of partner time and decreased charge-out rates to boost their revenue per partner. While law firms also exhibit an increase in revenue per partner in the post-SOX era, their increase is rooted in higher average charge-out rates and lower leveraging. During the crisis, the public accounting industry was insulated by the relatively inelastic nature of its services. By contrast, law firms suffered a decline in demand for their services, which reduced their revenue generation by reducing their charge-out rates. We also consider cross-sectional variations within each industry and find significant differences across firms in the impact of SOX and the economic crisis. Notably, large firms in both industries were more significantly impacted by SOX and the Big 4 accounting firms were adversely impacted during the crisis. Our study sheds light on the revenue generation and human resource consequences of two significant macroeconomic events for two professional service industries that serve as watchdogs in our capital markets.
Balancing the banks Dewatripont, Mathias; Rochet, Jean-Charles; Tirole, Jean ...
2010., 20100419, 2010, 2010-04-19, 20100101
eBook
The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. ...Bringing together three leading financial economists to provide an international perspective, Balancing the Banks draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future.
The 2008 global economic crisis led to a sharp increase in unemployment with an estimated 210 million people being unemployed worldwide by 2010. This study analyzes the spatio-temporal distribution ...of unemployment in the European Union (EU) at a cross-regional level between 2008 and 2013 to identify if spatio-temporal patterns of unemployment exist, and if the European regions have suffered similarly during the study period. Various local spatial autocorrelation techniques are applied and results show that unemployment is highly polarized across the EU regions. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece are experiencing high rates of unemployment forming clusters in space and time. By contrast, Germany, Austria, and nearby regions are more resilient to the economic crisis strains thus creating spatial clusters of low rates of unemployment. Spatial autocorrelation increased considerably in 2013 compared to 2008, indicating further polarization of unemployment and a widening gap between the south and the central-north, showcasing that the severe austerity measures imposed in the beginning of the crisis on some countries did not have any positive effect on unemployment mitigation. The paper also discusses interesting cross-regional patterns to assist policymakers and planners to better understand how high rates of unemployment are spreading geographically and thus take preventive measures to alleviate the implications of the phenomenon. The proposed analysis delves deeper into comprehending geographies of change, and related findings can support spatial planning for achieving society’s sustainability.
Food is fundamental to health and social participation, yet food poverty has increased in the global North. Adopting a realist ontology and taking a comparative case approach, Families and Food in ...Hard Times addresses the global problem of economic retrenchment and how those most affected are those with the least resources. Based on research carried out with low-income families with children aged 11-15, this timely book examines food poverty in the UK, Portugal and Norway in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis. It examines the resources to which families have access in relation to public policies, local institutions and kinship and friendship networks, and how they intersect. Through ‘thick description’ of families’ everyday lives, it explores the ways in which low income impacts upon practices of household food provisioning, the types of formal and informal support on which families draw to get by, the provision and role of school meals in children’s lives, and the constraints upon families’ social participation involving food. Providing extensive and intensive knowledge concerning the conditions and experiences of low-income parents as they endeavour to feed their families, as well as children’s perspectives of food and eating in the context of low income, the book also draws on the European social science literature on food and families to shed light on the causes and consequences of food poverty in austerity Europe.
The purpose of this article is to remedy the lack of explanatory endeavours concerning the positive performance of female migrant workers during the recent economic crisis in Western Europe. This ...phenomenon both interrogates the established association between economic downturns and their negative impact on migrant labour in low-skilled jobs and enriches the theory of the reserve army of labour, which has been applied to understanding the fragile status of migrant workers in Western economies. Secondary analysis of Labor Force Survey (LFS) and OECD data concerning the impact of the crisis on migrant labour shows that women employed in the care-domestic sector have been affected significantly less than men employed in manufacture and constructions. To explain this evidence, the article proposes a theoretical framework that draws on key concepts and debates in different strands of sociology: the increasing demand for paid care-domestic work due to the ageing population and the growth of native-born women's rates of activity; the commodification of care and the state management of migration; the affectivity and spatial fixity of care-domestic labour. All these factors contribute to configure female migrant labour, mostly employed in the reproductive sector, as a ‘regular’ rather than a reserve army of labour.
Situating data from a pilot study conducted in the Philippines within the research literature, we examine the impact of the recent global economic crisis on the experiences of Filipino migrant ...workers and their families in the context of previous economic upheavals. In so doing, we highlight the gendered effects of shifts in the global economy and detail government response to the premature return of migrant workers to the Philippines primarily due to retrenchment impelled by the global economic crisis. While the current conditions of migration and return are significant, we argue that these are not the result of a new global economic crisis, but are instead the ongoing effects of neoliberal globalization that have resulted in sustained multiple crises with which residents of the Global South have had to contend. Moreover, the reputed solutions offered to returned migrants are rooted in the same faulty paradigm that will be destined to produce only further hardship.
The purpose of this article was to observe the relationship between the tourism movement and the economic development of island territories during the global economic crisis (2008-2010). The aim of ...the paper was also answer the questions: why did some island territories react differently to the global economic crisis and if the coefficient of variation is a good indicator for assessing the changes in tourism movement during crisis events. Countries that have larger tourism expenditures as a proportion of GDP had a weak relationship between changes in tourist arrivals and changes in GDP. The islands prone to the global economic crisis did not have a stronger correlation between changes in tourist arrivals and GDP. The coefficient of variation was a good measure to indicate the island regions that were characterized by major changes in the volume of tourist movements.
Abstract Korean policy-makers constructed the global economic crisis as a purely external threat to the domestic economy. This understanding of the crisis supported a selective retreat from ...neo-liberalism. More problematically, the construction of the crisis as an exogenous phenomenon allowed policy-makers to focus on maintaining short-term growth without seriously addressing the structural weaknesses of the economy that the crisis should have drawn attention to. Levels of household debt in Korea have risen since the crisis and are considerably higher than in the USA. Equally, the economy remains over reliant on exports as a source of growth.
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