Is Enron responsible for weak job growth?
Tyler Cowen links to this informative Daniel Gross article in the New York Times about possible explanations for the relatively weak job growth the economy has experienced over the past few years: Mystified economists have pointed to various possible culprits: outsourcing, competition from China, high health care costs and lower work-force participation, to name a ...
Tyler Cowen links to this informative Daniel Gross article in the New York Times about possible explanations for the relatively weak job growth the economy has experienced over the past few years:
Tyler Cowen links to this informative Daniel Gross article in the New York Times about possible explanations for the relatively weak job growth the economy has experienced over the past few years:
Mystified economists have pointed to various possible culprits: outsourcing, competition from China, high health care costs and lower work-force participation, to name a few. But there’s one force that so far has managed to avoid blame for the sluggish pace of job growth: Enron. Until now. In 2000 and 2001, as the bull market imploded, there was a spike in accounting problems – a mix of outright fraud, earnings manipulation and more benign restatements necessitated by changes in business conditions. Clearly, investors were burned by earnings restatements at Enron and WorldCom, and at hundreds of smaller and less infamous companies. “Nobody had actually explored the real consequences of earnings management, as opposed to the financial ones,” says Thomas Philippon, assistant professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Gross then summarizes an NBER working paper by Philippon and his colleague Simi Kedia. Their abstract:
We study the consequences of earnings management for the allocation of resources among firms, and we argue that fraudulent accounting has important economic consequences…. We first show that periods of high stock market valuations are systematically followed by large increases in reported frauds. We then show that, during periods of suspicious accounting, insiders sell their stocks, while misreporting firms hire and invest like the firms whose income they are trying to match. When they are caught, they shed labor and capital and improve their true productivity. In the aggregate, our model seems able to account for the recent period of jobless and investment-less growth.
I agree with Tyler: “It is too early to evaluate this research, and let us not get carried away by monocausal theories, but today I felt I learned something.”
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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