According to international standards, performance audit is an independent and objective process for reviewing the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of a government’s program, organization, and/or activity in order to evaluate public management’s performance. The relevance of the matter prompted the present study, which aims to inquire if, when conducting performance audits, Supreme Audit Institutions analyze a procedure’s effectiveness, that is to say, the impact that determined government spending had on the program’s target population. In order to do so, a questionnaire was applied to auditors of Public Audit Institutions from several countries. As a preliminary result, our research concluded that the majority of auditors conduct economy, efficiency and efficacy analyses, but rarely assess the effectiveness of government spending.
{"title":"Performance Audits Focused on the Principle of Effectiveness: An Overview of Public Audit Agencies","authors":"L. G. M. Mury","doi":"10.11114/AFA.V4I2.3488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11114/AFA.V4I2.3488","url":null,"abstract":"According to international standards, performance audit is an independent and objective process for reviewing the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of a government’s program, organization, and/or activity in order to evaluate public management’s performance. The relevance of the matter prompted the present study, which aims to inquire if, when conducting performance audits, Supreme Audit Institutions analyze a procedure’s effectiveness, that is to say, the impact that determined government spending had on the program’s target population. In order to do so, a questionnaire was applied to auditors of Public Audit Institutions from several countries. As a preliminary result, our research concluded that the majority of auditors conduct economy, efficiency and efficacy analyses, but rarely assess the effectiveness of government spending.","PeriodicalId":91655,"journal":{"name":"Applied finance and accounting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46665288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We analyzed the South African general equity unit trusts for the period 30 June 2002 to 31 December 2014 to assess if we can re-categorize them into risk homogeneity groups. The current ASISA standards do not fully classify the unit trusts into categories that have within-group homogeneity and between-group heterogeneity.By analyzing the persistence of both systematic and total risk we concluded that we could objectively classify these unit trusts into objective risk homogeneity groups and improve on the current ASISA-mandate-based classification.
{"title":"Using Risk Characteristics to Classify Funds","authors":"Joe Kainja","doi":"10.11114/AFA.V4I2.3461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11114/AFA.V4I2.3461","url":null,"abstract":"We analyzed the South African general equity unit trusts for the period 30 June 2002 to 31 December 2014 to assess if we can re-categorize them into risk homogeneity groups. The current ASISA standards do not fully classify the unit trusts into categories that have within-group homogeneity and between-group heterogeneity.By analyzing the persistence of both systematic and total risk we concluded that we could objectively classify these unit trusts into objective risk homogeneity groups and improve on the current ASISA-mandate-based classification.","PeriodicalId":91655,"journal":{"name":"Applied finance and accounting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46369217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Long-term health insurance provides consumers with protection against persistent, negative health shocks. While the stochastic rise in medical spending growth may make some health risks harder to insure, financial assets could act as a hedge for medical spending growth risk. The purpose of this research was to determine whether such hedges exist. The results of this study were two-fold. First, the asset classes with the strongest statistical evidence as hedges were bonds, not stocks. Second, any strategy to hedge medical spending growth involved shorting assets i.e. betting against the bond or stock market. Health insurers writing long-term contracts should combine the use of hedges in the bond market with of portfolio diversification, and may benefit from health policies to moderate the uncertainty of medical spending growth.
{"title":"Hedging Medical Spending Growth: An Adaptive Expectations Approach","authors":"Robert D. Lieberthal","doi":"10.11114/afa.v2i2.1595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11114/afa.v2i2.1595","url":null,"abstract":"Long-term health insurance provides consumers with protection against persistent, negative health shocks. While the stochastic rise in medical spending growth may make some health risks harder to insure, financial assets could act as a hedge for medical spending growth risk. The purpose of this research was to determine whether such hedges exist. The results of this study were two-fold. First, the asset classes with the strongest statistical evidence as hedges were bonds, not stocks. Second, any strategy to hedge medical spending growth involved shorting assets i.e. betting against the bond or stock market. Health insurers writing long-term contracts should combine the use of hedges in the bond market with of portfolio diversification, and may benefit from health policies to moderate the uncertainty of medical spending growth.","PeriodicalId":91655,"journal":{"name":"Applied finance and accounting","volume":"2 1","pages":"57 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"63543821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Using a flexible econometric approach that avoids imposing restrictive modeling assumptions, we find evidence of a non-monotonic relation between conditional volatility and expected stock market returns: At low-to-medium levels of conditional volatility there is a positive trade-off between risk and expected returns, but this relationship gets inverted at high levels of volatility as observed during the recent financial crisis. We propose a new measure of risk based on the conditional covariance between daily observations of a broad economic activity index and stock returns. Using this covariance measure, we find clear evidence of a monotonically increasing risk-return trade-off. Our finding of a non-monotonic mean-volatility relation helps explain the absence of a consensus in the empirical literature on the sign of the risk-return trade-off. At the same time, our finding that the expected return is a monotonically rising function of the conditional covariance measure also suggests that a positive risk-return relation can be established once a better measure of risk is used.
{"title":"What is the Shape of the Risk-Return Relation?","authors":"Alberto G. Rossi, A. Timmermann","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1364750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1364750","url":null,"abstract":"Using a flexible econometric approach that avoids imposing restrictive modeling assumptions, we find evidence of a non-monotonic relation between conditional volatility and expected stock market returns: At low-to-medium levels of conditional volatility there is a positive trade-off between risk and expected returns, but this relationship gets inverted at high levels of volatility as observed during the recent financial crisis. We propose a new measure of risk based on the conditional covariance between daily observations of a broad economic activity index and stock returns. Using this covariance measure, we find clear evidence of a monotonically increasing risk-return trade-off. Our finding of a non-monotonic mean-volatility relation helps explain the absence of a consensus in the empirical literature on the sign of the risk-return trade-off. At the same time, our finding that the expected return is a monotonically rising function of the conditional covariance measure also suggests that a positive risk-return relation can be established once a better measure of risk is used.","PeriodicalId":91655,"journal":{"name":"Applied finance and accounting","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83347500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}