Search Results

This chapter considers how voters are different from nonvoters with respect to their demographic and ideological attributes, and if election outcomes would change if everyone voted. It first explains why vote misreporting presents a problem for studies of participatory bias. Then, the chapter introduces the vote validation study conducted as part of the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). It then compares voters to nonvoters along key demographic and attitudinal variables, using both CCES and ANES data. Here, the chapter shows how misreporting exaggerates the differences between voters and nonvoters, and it also addresses the problem with bias ratio measures. Finally, this chapter simulates higher voter turnout and shows that if more people voted, election results would hardly be affected at all.

This chapter looks to Indochina in the 1920s, when the French colonial state was reporting comparably high shares of revenue from opium taxes to British Malaya. It identifies a very different set of concerns animating local administrators who misreported official revenue numbers while struggling to manage an opium monopoly that ran itself into bankruptcy. The chapter traces a process through which a minor accounting measure in 1925, originally designed to allow emergency liquidity for purchasing foreign opium, became an entrenched mechanism for artificially balancing the budget, which slowly accumulated into a crisis of overdrawn accounts and unpaid debts that threatened the financial viability of colonial government. These were known as the cessions fictives. While at first a minor accounting practice within the legal boundaries of colonial administration, these cessions fictives were repeated in following years and became an entrenched mechanism for balancing the colony's budget.

Chapter 8 addresses the issue of whether hedge fund regulation mitigates or exacerbates the tendency of fund managers to misreport returns. By examining cross-country evidence on misreported returns, it is possible to infer by holding other factors constant the impact of international differences on hedge fund regulation on the propensity to misreport returns. Further, the chapter examines and calculates explicitly whether it pays to misreport.

Chapter 9 discusses the idea that performance persistence can either be enhanced or mitigated by financial regulation. An analysis of data from 48 countries spanning determines that international and time-series differences in hedge fund regulation exist for minimum capitalization requirements, restrictions on the location of key service providers, and permissible distribution channels. Overall, the analysis within this chapter supports for the idea that minimum capitalization enhances performance persistence, while restrictions on location mitigate performance persistence.

This chapter surveys applications of Benford's law within economics, such as its use in investigating the validity of macroeconomic data series. It argues that, given the strong interest in strategic behavior in economics, it makes sense to use Benford's law to investigate possible anomalies that suggest manipulation or other interference, especially when incentives increase for such tampering. The chapter then considers how a first-digit analysis informs Value at Risk (VAR) data from the U.S. financial sector over the past ten years. It finds that Benford's law fits precrisis data very well but is rejected for postcrisis data. Opportunities and incentives for such misreporting are then discussed.

The nature of news reporting and data gathering has changed with the advent of social media, equipping journalists with new methods of uncovering news stories and providing the necessary background and context for their readers. Even though a presence online is indispensable for journalists, there are risks from these practices. Affordances of media technologies can influence a journalist´s decision to cover an event, select sources, or engage in conversations, but they also result in cues and residues that can reduce a journalist’s credibility. In this chapter, we use the four classes of technological affordances outlined by the MAIN model (Sundar 2008)—modality, agency, interactivity, and navigability—to examine the various actions and cues in social media that both aid and ensnare journalists. We discuss how interface cues trigger cognitive heuristics (or mental shortcuts) that lure journalists, sometimes to their detriment. We provide recent examples of journalistic misadventure and potential solutions.