How our current system of high and complicated taxes are damaging economic growthThe features that should be found in a well-designed tax system and have been known since Adam Smith’s maxims appeared in Volume 2 of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. A well-designed tax system should have the...

We rely on governance theory summarized in Adams, Hermalin, and Weisbach (2010) and Bushman (2009) which suggests that corporate governance characteristics may be endogenous. This differs from past research that links governance to fraud (i.e., Farber 2005) and assumes corporate governance is...

There is a growing coalition of people in the US who hold a strong view that they would like the government to ‘leave us alone’. The coalition includes home-schoolers, those who run small businesses and taxpayers. These groups do not want special favours from government and their priorities...

We examine the usefulness of other comprehensive income (OCI) to debt investors in nonfinancial companies. Motivated by Merton's (1974) real options framework, we construct a measure of incremental OCI volatility, designed to capture the effect of OCI on overall firm asset volatility, which is a...

This study examines whether financial statement comparability plays a significant role in mitigating costs of capital in the market for seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). The FASB refers to comparability as a qualitative characteristic of financial reporting that enhances the decision-usefulness...

We use United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) comment letters and accounting restatements to investigate the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance (DCF) financial reporting oversight procedures. We investigate how DCF compares with “other monitors” in identifying disclosures...

UK's fiscal profligacy is exacerbating the downturnIn the twenty-sixty IEA Discussion Paper, Professor David B. Smith examines M4X as a measure of the supply of broad money.It has been argued that quantitative easing (QE) is designed to prevent a collapse of broad money. However, the official M4...