In der Literatur zur Abschlußprüfung ist ein negativer Effekt eines ökonomischen Vorteils aus der wiederholten Mandatsannahme, der aufgrund von Transaktionskosten entsteht, auf die Unabhängigkeit des Abschlußprüfers diskutiert worden. Anders als die bisher vorgestellten Ansätze wird im...

The paper shows how commodity taxes can provide insurance to consumers when the producer price is volatile. Specific and ad valorem taxes have differing roles. The optimal specific tax is positive when demand has some elasticity. The optimal ad valorem rate is zero when demand is unit-elastic,...

This paper investigates whether firms employing IAS or US GAAP exhibit measurable differences in proxies for information asymmetry and market liquidity. Sample firms are drawn from the "New Market" at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. All firms listed in this market segment are required to provide...

Performance fees for portfolio managers are designed to align the managers' goals withthose of the investors and to motivate managers to aquire "superior" information and tomake better investment decisions. A part of the literature analyzes performance fees on thebasis of market valuation. In...

Open source projects produce goods or standards that do not allow for the appropriation of private returns by those who contribute to these projects. In this paper we analyze why programmers will nevertheless invest their time and effort to code open source software. We argue that the particular...

This paper examines the provision of managerial investment incentives by an accounting based incentive scheme in a multiperiod agency setting in which an impatient manager has to choose between mutually exclusive investment projects. We study the properties of accounting rules that motivate an...

Executive Stock Option Programs (SOPs) have become the dominant compensation instrument for top-management in recent years. The incentive effects of an SOP both with respect to corporate investment and financing decisions critically depend on the design of the SOP. A specific problem in...

This paper considers the impact of reviewers on sales of products of quality unknown to consumers. Sales occur simultaneously after consideration by a reviewer with a known level of bias. Consumers observe the reviewer`s decision and a private signal. We find that: (a) with flexible prices and...

Probably the most enduring result in the theory of optimum income taxation is that,for a sufficiently thin upper tail to the skill distribution, the marginal tax rate shouldfall rather than rise with income. This paper shows that this result is highly sensitiveto a very strong informational...

A widely recognized paper by Colin Mayer (1988) has led to a profound revision of academic thinking about financing patterns of corporations in different countries. Using flow-of-funds data instead of balance sheet data, Mayer and others who followed his lead found that internal financing is the...