Under what conditions is government regulation better at protecting market participants than private, evolving, market-driven protections? An intriguing answer to that question emerges if we examine a relatively unregulated area of market participant protection: e-commerce privacy. In the United...

The Financial Accounting Standards Committee of the American Accounting Association (the Committee) is charged with responding to requests for comments from standard-setters on issues related to financial reporting. The Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) released for public comment on...

Attainment of rational expectations equilibria in asset markets calls for the price system to disseminate agents’ private information to others. Markets populated by human agents are known to be capable of converging to rational expectations equilibria. This paper reports comparable market...

Certification of financial reports is tightly regulated with the intent to ensure the quality of this service. In order to place this market within a larger perspective, Part I of this paper presents archival data on certification activity in the economy. The finding of widespread availability...

Independence (in fact as well as in appearance) is widely thought to be necessary for the quality of audits, and audit quality is often equated with independence. Private incentives to demand (and supply) independent certification of financial statements are thought to be insufficient, thus the...