Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the accounting notion of “human depreciation” helped the defined benefit pension plan emerge as the dominant means of dealing with an aging workforce in the first half of twentieth century USA. Design/methodology/approach -The study...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on accounting's role in bringing about a pension reform project in Chile under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. The paper aims to reveal the specific role that the pension reform played in the regime's broader ideological goals,...