Over the three decades leading up to the crisis of 2008, inequality dramatically increased in the United States and Great Britain. What stands out, but is seldom noted, is that this occurred within democracies where the relative losers -- the overwhelming majority -- could in principle have used...

This study examines an aspect of earnings management that we refer to as audit management. We define audit management as a client’s strategic use of diversions to decrease the likelihood that auditors will discover earnings management during the audit. Specifically, we examine whether...

A critical and pervasive component of firm-specific audit firm inspection reports is the inclusion of detailed descriptions of the deficiencies uncovered by inspection teams. Prior research in psychology indicates that people are likely to focus on such anecdotal information without adequately...

Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics, of whom none was more wide-ranging than Karl Marx. Marx recognized that behind its ideological patina of freedom, capitalism, like the exploitative systems of slavery and feudalism, was a social...

Although the Great Depression and the financial crisis of 1929 that triggered it have been endlessly studied, there is little consensus and even much puzzlement as to why they occurred. This article claims that beneath the many causal factors that have been advanced lie deeper underlying...

The explosion in inequality since 1980 has quashed hopes that mature economic development would generate more equitable economic and social conditions. Although inequality is receiving increasing attention from academics and politicians, the focus has been mostly on income and wealth. This...

This paper reassesses the political reaction in the United States to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in terms of economics and evolutionary biology. The fact that war and its threat were ever-present in human evolution resulted in two social propensities that render society vulnerable...