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The aim of this paper is to examine how managerial ability affects corporate tax aggressiveness.

The study follows the work of Demerjian, Lev, and McVay (2012) and quantifies managerial ability by calculating how efficiently managers generate revenues from given economic resources using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The study uses a wide range of measures of tax aggressiveness. Firm fixed-effects regressions and a difference-in-differences approach using information regarding CEO turnover to control for endogeneity are used.

The study finds a negative relationship between managerial ability and corporate tax aggressiveness. Further tests show that this negative relationship is more pronounced for firms with higher investment opportunities or firms with more reputational concerns.

Given the significant costs associated with tax aggressiveness and the negative effect it can have on managerial reputation if discovered, the results suggest that more able managers invest less effort in aggressive tax avoidance activities. This study furthers the understanding of how managerial personal traits affect corporate decision-making.

The interest shown in the study of the volatility of asset prices has been considerable for several years. In an important paper, Merton (1980) pointed out that a weakness of a significant number of empirical studies of asset returns is the failure to account for the effect of changes in the level of risk when estimating expected returns. He further pointed out that estimators which use ex‐post returns should take account of heteroscedasticity. He concluded that one of the most important directions for future research is to develop accurate variance estimation models which take account of the errors in variance estimation. The development of autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) by Engle (1982) and the generalized ARCH (GARCH) by Bollerslev (1986) has provided financial economists with a model for returns which specifically allows for changing conditional variances. In this paper I apply ARCH modeling strategy to study the relationship between risk and returns of deposit institutions.

This chapter investigates whether core competence of managers and their expansive (vs. specialized) managerial style affects firms' innovative ability, capacity, and efficiency. Using exogenous CEO departures as a natural experiment, it establishes a causal link between managerial capability and innovation. Importantly, it reveals that firms with talented managers receive significantly more nonself citations; make significantly lower self-citations and lesser citations to the others, indicating novel and explorative innovation achievements. Also, managers with higher general (specialized) ability are cited more (less) by patents from a wider range of fields. Lastly, career concern is identified as a mechanism linking higher ability and innovation.

This paper investigates the impact of the development of capital markets on economic growth in Africa and reports a significant increase in real GDP per capita after stock exchanges are established. This paper also reveals that there are significant improvements in the level of private investments in the post stock market launch era. The results also indicate that stock markets play a complementary role to the banking sector by contributing to the availability of private credit. Although African capital markets are relatively less advanced when compared to capital markets on other continents (particularly in terms of technology, structure, and liquidity), we find that their establishment has been crucial in helping African countries catch up with the rest of the world.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper compares how the two interacting themes of “Whistleblowing” or “Speaking Up” and the duty of candour (DoC), which are both concerned with safety and quality improvement in health care, got onto the agenda of the British National Health Service (NHS).

It uses the approach of multiple streams and the methodology of interpretive content analysis in a deductive approach that focusses on both manifest and latent content. It examines official documents that discuss the DoC or whistleblowing or cognate terms in connection with the British NHS from 1999 to 2019.

The main conceptual finding, which mirrors many previous studies, is that it seems difficult to operationalise many of the sub-components of the multiple streams approach. The main empirical finding points to the “focusing event” of the Francis Report into the Mid Staffordshire Trust of 2013 and the importance of its Chair, Sir Robert Francis, as a policy entrepreneur.

This is one of the first studies to focus on both issues of whistleblowing and the DoC and the first to compare them through the lens of the multiple streams approach. It has two main conceptual advantages over most previous studies in the field: it compares whistleblowing and the duty of candour rather than the dominant approach of a single case study and explores the different outcomes of failed as well as successful couplings of the streams.

We examine the stock market reaction to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 during its enactment process, focusing on its international provisions. Consistent with extant evidence, we find lower returns for high-foreign-activity firms, indicating a negative market reaction to the international provisions overall. Considering specific international provisions, we find that the market reaction was more positive (negative) for firms likely most affected by the shift to a quasi-territorial system for taxing foreign earnings (the transition tax on existing unrepatriated earnings, the tax on global intangible low-taxed income, and/or the base erosion and antiabuse tax) than for other firms. Our findings imply that investors are able to disentangle the economic implications of complex and interactive tax law changes.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, illustrate and provide a deeper understanding of team composition and labor allocation in audit teams by quantifying the exact value of resources at different levels of the audit production. Audit teams have been considered as a black box in audit research. Therefore, this paper reports descriptive statistics on (levels and proportions of) hours and costs allocated to auditor ranks (and the number and value, i.e. billing rates, of auditors for different ranks and the entire team) to shed new light on audit teams.

This study uses a proprietary data set containing disaggregated information on hours, costs and billing rates for each team member in each of 908 audit engagements. The data are provided by a Swedish Big 4 audit firm. The study uses a purely descriptive approach and categorizes auditors into seven ranks. As size and the publicly listed status are crucial determinants of audit production, the paper splits engagements in public and private companies and reports statistics for size quartiles of both public and private clients.

The paper provides descriptive statistics for (1) client size, (2) audit team members, (3) audit hours, (4) audit costs, (5) proportion of audit hours, (6) proportion of audit costs, (7) billing rates and (8) variation of billing rates. Results show that compared to private clients, the audit firm allocates higher effort from auditors in higher ranks and lower effort from auditors in lower ranks to public clients. Another finding is that allocation varies with client size for private clients, but less so for public clients.

In an area with sparse literature, this descriptive study serves as a first step to improve our understanding and guide future research. It provides concrete support for previously known theory.