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Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

Based on Geoffrey Harcourt's Palgrave volumes, this review article attempts to picture how, in a Cambridge environment, Keynes's fragmentary monetary theory of production grew organically out of Marshall's equally fragmentary monetary theory of exchange. The dangers associated with Keynes's close links with Marshall are alluded to. Indeed, without taking account of the classical spirit of Sraffa's work, Keynes's monetary theory may quite easily be integrated into the Marshallian‐neoclassical framework of analysis. However, theorising, not literally, but in the spirit of Keynes and Sraffa, within a Ricardian‐Pasinettian framework of vertical integration, opens the way to a Classical‐Keynesian monetary theory of production.

In this paper, we study financial foundations of Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). By doing this, we (1) clarify ambiguous and controversial concepts like roundaboutness and average period of production, (2) we show that the ABCT has strong financial foundations (consistent with its microeconomic foundations), and (3) we offer examples of how to use the flexibility of this approach to apply ABCT to different contexts and scenarios.

The purpose of this study is to use a steady-state model structure to investigate earnings management (EM) theoretically in the context of different expense theories. Empirically, the objective is to apply the theoretical model to investigate the implicit choice of expense theories for reporting expenses. The study aims to present a new approach to analyze EM.

The study makes use of ten-year time-series data originally from 1,015 Finnish public and private firms to estimate the parameters of the steady-state model, and to investigate which expense theories the firms implicitly follow in financial reporting. The parameters are estimated using the restricted least squares regression method. The final sample included data from 631 firms fulfilling restrictions for the consistency of estimates.

The paper provides empirical insights about expense theories that Finnish firms implicitly follow in financial reporting. Evidence shows that the reporting of expenses mainly follows the units-of-revenue and the rate-of-return theories. Only a small number of firms follow the interest expense theory.

The study is based on a steady-state approach, and therefore, the research results may lack generalizability as only 62% of the original sample firms obtained consistent estimates. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to use more general models for further theoretical and empirical work.

The paper includes implications for a new approach to EM. It also gives implications how to analyze different expense theories in the context of EM both theoretically and empirically.

This paper develops a new approach to investigate EM.

This chapter investigates the political and economic contexts of the controversy about the causes of the increase of income concentration in Brazil during the 1960s. That was the most important economic debate that took place under the military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985. The perceived sharp increase in income inequality posed a challenge to the economic legitimation of the military regime, which had by the early 1970s achieved high rates of economic growth. This chapter discusses the apparent paradox of relatively open economic debate during a period of political repression, as well as its international dimension as reflected in the role played by institutions such as the World Bank.

To the extent that management accounting is based on neo‐classical economics, all decision‐making is assumed to be rational, aimed at utility or profit maximisation and all circumstances influencing decisions are accepted as stationary. The approach excludes all social, cultural or historical considerations and is based on perfect information that is freely available. Neo‐classical economics further assumes that minimum government intervention, which is regulated by competition, will result in maximum benefit for society as a whole. This paper aims to determine the extent to which management accounting theory has been based on these limiting assumptions and finds that emerging management accounting theory is increasingly based on alternative, more liberating foundations. This situation is in contrast to management accounting education in South Africa, which remains almost entirely based on neo‐classical economics.

A review article of Pasinetti and Schefold’s edition of the papers at a conference in Marseilles, 1997, on the impact of Keynes in the twentieth century. The book itself is in three parts – theory; Keynesianism in European countries; and institutional discussions of Keynesian policies. The essay concentrates on the issues raised in the first part by Pasinetti, Leijonhufvud and Skidelsky. Pasinetti uses his vital distinction between principle and theory to examine why the Keynesian revolution may not have succeeded. Leijonhufvud identifies Keynes as the last of the classics, contrasting his approach with those he calls the moderns. Skidelsky asks what policies Keynes would advocate today, had he remained ageless with us.

The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality in the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. … The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably. [Sic!] — John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919/20; Chap. II, sec. III), “Europe before the War,” “The Psychology of Society.”