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There are two influential interpretative positions in the current debate on the crisis among Marxists. The first understands financialization as a consequence of the tendential fall of the rate of profit. The other interpretation, prevalent among those influenced by Keynesianism and Neoricardianism, refers to the tendency toward the crisis of realisation, because of the squeeze on the wage bill and the insufficiency of consumer demand. In both cases, the current crisis is the crisis of a feeble capitalism, permanently stagnationist. A Marxian interpretation of the crisis cannot be separated from the tendential fall of the rate of profit. This latter, however, cannot be accepted as it is presented by Marx, and it must be rethought as a meta-theory of the crisis, including within it the different crisis theories that can be derived from Capital. This article first provides a personal survey of Marx's crisis theories, often presented as opposed to each other. Second, it seeks to integrate the different positions into a unitary discourse, within a nonmechanical reading of the fall of the rate of profit. This discourse then mutates into an historical sketch of the long dynamic of capital: from the Great Depression of the end of the nineteenth century, to the Great Crash of the 1930s, to the Social Crisis in the immediate processes of valorisation of the 1960s–1970s (the Great Inflation). Finally, the “new” capitalism (the Great Moderation) and its recent crisis (the Great Recession) are read – integrating Marx and Minsky – as the conjunction between the real subsumption of labour to finance and the fragmentation of labour.

Current US tax laws provide investors an incentive to time the sales of their bonds to minimize tax liability. This gives rise to a tax-timing option that affects bond value. In reality, corporate bond investors’ tax-timing strategy is complicated by risk of default. Existing term structure models have ignored the effect of the tax-timing option, and how much corporate bond value is due to the tax-timing option is unknown. In this chapter, we assess the effects of taxes and stochastic interest rates on the timing option value and equilibrium price of corporate bonds by considering discount and premium amortization, multiple trading dates, transaction costs, and changes in the level and volatility of interest rates. We find that the value of the tax-timing option accounts for a substantial proportion of corporate bond price even when interest rate volatility is low. Ignoring the timing option value results in overestimation of credit spread, and underestimation of default probability and the marginal investor’s income tax rate. These estimation biases generally increase with bond maturity and credit risk.

Investment companies dominate U.S. equity markets, both in terms of the large proportion of equity capital they control and the sizable trading volume they generate. This shift in the ownership of U.S. equity securities could lessen the impact of changes in U.S. capital gains tax policy which are aimed at individual investors. This paper examines the effect of capital gains tax rates on investment company capital gains realizations. Empirical tests on cross-sectional, time-series data provide evidence of an unlocking effect of lower marginal capital gains tax rates. Investment companies exhibit economic response behavior consistent with the lock-in effect characteristic of individual investors. Capital gains realized are higher during periods of low marginal capital gains tax rates. The significant permanent tax effects estimated in the analysis are strengthened when transitory effects are introduced into the model.

Recent U.S. Treasury yields have been constrained to some extent by the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. Therefore, we compare the performance of a standard affine Gaussian dynamic term structure model (DTSM), which ignores the ZLB, to a shadow-rate DTSM, which respects the ZLB. Near the ZLB, we find notable declines in the forecast accuracy of the standard model, while the shadow-rate model forecasts well. However, 10-year yield term premiums are broadly similar across the two models. Finally, in applying the shadow-rate model, we find no gain from estimating a slightly positive lower bound on U.S. yields.

The basis of the present financial crisis, which is bound to continue inflicting its venom because of structural problems of society, economy, finance, and institutions, is the insatiable preferences of households and investors that fuel excessiveness in the real estate market. Then there is the contagion that this kind of preference has on the economy and the foreboding uncertain market expectations everywhere. Finally, the excessiveness is allowed to survive and proceed on with unrelenting animal spirit by weak government polices, outmoded understanding of the economic and financial world-system, being unable to simulate the otherwise complex system by a spent-out methodology.

The sociology of professions literature has theorized that the professions are undergoing a dramatic transformation from being traditional professions to “entrepreneurial professions” populated by “knowledge workers.” In part, this transformation is associated with the commodification and commercialization of professional endeavor.

Our purpose is to enlist the processual ordering perspective to examine the ongoing transformation of the Big 5 (and following the collapse of Arthur Andersen during our field study)/4 public accounting firms to become entrepreneurial firms populated by global knowledge experts. More specifically, we focus on the inter-play of power and meta-power across three moments of the social construction process – externalization, objectivation, and internalization – through which the ethos of entrepreneurialism is being socially constructed within these firms, their individual members, and in the public accounting profession. Finally, we explore impressions gleaned from our qualitative, naturalistic field study.

Over the last decade, many published papers lament auditors’ shift from professionalism to commercialism and call for increasing auditors’ commitment to the public interest (see, e.g., Bailey, 2008; Fogarty & Rigsby, 2010; Lampe & Garcia, 2013; Wyatt, 2004; Zeff, 2003a, 2003b). At the same time, suggesting effective methodologies for improving auditors’ commitment to the public interest is particularly challenging because issues arising in the audit context are complex, and often involve tradeoffs between multiple stakeholders (e.g., Gaa, 1992; Massey & Thorne, 2006). An understanding of auditors ethical characterizations across separate phases of the audit process is needed so that methodologies can be devised to improve auditors’ commitment to the public interest. Thus, in this paper we interviewed 24 auditors and asked them to describe critical ethical incidents that they have encountered throughout the various phases of the audit process. Our results not only document the tension underlying the shift between professionalism and commercialism in auditing suggested by others, but also show that ethical conflicts are found in each phase of the audit and there are cross-phase differences in the auditors’ ethical characterizations. Limitations of the findings are also discussed as are suggestions for future research.

This chapter analyzes the empirical relationship between the pricesetting/consumption behavior and the sources of persistence in inflation and output. First, a small-scale New-Keynesian model (NKM) is examined using the method of moment and maximum likelihood estimators with US data from 1960 to 2007. Then a formal test is used to compare the fit of two competing specifications in the New-Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) and the IS equation, that is, backward- and forward-looking behavior. Accordingly, the inclusion of a lagged term in the NKPC and the IS equation improves the fit of the model while offsetting the influence of inherited and extrinsic persistence; it is shown that intrinsic persistence plays a major role in approximating inflation and output dynamics for the Great Inflation period. However, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 5% level for the Great Moderation period, that is, the NKM with purely forward-looking behavior and its hybrid variant are equivalent. Monte Carlo experiments investigate the validity of chosen moment conditions and the finite sample properties of the chosen estimation methods. Finally, the empirical performance of the formal test is discussed along the lines of the Akaike's and the Bayesian information criterion.