Richard Musgrave was one of the around 200 academic economists who emigrated from Germany when Fascism came to dominate the country. This memorial lecture traces the German and European roots of Richard Musgrave’s oeuvre, trying to shed light on his family background as well as on the...

This paper provides the first estimate of the actuarial balance of the Spanish contributory pension system for the old age contingency, based on official data. The novel entry in the balance sheet, named “Contribution Asset” or “Hidden Asset”, is at the centre of the theoretical...

We study a principal-agent model in which the agent can provide ex post additional relevant information regarding his performance. In particular, he can provide a legitimate excuse, that is, evidence that a poor result is only due to factors outside his control. However, building a convincing...

The introduction of a common consolidated corporate tax base (CCCTB) and tax allocation via formula apportionment (FA) is hotly debated in the European Union (EU) since more than a decade. While the literature has thoroughly analyzed the economic effects of FA from a macro-level perspective, the...

Asymmetric persistence of accounting income is often tested in a regression of changes in earnings on lagged changes in earnings, including an interaction term for negative changes (see Basu [1997] or Ball et al. [2009] for a recent overview). In this note we propose an alternative, but closely...

High oil prices are normally expected to stimulate exploration and the development of new oil and gas fields. But over the last few years, financial analysts have focused strongly on short-term accounting return (RoACE) for benchmarking and valuation, and this has led to high capital discipline...

This paper examines a life-cycle cost concept that applies to both manufacturing and service industries in which upfront capacity investments are essential. Borrowing from the energy literature, we refer to this cost measure as the levelized product cost (LC). Per unit of output, the levelized...

We decompose the market-to-book ratio into two additive components: a conservatism correction factor and a future-to-book ratio. The conservatism correction factor exceeds the benchmark value of one whenever the accounting for past transactions has been subject to an (unconditional) conservatism...

In many industries like management consulting, IT consulting, or construction highly qualified employees, i.e., experts or executive managers, have to be assigned to temporary projects. In firms with many employees and various different projects, this assignment decision involves a complex...

This paper provides further empirical evidence on the relationship between taxes and financial reporting by focusing on accounting decisions to write-offs equity investments. The analysis is based on panel data for Italian companies. In the period 1998-2006 the Italian corporate income tax has...