This paper presents some stylised facts about the book-tax gap, i.e. the difference between book and taxable income, of Italian corporations. This divergence is a reflection of the usage of any tax shields and any applicable credits and rebates which, in turn, implies that the concept of taxable...

Collusion and soft budget constraint are two conspicuous phenomena in transition economies¡¯ banking system. Literature has separately investigated those two phenomena from theoretical point of views. However, the cross-point of both phenomena has been neglected in the research of banking...

We analyze competitive pressures in a sequence of auctions with a growing number of bidders, in a model that includes private and common valuations as special cases. We show that the key determinant of bidders' surplus (and implicitly auction revenue) is how the goods are distributed. In any...

This paper examines alternative ways to prevent losses from bank insolvencies. It is widely viewed that transparency in reporting bank balance sheets is a key element in reducing such losses. It is, however, unclear just how such transparency would be achieved. Current approaches to avoiding...

This paper examines industrial differences in depreciation rates and the suitability of financial data for a microeconomic analysis. Depreciation is a main source of enterprise investment and serves as a source for replacement of obsolete or used-up capital. The findings on capital structure in...

A search of the accounting, trade and ethics literature failed to find a single article that discussed the role that accountants play in assisting in the data gathering process of a trade investigation. Yet there are serious ethical issues that need to be addressed. Certain aspects of trade...

In this paper we consider an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and two-sided altruism and show the limitations of applying commonly used open loop Nash equilibrium in characterizing equilibrium transfers from parents to children in the form of bequest, and transfers from...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

We study the optimal design of the rules of trade in a two-period market given that agents arrive at different times and may only trade with agents present contemporaneously. First period agents face a fixed cost of trading across periods, and their decisions of whether or not to trade in the...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...