In this paper, we use the investment fraud of Bernard Madoff to inquire into the production of trust in the context of financial markets. Drawing upon empirical data related to U.S. individual investors (interviews and letters) as well as documentary material, we investigate the mechanisms...

this paper analyses the transformations induced since 1970 in the French accountancy profession by the globalisation of France's economy.

The position of an internal audit function as a “servant of two masters” (i.e. management and the audit committee) may lead to a conflict of priorities. In this setting, the tone at the top set by the Chief Audit Executive (CAE) plays a critical role in balancing the potentially competing...

Amongst professional activities, audit has increasingly departed from what the sociology of professions traditionally considered to be lying at the heart of the identity of the members of a professional body : the autonomy to judge the nature and amount of work that is necessary to treat the...

In this note we study a take-it-or-leave-it bargaining procedure between two risk neutral individuals engaged in the joint stochastic production of a commodity. Each individual has to exert effort, that is, to provide a one-dimensional input which is unobserved to the other individual. The...

In this article, the authors use a stylized model of the labor market to investigate the effects of three alternative and well-known bargaining solutions. They apply the Nash, the Egalitarian and the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solutions in the small firm’s matching model of unemployment. To...

Regulation and subsequent deregulation significantly affect firms’ debt decisions. Prior to deregulation, regulated firms depend significantly more on long-term and public debt but reduce this dependence considerably during deregulation. Cross-sectional analysis shows that the reduction in the...

Political activism positively affects firm innovation. Firms that support more politicians, politicians on Congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms’ industries and politicians who join those committees innovate more. The authors employ instrumental variables...

This study derives testable hypotheses from their framework and thus provides an empirical test of interest alignment theory based on a sample of 69 management buyouts in the UK. The results of the multivariate regression model suggest that in this setting, interest alignment does have a...

This paper develops and tests new theory about the determinants of value creation in unrelated multibusiness firms from a resource-based perspective. The authors argue that the availability of "headquarter resources", which are at the basis of headquarter services provided to the business units,...