This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

The 2004 Presidential Election in Mozambique was marred by allegations of fraud. We assess the validity of these allegations by testing whether or not qualitative descriptions of the methods and locations of misconduct are consistent with a series of simple quantitative tests. Most studies of...

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities, exploiting spatial discontinuities in tribunals' jurisdiction for identification. Results show that halving the length of civil proceedings, average firm size would increase by around...

This introductory essay reviews recent advances in the emergent field of social studies of finance (SSF) and, subsequently, sets out to illustrate how a closer engagement with SSF might benefit research interests in accounting and vice versa. Finally, it provides a sketch of how mutual...

This paper analyses the use and circulation of nternational auditing standards within a large post-Soviet Russian audit firm, as it faces up to the challenges of international harmonisation. It describes this process as one of ‘connecting worlds’ and translation. In a detailed field study...

This paper examines the determinants of inside spreads and their behaviour around corporate earning announcement dates, for a sample of UK firms over the period 1986-94. The paper finds that closing daily inside spreads are affected by order processing costs (proxied by trading volumes),...

This paper studies the roles that images and ideas of market creation played in the re-articulation of relations between government, audit expertise and professional organisation in post-Soviet Russia. It examines the change from state-led inspection to market-oriented auditing between 1985 and...

This paper investigates whether the industrial relations climate in Indian States has affected the pattern of manufacturing growth in the period 1958-92. We show that pro-worker amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act are associated with lowered investment, employment, productivity and output...

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise of unemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions between shocks and institutions. The contribution is twofold. First, the impact of a general feature of developed economies...

Entry regulations against big-box retailers have been introduced in many countries to protect smaller independent stores. Using a new dataset from the UK, I show that in fact these entry regulations have been associated with greater employment declines in independent stores they were meant to...