This paper introduces the indexing paradox, which states that it if all investors are rational with rational expectations and have a common risk-averse investment performance measure, then no investor can expect to do better than the market. If the cost of indexing is less than the cost of...

We investigate the quality of public and private information environments between Western European or Eastern European firms. We find that the quality of private information is higher for Eastern European than for Western European firms and the quality of public information is higher for Western...

The present paper is an empirical study, the goal of which is to determine the strength of various arguments that have been used to justify tax evasion and to determine whether results differ based on certain demographic variables. A survey instrument was constructed using a seven-point Likert...

Budgets are commonly used for multiple purposes. Whereas planning budgets reflect organisations' 'best guesses' of future events, control budgets are intended to motivate high levels of effort. Budgetary control mechanisms modelled in a principal-agent setting typically find that the use of such...

Unanticipated inflation or deflation causes one party of a nominal contract to gain at the expense of the other party, an effect absent in macroeconomic models with one representative consumer or with consumers having identical consumption. In this paper's general dynamic and stochastic...

Contrary to Sargent and Wallace (1975), a central bank’s use of an interest-rate instrument does determine prices when the central bank pursues either a short-term or long-term price target. However, in order for a central bank’s pursuit of a long-term price target to be credible, the public...

The standard ad hoc monetary objective function creates a bias in favor of inflation targeting. Instead, this paper uses the Pareto criterion to assess inflation targeting (IT), price-level targeting (PLT), and nominal-income targeting (NIT). The effect that unanticipated inflation or deflation...

In a pure-exchange economy involving one perishable consumption good and risk-averse consumers, the elasticity of a consumer’s Pareto-efficient consumption with respect to aggregate output equals the reciprocal of the ratio of the consumer’s coefficient of relative risk aversion to average...