Where fines are the only available sanction against cartels there is a trade-off between increased deterrence and the increased risk of insolvency. Higher fines are unacceptable to the European Commission because of the costs and uncertainties associated with bankruptcy. These concerns have led...

We analyze related party transactions between Chinese publicly listed firms and their state-owned enterprise (SOEs) shareholders to examine whether companies benefit from the presence of government shareholders and politically connected directors appointed by the government. We find that...

Recent years have seen an explosion of financial innovation. Much of this innovation seeks to exploit inconsistencies in the regulatory environment, and one of the most popular techniques for doing so uses put-call parity. Nonetheless, regulatory arbitrage using put-call parity is not a new...

Nowadays the organized crime exploits the development of integration and globalization in the industrial, commercial and financial activities, taking advantage of the same networks that facilitate the legitimate transactions. In expanding their businesses the criminal organizations try to use...

Leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plan (quot;ESOPquot;) transactions originated in the 1950s, yet there are still unresolved valuation issues that arise from a complex set of operating expenses, financing structures and contingent claims that are unique to leveraged ESOPs. Although complex,...

In 2005 the European Commission has adopted the so called Third Directive on Anti-Money Laundering (AML), which was to be implemented into the national laws at the latest in December 2007. The key feature that characterizes the Third Directive is the idea that the regulatory framework should be...

Despite weighty obligations imposed upon securities underwriters by Section 11 and 12 of the 1933 Securities Act, it seems inappropriate to saddle the underwriter with the entire burden to discover pre-offering fraud, especially in light of its dual roles, as well as its status as a dependent...

After giving a short literature review, the paper tries a quantification of the volume of money laundering activities, with the help of a DYMIMIC estimation procedure for the years 1995 to 2006 for 20 highly developed OECD countries. The volume of laundered money was 273 billions USD in the year...

In this paper a first assessment of the 2007 reform of Italian anti-money laundering (AML) law is presented. In light of the relevant literature on AML, the reform seems to improve the Italian AML framework in many ways, but there persist some drawbacks both on the legal and the enforcement...

The present study discloses the results of a survey on the ethics of tax evasion that was distributed to accounting, business and law students in New Zealand. Eighteen arguments that have historically been used to justify tax evasion were ranked in terms of relative strength. Analyses were done...