This article proposes a way of historical progress of accountancy. Accountancy's infancy dates back to the earliest days of human agriculture and civilization, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia an another civilization, when the need to maintain accurate records of the quantities and relative values...

Following Colbert's Ordonnance of 1673, most of whose provisions were reiterated in the Code de Commerce, 1807 and the Law of Bankruptcy, 1838, traders in France were under a legal obligation to keep accounts of their business activities. In the event of bankruptcy, traders were potentially...

Le dispositif juridique français, fidèle au modèle de la décision publique, place l’expert dans une situation subalterne par rapport au Juge qui le choisit, lui fixe sa mission, lui impartit des délais et finalement le rémunère, et à qui il doit apporter un éclairage strictement...

During the second half of the nineteenth century, five Great Exhibitions took place in Paris. The French state was highly involved in their financing and management which led to the implementation of public finance rules. Because of specific managerial constraints, public accounting systems and...

This paper examines the pervasiveness of earnings management across 31 countries between 1990 and 1999. It documents systematic differences in earnings management across different clusters of countries. We propose an explanation for these differences based on the notion that insiders, in an...

We investigate the determinants of corporate financial reporting in an unregulated setting. Prior to World War I, limited liability companies in Belgium were obliged to publish financial statements, but financial reporting was virtually unregulated. Investor protection was generally very poor....

Accounting as a branch of economic science and research is not in the center of attention of economists, whether they are focused macroeconomic or Business Administration (microeconomic). Whoever, it is necessary to underline the crucial importance of accounting for the formation of a number of...

This paper focuses on the development of property rights to village com-mons, as they appear in the court rolls of a legal district in Sweden in the late 17th and the early 18th century. A development of agrarian property rights, from comparably attenuated towards more exclusive and private...

This paper explores the responses of fertility and nuptiality to fluctuations in real wages and mortality that can be inferred from annual series of English historical data over the period 1542 to 1800. The paper begins with a review of the time series properties of the data and summarizes the...

This paper explores the nature and implications of nineteenth century patent law in two late-industrializing countries: Spain and Mexico. Both inherited earlier ancien regime monopoly practices, both adopted aspects of modern, codified patent systems in the early nineteenth century, and both...