Adam Smith hypothesized that impersonal exchange was necessary for a society to develop specialized division of labor and create wealth. Douglass North and Vernon Smith argue that successful developed economies are the result of institutions. We hypothesize and provide evidence from ethnographic...

I examine the determinants and market impact of paid-for coverage using a hand-collected sample of paid-for reports over 1999-2006. More than five hundred publicly listed US companies paid for analyst coverage since 1999. Yet little is known about the informational consequences of this analyst...

In a competitive information market, a single information source can only dominate other sources individually, not collectively. We explore whether earnings announcements constitute such a dominant source using Ball and Shivakumar's (2008) [How much new information is there in earnings?, <italic>Journal...</italic>

We study changes in financial reporting around economic crises from a historical perspective through the lens of punctuated equilibrium evolution. Historical evidence and contemporary economic analyses indicate that corporate financial reporting plays a minor role in precipitating economic...