Standards reflect preferences and values of a given society which may – and usually do – diverge, thereby inflating compliance costs for companies. If developed internationally, then substantial gains can be made through the diminution of such costs and by addressing network externalities,...

Transnational technical standard-setting has grown in prominence in recent years. The World Trade Organization (WTO) requires the use of international standards but adopts a deferential approach towards international standards. However, practice shows that several international standards are...

Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We identify key company- and country-level factors that limit firms' use of selective disclosure by...

Circular Economy Labels and Information Schemes (CELIS) compose the group of labels, certifications, standards of information schemes that fully or partially address one or more resource efficiency or circular economy elements. CELIS can play an important role in fostering circular economy...

This paper examines whether there is a natural barrier to entry in the credit rating industry. We consider an in nite horizon model in which each period, an original incumbent faces competition from an entrant randomly selected from a pool of ex ante identical potential entrants. The incumbent's...

We present an infinite horizon model that studies the competition between a relatively ineffective incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more effective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven at the time they enter the market....

We analyze the reliability of voluntary disclosures of financial information, focusing on widely-employed publicly available hedge fund databases. Tracking changes to statements of historical performance recorded at different points in time between 2007 and 2011, we find that historical returns...

This paper reports the outcome of a small scale ‘Delphi' survey of standards professionals, focusing on the business and economic benefits of standardization in global financial markets and the barriers to standardization. Despite its small scale this survey points to clear conclusions. There...

We find evidence supporting the hypothesis that countries at times misreport their economic data in a strategic manner. Among those suspected are countries with fixed exchange rate regimes, high negative net foreign asset positions or negative current account balances, which corroborates the...