We find that Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) had two significant effects on the audit market for nonpublic entities. The first short-run effect stems from inelastic labor supply coupled with an audit demand shock from public companies. As a result, private companies reduced their use of attested financial...

This paper analyzes Influence Peddling with interaction between human capital transfer and collusion-building aspects in a model, in which each government official regulates multiple firms simultaneously. We show that (i) there exists an optimal division rule for collusion between a sequence of...

The current work focuses on the economics of corruption, with an emphasis on the influence of internet users and press freedom on the perception of corruption. An analysis of crosssectional data obtained for 113 countries in 2010 was implemented by means of a generalized linear model involving a...

Independent authorities have a number of advantages compared to politically dependent institutions, namely because of their superior specific qualification and performace, long-run incentive structure, influence of interest groups being less effective, and other reasons. Concerns are often...

Income Tax and National Insurance are now sufficiently similar that merging them appears to be a plausible option, yet still sufficiently different that integration raises significant difficulties. This paper surveys the potential benefits of integration – increased transparency and reduced...

Governance indicators are now widely used as tools for conducting development dialogue, allocating external assistance and influencing foreign direct investment. This paper argues that available governance indicators are not suitable for these purposes as they do not conceptualize governance and...

Modernity is usually thought as a complex society with clearly differentiated spheres of everyday life. It means, in particular, that economic rules do not interfere with the norms structuring political, social, scientific and other interactions. The complex, differentiated society sharply...

Auditing institutions, such as the German Federal Court of Audit (BRH), provide information on public revenue and public spending. The question of how to increase tax compliance has been of frequent interest. Unfortunately, information from German taxpayers? declaration behaviour (beyond the...

Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number of administrators in an office is bound to increase over time. An unique laboratory to test Parkinson's ideas are vehicle registration offices in Germany. Using their data we found...

The paper examines the relationship between the political system and the public administration modernization in the Hungarian transition. Its intention is to point out that there are various shortcuts and bottlenecks of the Hungarian modernization and the cumulative impacts of these deficiencies...