The world's audit industry is concentrated in the hands of four big accounting firms: PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (the Big 4). These firms are in a strong position in that they audit the financial statements of nearly all the global public companies...

What role does political influence play in access to finance? Using a comprehensive cross-country dataset, I characterize how and why domestic political connections affect firms' ability to access all types of finance — exploiting firms' cross-listing activity as a source of empirical...

Since the first publication of Economics of Shortage in 1980, an entire economist generation has grown up, whose members are well-versed in numerous sub-themes of the economic sciences. They find their way around the most modern methodological schools, yet they know significantly less about the...

Neoliberal political leaders such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) and President Ronald Reagan (1981-89) heralded entrepreneurs as capitalist heroes. Yet for the most part the policies they enacted did not help real entrepreneurs. Their ideology impaired their ability to promote...

Crisis cartels are one of the most challenging issues for competition authorities, who need to strike a balance between strictly antitrust considerations and non-economic government objectives, such as social welfare and survival of entire market sectors. The current global recession has made...

We take for granted that the basic choice in public policy is between allocation of resources by government bureaucracy, on the one hand, or allocation by markets, on the other. But that dichotomy is false, and at least under contemporary circumstances it is more accurate to describe the choice...

This study examines the change in entering class median LSAT, a key input into the U.S. News & World Report rankings, between 1993 and 2004. Using multivariate regression analysis, the authors model several factors that can influence the direction and magnitude of this change. The study presents...

The market for entry level legal talent circa 2013 is dysfunctional, as it is organized around stale and unreliable measures of academic ability. Both logic and experience, as well as a fair amount of social science, suggest that success as a lawyer depends upon a wide array of additional...