Almost all firms have taken measures to reduce the employee health claim cost component of health care expense. Many large firms have also been able to reduce the transaction costs of health insurance by changing to partial or full self‐insurance. For smaller firms the self‐insurance...

Financial reporting standards require that many future‐oriented expenditures for intangibles, such as development costs and personnel training, be expensed in the current period. These standards cause such expenditures to be indistinguishable from expenditures for current revenues, and...