The evolution of large international audit firms was driven by client needs and legal regulations specific for the audit industry. The organizational structure of these professional service firms can be characterized as a specific form of a strategic network. The national member firms have to...

Everybody who ascribes a material steering function to moral norms has to give some reasons why rational individuals actually obey these norms. This is a quite natural question to start with, specially for economists. Recently, the philosophers Stemmer (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), Hoerster...

In this chapter I describe important accounting scandals in Germany with respect to their motives, structure of accounting transactions, with related balance sheet and profit and loss items, and the reactions of concerned parties (supervisory board, regulatory agencies, management, auditors, the...