Timeliness of financial reporting is an attribute of good corporate governance. Shareholders and other stakeholders need information while it is still fresh and the more time that passes between year-end and disclosure, the more stale the information becomes and the less value it has. Corporate...

The ethics of tax evasion has been discussed sporadically in the theological and philosophical literature for at least 500 years. Martin Crowe wrote a doctoral thesis that reviewed much of that literature in 1944. The debate revolved around about 15 issues. Over the centuries, three main views...

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, centrally planned economies in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia have been struggling to convert their economic systems from central planning to the market. One facet of this transition is accounting...

Corporate governance has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Corporate scandals have brought corporate governance weaknesses to the attention of the general public, especially in the United States. Weaknesses in the corporate structure of some Asian countries have been...

Corporate governance has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Corporate scandals have brought corporate governance weaknesses to the attention of the general public, especially in the United States. But corporate governance is sometimes a problem in other countries as...

Each year the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal publish the Index of Economic Freedom. This major study compiles economic data on more than 150 countries. The compilers divide the data into ten categories, ranging from business freedom to labor freedom. One of the ten categories is...

In 1944, Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debate on this topic, which identified three basic philosophical positions on the issue....

Most studies on tax evasion have taken either an economics or public finance perspective. Not many studies have investigated tax evasion from the perspective of ethics. One exception is a 1944 doctoral dissertation by Martin Crowe (1944), a Catholic priest who examined the Christian (mostly...

Each May, Forbes magazine publishes a study on tax misery. The Forbes Tax Misery Index is a proxy for evaluating whether tax policy attracts or repels capital and talent. It is computed by adding the top marginal tax rate for the corporate income tax, individual income tax, wealth tax,...

The common view is that insider trading is always unethical and illegal. But such is not the case. Some forms of insider trading are legal. Furthermore, applying ethical principles to insider trading causes one to conclude that it is also sometimes ethical. This chapter attempts to get past the...