Knowledge that Transforms

We study the New York City taxi market to examine whether an excise tax hike on cigarettes corresponds to smoker taxi drivers more frequently cheating their customers. Increased cheating could be motivated by both financial pressures and as a reaction to unfair treatment (as surveyed smokers view cigarette tax hikes as quite unfair). We examine this question using detailed ride-level data where we can identify a rare but fraudulent overcharging technique (cheating) and a subsample of taxi drivers who smoke (affected taxpayers, identified via tickets for smoking in a cab). In difference-in-differences regressions we find that following a cigarette tax hike, taxi drivers who smoke are approximately 1.5 times more likely to cheat customers than other drivers. Our findings are strongest in the subsample of smokers with consistently low earnings.

The office has become a large scale organisational phenomenon accommodating large numbers of organisational employees most often housed in open plan and Activity Based Working settings that arguably resemble the new factory. This study examines contemporary Big 4 accounting firm office design innovations and their representation with a view to eliciting their claimed rationales, reflections of historical office design and management thinking, and apparent strategic agendas with respect to office efficiency, client relations and cost control involved in their offering of professional services. In doing so, it also explores the implications that public practice firms' office design may have for auditor independence and audit quality. Informed by Goffman's theories of impression management, the study employs historical and website analysis, finding a predominant firm focus on office efficiency and client relations with an undercurrent of cost reduction and revenue enhancement aspirations. While represented as innovative current office design and work pattern developments, public practice accounting firm office innovations and intentions are found to significantly reflect historical office design and management thinking, with dramaturgical circumspection of floor designs and props oriented towards creating front stage performances predesigned for clients' impression management. Where backstage redesign and frame breaking does not produce desired employee performance changes, some signs of retreating to more traditional floor redesign and territorial marker usage are evident. The study also signals the potential for innovative accounting firm office designs to carry some significant impacts upon audit independence and audit quality.

In this paper, we investigate how increasing transparency about managers' treatment of their employees affects the tendency of employees to initiate collusion. Building on behavioral economics theory, we argue that employees who are treated less kindly by their managers are more willing to initiate or join a collusive agreement. We hypothesize that internal transparency affects collusion in two ways. First, by revealing how kindly employees are treated by their managers, transparency increases or decreases the probability that individuals are singled out as potential “partners in crime.” Second, increasing transparency incentivizes managers to treat employees more kindly, which in turn reduces employees’ inclination to initiate collusion. The results of two experiments generally support the theory. We discuss the implications of our study for research and practice.

We examine responses to pressures to act on extractive firm country-by-country reporting (CbCR) by three regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, the European Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Debates over CbCR of payments that extractive firms make to governments center on improvements to transparency, governance, and accountability and raise questions about the division of regulatory labor in terms of where and by whom global reporting issues are undertaken and why. Our comparative analysis suggests that while the three regulators resist or respond reluctantly to similar pressures to act on CbCR, each responds in distinct ways that reflect and impact regulatory mandates. Specifically, we show how the regulators’ responses constitute the purpose, problematize the objectives, and construct the perceived interests served by CbCR in relation to each regulator’s mandate. We highlight how these responses can be understood through modes of discursive ignorance (McGoey, 2019) and the uncomfortable knowledge (Rayner, 2012) that each regulator may engage with when pressures challenge how regulators make sense of the world. Our study highlights that regulatory responses are based partly on what regulators assume are their mandates, their legitimacy and ways of operating. It analyzes their self-understandings and defense mechanisms, thereby providing an elaboration of responses to pressures for action and offering a richer political economy of regulation that highlights sensemaking in these processes. We further elaborate on what these responses imply for the division of regulatory labor around pressures to act on global reporting issues, as well as broader implications for participation in and ignorance around accounting regulatory projects.