Knowledge that Transforms

A model of the relations among taxpayers' opportunity, social norms, ethical beliefs, and tax compliance is proposed and tested using structural equation modeling. High opportunity taxpayers, who may personally benefit from evasion, judged evasion as less unethical than low opportunity taxpayers. High and low opportunity taxpayers judged social norms similarly. Further, ethical beliefs partially (fully) mediate the relation between opportunity (social norms) and underreporting. Implications from our study to tax compliance researchers and policy makers are discussed.

This paper provides evidence consistent with firms with Last-in-first-out (LIFO) inventory policy being priced by the market as having lower information risk than First-in-first-out (FIFO) firms. Furthermore, the paper shows that this pricing differential is sustained after controlling for accruals quality, suggesting that the inventory policy signals some information risk characteristics that are not captured by accruals quality measure. We investigate the relation between inventory policy and accruals quality and find that accruals quality is systematically worse for FIFO firms than for LIFO firms after controlling for correlated omitted variables and known firm attributes. These findings complement the currently established relationship between the cost of capital, market pricing and accruals quality by focusing on the need for understanding the incremental effects of individual accounting policies.

Using data from Ontario hospitals, we investigate the conjecture that the stickiness of costs would be greater for functions that relate to an organization's core competency. We find operating costs for the hospital as a whole are sticky. Moreover, we find higher stickiness in costs pertaining to patient care relative to costs in other functions. Indeed, there is no evidence of stickiness in the operating costs of support departments that are peripherally related to the hospital's mission.