Sacrifice is widely believed to enhance cooperation in churches, communes, gangs, clans, military units, and many other groups. We find that sacrifice can also work in the lab, apart from special ideologies, identities, or interactions. Our subjects play a modified VCM game—one in which they can voluntarily join groups that provide reduced rates of return on private investment. This leads to both endogenous sorting (because free-riders tend to reject the reduced-rate option) and substitution (because reduced private productivity favours increased club involvement). Seemingly unproductive costs thus serve to screen out free-riders, attract conditional cooperators, boost club production, and increase member welfare. The sacrifice mechanism is simple and particularly useful where monitoring difficulties impede punishment, exclusion, fees, and other more standard solutions.

Recent progress has outmoded many traditional standards of financial administration of governmental units. Among the more significant changes in concept are (1) greater recognition that financial management must be an integral part of total management at each level to be effective; (2) greater emphasis on the inter-relationships of programming, budgeting, accounting and reporting, and (3) greater awareness and acceptance of the need for variable patterns of accounting compatible with assignments of managerial responsibility and the type of operation being conducted. This proposed statement is an effort to express in broad terms the current accounting and related standards of governmental financial administration. Preparation of a budget for a governmental unit should begin with a determination of the work to be done and the expenses of doing it. Such a cost-based budget and the cash requirements stemming therefrom should be submitted to the legislative branch as a basis for appropriation action. After legislative action, cost-based budgets should be used to control work being done. The cost-based budget is the standard against which the actual costs incurred are to be measured. Responsibility for review, appraisal and action rests on supervision at every level. An independent financial examination and review of operations should be made.

This paper examines daily excess bond returns associated with announcements of additions to Standard and Poor's Credit Watch List, and to rating changes by Moody's and Standard and Poor's. Reliably nonzero average excess bond returns are observed for additions to Standard and Poor's Credit Watch List when an expectations model is used to classify additions as either expected or unexpected. Bond price effects are also observed for actual downgrade and upgrade announcements by rating agencies. Excluding announcements with concurrent disclosures weakens the results for downgrades, but not upgrades. The stock price effects of rating agency announcements are also examined and contrasted with the bond price effects.

This paper investigates how openness to international goods markets affects pollution concentrations. We develop a theoretical model to divide trade's impact on pollution into scale, technique, and composition effects and then examine this theory using data on sulfur dioxide concentrations. We find international trade creates relatively small changes in pollution concentrations when it alters the composition of national output. Estimates of the trade-induced technique and scale effects imply a net reduction in pollution from these sources. Combining our estimates of all three effects yields a somewhat surprising conclusion: freer trade appears to be good for the environment.

This article presents a report of the Task Committee, American Accounting Association on the standards of accounting instruction. From its inception, the American Accounting Association has been concerned with accounting education. This interest has been manifested in various projects and special committee activities undertaken by the Association, alone and jointly with other groups. One of the Association's special task committee in the area of education is the Committee on Standards of Accounting Instruction. It operates in cooperation with, and as a task force of, the Joint Committee on Education. The first project of the Committee on Standards of Accounting Instruction was a questionnaire study of the undergraduate courses taken by accounting majors. The questionnaire was carefully prepared and tested before being released. It was sent to most of the colleges and universities in the U.S. , which offered a major or concentration in accounting in an undergraduate program. The study indicated that the largest school in the sample graduated 837 students in 1954 with bachelor degrees in business. It was notable that 1954 saw less than half as many accounting majors graduating as in 1950. The decline in degrees in business was considerably sharper than for all bachelor degrees. The Committee felt that course work in cost accounting is properly required by nearly all schools