This article presents the findings of the report of the committee, appointed by President Charles J. Gaa as a task committee operating under the Joint Committee on Education, to receive and review the Ford and Carnegie reports for the American Accounting Association. The two reports--"Higher Education for Business" by Gordon and Howell, and "The Education of American Businessmen" by Pierson were financed and sponsored by The Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York respectively. The authors of Ford and Carnegie reports, in their extensive surveys found glaring examples of bachelor's degrees given for programs of study, overloaded with business in general or with accounting in particular. The Committee urges that the faculty of each school should read the entire reports so that by carefully trying on each shoe of criticism they may find those, which fit their particular situations. It is also expected that the Ford and Carnegie reports will have an impact on collegiate education for business.

We show that market‐maker balance sheet and income statement variables explain time variation in liquidity, suggesting liquidity‐supplier financing constraints matter. Using 11 years of NYSE specialist inventory positions and trading revenues, we find that aggregate market‐level and specialist firm‐level spreads widen when specialists have large positions or lose money. The effects are nonlinear and most prominent when inventories are big or trading results have been particularly poor. These sensitivities are smaller after specialist firm mergers, consistent with deep pockets easing financing constraints. Finally, compared to low volatility stocks, the liquidity of high volatility stocks is more sensitive to inventories and losses.

This paper reports the first effort to use data to evaluate how new information, acquired through exogenous health shocks, affects people's longevity expectations. We find that smokers react differently to health shocks than do those who quit smoking or never smoked. These differences, together with insights from qualitative research conducted along with the statistical analysis, suggest specific changes in the health warnings used to reduce smoking. Our specific focus is on how current smokers responded to health information in comparison to former smokers and nonsmokers. The three groups use significantly different updating rules to revise their assessments about longevity. The most significant finding of our study documents that smokers differ from persons who do not smoke in how information influences their personal longevity expectations. When smokers experience smoking-related health shocks, they interpret this information as reducing their chances of living to age 75 or more. Our estimated models imply smokers update their longevity expectations more dramatically than either former smokers or those who never smoked. Smokers are thus assigning a larger risk equivalent to these shocks. They do not react comparably to general health shocks, implying that specific information about smoking-related health events is most likely to cause them to update beliefs. It remains to be evaluated whether messages can be designed that focus on the link between smoking and health outcomes in ways that will have comparable effects on smokers' risk perceptions.

A 1978 survey of undergraduate tax courses offered at U.S. universities and colleges provides information about course content, instructional materials, and teaching methods for accounting professors involved with the design and implementation of the tax curriculum.

We construct a public atlas of mean outcomes in adulthood by childhood census tract. Outcomes vary sharply across neighborhoods: For children whose parents earn $27,000, the standard deviation of mean household income in adulthood is $10,420 across tracts within counties. Only half the variation in outcomes is explained by traditional measures of neighborhood opportunity like poverty rates. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates indicate 60 percent of the variation in outcomes across neighborhoods is driven by causal effects. We demonstrate how our statistics can be applied to better target policies to improve low-opportunity areas and help families move to affordable high-opportunity areas.

This paper reports the results of controlled experiments designed to test the Harris‐Raviv generalization of the Vickrey theory of bidding in multiple unit discriminative auctions. The paper also discusses further development of the theory—in a way suggested by the experimental results—to include bidders with distinct risk preferences.

We examine the effects of a large number of clients in an audit office using the same enterprise-resource planning (ERP) system such as SAP or Oracle resulting in what we term “client accounting system homogeneity” on audit efficiency and effectiveness. Using a unique dataset of ERP system implementations, we find that accounting system homogeneity is positively associated with audit efficiency. Specifically, we find lower (higher) audit fees for clients using an ERP system from a vendor used by a higher (lower) proportion of clients in that office. We further document that accounting system homogeneity is associated with improved audit effectiveness as proxied by two accruals-based measures, incorrect internal control weakness reporting, and restatements. Our findings are reflective of a new form of knowledge spillover from repeated experiences auditing clients using similar accounting systems, resulting in audits that are not only less expensive but also of higher quality. Data Availability: Contact the authors.

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

This study investigates the effect of firms' adoption of SFAS No. 131 segment disclosure rules on the stock market's ability to predict the firms' earnings, as captured by the forward earnings response coefficient (FERC). The FERC is the association between current-year returns and next-year earnings. SFAS No. 131, effective for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 1997, arguably increased both the quantity and quality of segment disclosure. Consistent with the standard's intended qualitative effects, pre-131 multi-segment firms experienced a significant increase in FERC after adopting SFAS No. 131. Consistent with the standard's intended quantitative effects, many pre-131 single-segment firms began disclosing multiple segments, and those that did experienced an increase in FERC. However, pre-131 single-segment firms that remained single segment (i.e., were unaffected by SFAS No. 131) had no change in FERC, indicating that the increase in FERC for 131-affected firms is not due to some other event concurrent to the adoption of SFAS No. 131. These results are robust under numerous procedures that control for characteristics of the sample firms and their earnings, providing strong evidence that SFAS No. 131 resulted in an increase in stock price informativeness for affected firms. Thus, we provide the first empirical price-based evidence that SFAS No. 131 provided more information (about future earnings) to the market, as the standard's proponents have suggested.