Reviews the book "Corporate Collapse: Regulatory, Accounting and Ethical Failure," by F.L. Clarke, G.W. Dean and K.G. Oliver.

This paper proposes an explicit test for determining the significance and the timing of slowdowns in economic growth. We examine a large sample of countries and find that a majority—though not all—exhibit a significant structural break in their postwar growth rates. We find that (a) most industrialized countries experienced postwar growth slowdowns in the early 1970s, though (b) the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom did not, and (c) developing countries (and in particular, Latin American countries) tended to experience much more severe slowdowns which, in contrast with the more developed countries, began nearly a decade later.

Reviews the book "Auditing Organizations Through a Strategic-System Lens," by Timothy Bell, Frank Marrs, Ira Solomon and Howard Thomas.

Constraints on the gamma of the replicating portfolio, constraints on portfolio amounts, and constraints on the number of shares are also considered.

Why are many of China's successful rural enterprises publically owned by local communities? Using a set of provincial data, we find that the share of community public firms (Township-Village Enterprises, or TVEs) relative to private enterprises is higher where the central government's influence is greater, the community government's power is stronger, and the level of market development is lower. We also find that TVEs help achieve the community government's goals of increasing government revenue, rural nonfarm employment, and rural income. However, TVEs do not increase rural income given the levels of nonfarm employment and local public goods provision, indicating possible inefficiency as compared with private enterprises.

In this paper we develop an applied general equilibrium model to examine the effects of tax-favored retirement accounts on the capital stock. The results from our benchmark model indicate that a modest IRA contribution limit similar to that in effect during the early 1980's raises the steady-state capital stock by 6.18 percent; approximately 9 percent of IRA contributions constitutes incremental saving. Our results lend support to recent suggestions that retirement accounts with favorable tax treatment only for contributions above some base amount might provide more stimulus to saving than conventional IRAs.

[One-step efficient GMM estimation has been developed in the recent papers of Back and Brown (1990), Imbens (1993), and Qin and Lawless (1994). These papers emphasized methods that correspond to using Owen's (1988) method of empirical likelihood to reweight the data so that the reweighted sample obeys all the moment restrictions at the parameter estimates. In this paper we consider an alternative KLIC motivated weighting and show how it and similar discrete reweightings define a class of unconstrained optimization problems which includes GMM as a special case. Such KLIC-motivated reweightings introduce M auxiliary "tilting" parameters, where M is the number of moments; parameter and overidentification hypotheses can be recast in terms of these tilting parameters. Such tests are often startlingly more effective than their conventional counterparts. These differences are not completely explained by differences in the leading terms of the asymptotic expansions of the test statistics.]

A number of authors have found that firm size and book-to-market-value capture the cross-sectional variation in average stock returns. More importantly, these variables have been shown to out-perform the CAPM's β coefficient in explaining the cross-section of US stock returns. However, these studies all employ variants of the two-step estimator due to Fama and MacBeth (Fama, E.F., MacBeth, J.D., 1973. Risk, return and equilibrium: Empirical tests. Journal of Political Economy 71, 607–636), which impose implicitly the restriction that idiosyncratic returns are uncorrelated. In this paper we use a one-step estimator due to McElroy et al. (McElroy, M.B., Burmeister, E., Wall, K.D., 1985. Two estimators for the APT model when factors are measured. Economics Letters 19, 271–275) and find a highly significant role for β risk in the UK stock market when we allow for correlation amongst idiosyncratic returns.