Aggregation, Decision making

APB opinions, FASB, Independence, Role of regulator

Structural reforms of a fundamental nature now under way in Wall Street have been proclaimed so often of late as to become commonplace. The fact that many of these changes are not welcomed by established and influential persons who make their living in or around Wall Street is not news. What may be news, however, is that neither of these facts is particularly new.

Recently, there has been no shortage of proposals for reforming the U.S. financial system. Proposals have been offered by the Hunt Commission, the Administration, and several other groups. All these proposals contain many common elements, attesting to the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive financial reform. The analysis here focuses primarily upon the Administration's 1973 recommendations.

Asset valuation, Price-level adjusted accounting, Uncertainty, Estimation theory

FOREIGN direct investment which I shall associate with the multinational corporation varies greatly in its prominence from country to country and sector to sector. The analytical apparatus of international trade and industrial organization supplies some hypotheses to explain this variation, but they have not been drawn together and tested competitively. The purpose of this paper is to explain statistically the substantial inter-industry variance that we observe in the prevalence of multinational corporations. In the first section I review the hypotheses that have been advanced to explain this variance. The second and third sections report tests of these hypotheses on the shares of sales held by foreign-owned enterprises in Canadian and United Kingdom manufacturing industries.