Reviews the book "Theory and Mechanics of Accounting," by Leo A. Schmidt.

In the last years of the nineteenth century in Virginia the annual state revenue did not exceed $4,000,000, and the amount raised through taxation by the local governments was also small. Taxes per capita were therefore light. It is true that local rates sometimes were high, but low assessments usually neutralized them except for the very scrupulous and the very helpless. The taxation of intangible property, incomes, franchises, and licenses was poorly systematized and worse administered. The chief burden, such as it was, fell on tangible property, and was borne by the landowners. Discontent among the farmers with such a system is readily understood by those who remember the depressed condition of agriculture in the nineties. Particularly were they bitter against the railroads, which were commonly supposed to be evading their taxes by underassessment and other still less creditable methods. Other corporations in the state twenty years ago were relatively few and weak, and the "railroads'" bore the brunt of the farmers' hostility. Sectional inequalities and other forms of injustice were known to exist, but they were given little thought in comparison with the inequalities between the railroad and the landowner. It is needless to say that in a state so largely rural as Virginia the sympathy of the legislature was with the farmers. But

The history of iimmigration to the United States since official statistics began to be kept may be divided into two periods. Though it is impossible-and, indeed, unnecessaryto draw the line between them in any particular year, yet the decade I870 to i88o saw the end of one and the beginning of the other. The two periods differ from each other in the volume of immigration, in the races mainly contributing to it, in the attitude of the American government and public opinion toward it, in the conditions of transportation, and in the causes that promoted it. It would be impossible to enumerate all the causes that induce men to leave old homes for new. Sometimes it is a mere spirit of adventure, a love of change. Very often the reasons are personal; sometimes they are involved and complicated, and however strongly felt, are but vaguely understood even by those that move under their influence. Whatever weakens the ties of home-bereavement, altered surroundings, domestic infelicity, social or political disappointment, economic difficulties, in short, any one of many things that may darken the current of lifeurges men to a change of habitation. At the present day when the means of transportation have become cheap, quick, and secure the motives for emigration need not be so strong as was necessary to induce men to leave Europe for America in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The general causes for immigration during the period from

This study examines whether IPO disclosure requirements mandated by countries’ securities laws are associated with variation in IPO underpricing in international IPO markets. Our empirical analysis uses a unique sample of 6,025 IPOs from 34 countries over the period from 1995 to 2002. We show for the first time that the stringency of disclosure requirements for IPO prospectuses is negatively associated with the extent of IPO underpricing, after controlling for various country‐ and firm‐level determinants of underpricing. Moreover, we find that the disclosure effect on IPO underpricing is moderated by the extent of a country’s capital market integration. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the view that increased disclosure regulation appears to reduce IPO underpricing and hence the cost of equity, and that institutional factors such as capital market integration play an important role in understanding the economic consequences of disclosure regulation in international IPO markets.

To ascertain whether the form of managerial compensation affects a firm's long-term operating performance, we track IPOs for 5 years after the expiration of the stabilization period. New public companies perform better when managers receive a balanced combination of stock option grants and equity ownership. Firms with unbalanced compensation arrangements, large option grants and little equity ownership or vice versa do not perform as well. This empirical finding is consistent with a theoretical explanation based on managerial risk aversion and the alignment of managerial and owner incentives.

We investigate whether and how political systems affect the financial soundness of conventional and Islamic banks. Using factors extracted from principal component analysis, we find that Islamic banks underperform their conventional counterparts in more democratic political systems but outperform them in hybrid and Sharia’a-based legal systems. The findings reflect the challenges Islamic banks face in Western countries in terms of perception, financial infrastructure, and regulatory constraints while mirroring the recognition of their specificities and their cultural and religious compliance with Sharia’a law in Muslim countries. The findings are robust to a battery of alternative estimation techniques and methods of correcting standard errors.